Kompromat

‘I am delighted to follow Lord Middlebank of Upper Twaddle. I am so sorry. I’ve got that wrong. I shouldn’t have said Upper Twaddle. I should have said Utter Twaddle!’ The young audience loved that. And they warmed to her too. She was the dark horse – dark filly, really – who had come up fast on the rails in the final furlong. Barnard mentally tipped his hat to her.

Up in the BBC commentary box, Louisa Hitchcock commented, ‘No one knew very much about Andromeda Ledbury before the start of the campaign but, so far, she hasn’t put a foot wrong.’

Tom Milbourne, when it was his turn to speak, seemed strangely hesitant. Maybe he knew that the tide was beginning to turn in favour of Leave. And when he started talking about the dire measures he would be forced to introduce if the country ‘voted the wrong way’ his audience sensed that he had made a colossal error of judgement.

Once again, Louisa Hitchcock summed it up. ‘The chancellor has already given us Project Fear. He has told us that the ice caps will melt if we vote to leave Europe. Financial markets will collapse. Granny will starve in the attic. But today, before this Oxford audience, he has gone one step further, promising the country a Punishment Budget, like a Punishment Beating, if we dare to vote Leave.’

Louisa Hitchcock looked straight at the camera. ‘Tonight the chancellor, normally so shrewd, may have made a fatal miscalculation.’

Sitting there, waiting his turn to come to the despatch box, Barnard found it hard to concentrate. He simply couldn’t put the photo he had seen in the anteroom out of his mind. The photo that showed Harriet (then Howard, of course) Marshall sitting next to Yuri Yasonov. If Harriet/Howard and Yasonov had been friends and colleagues at Oxford, were they still friends now? If so, why hadn’t Harriet/Howard ever mentioned it?

He decided to send an urgent message to Jerry Goodman. ‘Something fishy going on. Keep an eye on Harriet Marshall. Sitting next to my wife, left front.’

Arthur Pemberton, Oxford Union President in the Trinity Term of 2016, had a powerful voice which he did not hesitate to use.

Sitting in his high-backed chair in white tie and tails, he boomed, ‘I now call upon the Right Honourable, Edward Barnard, MP to make the final speech opposing the motion.’

As he stood up, Barnard could see Harriet Marshall a few feet away, waving the order paper in front of her face, like a fan. Funny, Barnard thought, it was almost as though she was signalling or something.

Jerry Goodman, standing by the door so as to keep an eye on the packed hall, glanced down at his mobile when Barnard’s message pinged in. He spotted Harriet immediately, waving the paper. Then he saw Harriet look up at the crowded balcony, turning her head to the right as she did so. What was Harriet looking at, he wondered? Then he saw it. At the far end of the hall, above and behind the balcony, was the old projection box, left over from the days when undergraduates came to the Chamber on wet Sunday afternoons, not to debate, but to watch classic films in their original celluloid. The box had to be big enough to hold the projectionist. Some of those old films, like The Manchurian Candidate, needed three or four reel changes before the film was over.

The Manchurian Candidate! Oh my God, thought Jerry Goodman! As he remembered it, the assassin chooses a high vantage point right at the back of the stadium to shoot the candidate at that giant rally in New York!

He quickly pulled out some pocket binoculars to scrutinize the projection block more closely and, as he did so, he saw the barrel of the rifle emerge.

Jerry Goodman spoke urgently into his lapel mike. ‘Anna, Tom, are you up there? There’s a guy with a gun on the balcony. In the old projection box. Take him out!’

Then Goodman hurled himself across the room, just as Barnard walked to the despatch box to begin his speech. You could have handguns, you could have Tasers but in the end the old-fashioned rugby tackle often worked best. Goodman’s shoulder hit Barnard hard, in the ideal spot for a good clean tackle, halfway up the thigh, and Barnard crashed to the floor like a wing three-quarter hurtled into touch by the corner-post. The sound of gunfire erupted in the room. First, a single shot, coming from the projection box, then a brief staccato volley, as both Anna and Tom returned fire.

The gunman’s bullet, which would surely have smashed into Barnard had he not been brought low by Goodman’s rugby tackle, demolished an antique plaster bust of former prime minister William Gladstone, scattering debris over the despatch box.

Goodman picked Barnard off the floor, slung him over his shoulder, and headed for the door. ‘We’ve got to get you out of here!’ he said.