The foreign secretary, almost horizontal now, stretched his legs and pushed his fists into his trouser pockets. ‘Tell me again exactly what you want to do,’ he said to Charles.

‘I’d like to let Gareth Horley continue with the case, at least for the time being. And I’d like to send him along to the next meeting primed with whatever we want the EU to believe we’d settle for, true or false.’

‘But you just said this Howling Wolf or Jack Russell or whatever you call him doesn’t show any interest in finding out what we think but only tells us what they think, which is partly why you think it’s a put-up job.’

‘That’s true but it’s also possible that Gareth Horley is passing on gossip about our positions without declaring it. However, it could only be gossip because he’s not au fait with the details of negotiations.’

‘But you also said we can’t trust him. So if we were to give him stuff to pass to them how could we trust him not to tell them that’s what we were doing?’

‘Because he wouldn’t know. We’d engineer it in such a way that he came across something without knowing we wanted him to know it, contriving it so that he would think he’d found it out for himself.’

‘Hard to control, isn’t it? First you’ve got to make sure he finds out whatever it is without smelling a rat, then that he gets it right when he passes it on, then that he actually does pass it on, which he might well not and we would never know whether he had or hadn’t. You wouldn’t be able to ask him about it. Then, even if he does pass it on, you’ve got to trust your Springer Spaniel chappie to pick up on it and report it accurately. And we can’t know about that, either.’

‘Then there’s the question of whether the other side believe it,’ said Robin. ‘We’d have no way of knowing.’

‘Also, we’d have to get the prime minister’s chop on it and I get the impression she’s a touch more cautious than me.’ The foreign secretary grinned. ‘She’s still sitting on that other submission of yours, the one about zapping that chap in Syria who’s trying to get people back here to blow us all to smithereens.’

‘And we’d have to decide in almost no time at all what the it – the “it” we want them to believe – actually is,’ said Robin.