Kompromat

Joyce Griffiths hadn’t finished. ‘The Embassy is also trying to set up a private meeting between you and Mr Zhang Fu-Sheng. They said Zhang is a member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo. They hinted that Zhang was a big cheese. I’m not an expert but I can tell you that in China a member of the Politburo Standing Committee is a very big cheese indeed.’

Three days later, Barnard took his seat in the huge Xian International Congress Centre with ten minutes to spare. He had been escorted through the VIP entrance and then ‘fast-tracked’ through security, but even so the formalities took time. With Zhang Fu-Sheng scheduled to do the honours, no one was taking any chances.

There were giant screens behind the podium. In that vast cavernous hall, one man standing before a lectern could seem small and insignificant. Most people, the evidence indicated, like watching the giant screen rather than the tiny man.

Right up front in the VIP row, Barnard watched and listened to Zhang’s opening address.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Zhang began. ‘Honoured delegates, honoured guests from overseas, it gives me great pleasure to declare this important congress open.’

As Zhang spoke, the giant image on the screen behind him changed and was replaced by a shot of the audience. To his surprise, Barnard suddenly saw himself in close-up, staring at the stage. Where the hell was that camera, he wondered?

And then he spotted it, mounted on a wire above the stage, able to traverse the whole stage from left to right and back again.

When, for a second time, he saw himself in close-up, he waved discretely. I could be at a football match, in one of those crowd shots, when people in funny hats or paint on their faces suddenly realize they are being filmed. He had an almost overwhelming temptation to stick out his tongue and waggle his hands behind his head, but he thought better of it. He might not be a minister of the Crown any longer, but he still had to behave.

Listening to Zhang through his headphones, Barnard was impressed by the clarity and conviction with which the man spoke. A year earlier, China had stuck its neck out. It had bonded together with the United States to force through the international agreement on climate change in Paris at the end of 2015. Now that agreement was at serious risk of collapsing even before it had entered into force. Ron Craig, the most likely Republican candidate, had made it clear that he believed global warming to be a ‘giant hoax and an attack on American jobs’. Craig had threatened that if he ever became president he would pull the US out of the Paris Agreement and even out of the parent Climate Change Convention, which had been adopted way back in 1992 at the United Nations first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Barnard was expecting to hear some tough retaliatory language from Zhang, but whatever the Chinese minister might have thought privately, he went out of his way to respect the conventions of diplomacy. Opening speeches are meant to be uplifting, not full of venom.

‘China,’ he said, ‘will always put ecological environmental protection as an important area of opening up to the outside world, and will fulfil international environmental conventions, as well as taking on international obligations. It will continue to participate in global cooperation to combat climate change, and make important contributions to global ecological security.’

When he had finished his speech, Zhang bowed three times to acknowledge the applause, and then followed one of the conference ushers to the seat reserved for him in the VIP row. Martial music echoed from the loudspeakers.

As Zhang walked along the front row, Barnard stood up to greet him as he passed. ‘Great speech. Fantastic,’ he said.

Zhang bowed and walked on. But at the dinner, later that evening, he sought Barnard out and found time for a private word.

‘Ah, Mr Barnard, how good of you to come. We are so pleased to have been able to cooperate with the United Kingdom on these environmental issues. We hope that cooperation may continue even in changed circumstances. But of course China will never intervene in the electoral process of another country.’

For a moment Barnard wondered whether Zhang was making a joke at Russia’s expense, since Russia’s habit of intervening in other countries’ elections was fairly well documented. That very day, he had seen a report on CNN about thousands of ‘leaked emails’, most of them featuring Caroline Mann, the most likely Democratic candidate in the upcoming US election. The consensus was that the leak was most likely to have originated from Russia and that it could severely damage Mann’s chancing of winning the election.