Ingham’s outrage struck some observers as hypocritical. George Pitcher, a former publicist who is now a priest, wrote, in Politico, that the association looked “like a bunch of pimps throwing up their hands in horror at the moral turpitude of their highest-earning whore.” Senior figures at Bell Pottinger speculated that Ingham’s tone had been influenced by Bell, with whom Ingham is friendly. Only a few months earlier, Ingham had inducted Bell into an international P.R. hall of fame, saying that Bell had “created modern P.R.” and “elevated our work.” Three days after Bell Pottinger’s expulsion from the association, Ingham and Bell were spotted having lunch together.

Herbert Smith Freehills, meanwhile, published a skeleton account of its findings. It reported, “While we do not consider that it was a breach of relevant ethical principles to agree to undertake the economic emancipation campaign mandate per se, members of B.P.’s senior management should have known that the campaign was at risk of causing offence, including on grounds of race. In such circumstances B.P. ought to have exercised extreme care and should have closely scrutinised the creation of content for the campaign. This does not appear to have happened.”

That evening, a former managing director of Bell Pottinger, David Wilson, who left the firm in 2015, learned that Tim Bell was shortly to be interviewed on the BBC program “Newsnight.” Wilson was an investor in Bell Pottinger, and had friends who still worked there. Believing that Bell could fatally damage the firm, Wilson sent him a text urging restraint: “Tim please remember some of us shareholders . . . this is dire for us.”

Bell did not reply.

The “Newsnight” interview was widely perceived as embarrassing. Bell, who was wearing a suit with a polo shirt underneath, had left his phone on, and it rang twice during the segment. On the first occasion, Bell fumbled with the device before turning its screen toward the interviewer, Kirsty Wark, with a puckish grin. “Look who it is!” Bell stage-whispered. The caller was Johann Rupert, the founder of Richemont.

Bell said of Oakbay, “I had nothing to do with getting this account!” He continued, “Of course, James Henderson is to blame.”

Wark asked Bell, “Do you think this is curtains for Bell Pottinger?”

“Almost certainly,” Bell said. “But that’s nothing to do with me.”

“It doesn’t strike anyone as possible that you could be the innocent in all this,” Wark said.

“Well, I’m sorry, but I am,” Bell said.

Wilson, like many former and current Bell Pottinger employees, watched the interview with dismay. To outsiders, Bell had come across as a floundering old man. But many former colleagues, who knew how skilled he could be with the media, saw a calculated performance, down to the ringing cell phone. “Tim doesn’t do very much by accident,” one of them said. Despite the seemingly amateurish display, Bell had delivered two messages with clarity: Bell Pottinger was in grave trouble, and Henderson was at fault.

The next morning, the headline of the London newspaper City A.M. was “BELL ROTTINGER.” All day, the firm hemorrhaged clients. Chime Communications, which had been attempting to sell its stake in Bell Pottinger, announced that it was simply giving up its shares.

Crisis communications was one of Wilson’s specialties—he had steered Rebekah Brooks, the former editor of the News of the World, through the infamous phone-hacking scandal—and he tried again to reach Bell. He felt that if he could persuade Bell to stop talking to reporters the firm might survive.

Bell met Wilson for coffee the next morning at a restaurant in Sloane Square, arriving in a chauffeur-driven town car, which idled in a no-parking zone as they spoke. They sat outside, so that Bell could smoke. (Bell says that he has no recollection of the meeting, but text messages confirm that he and Wilson met at the restaurant.)

Wilson asked Bell to keep quiet, for the sake of his former colleagues. Bell refused, noting that journalists were calling him. Wilson recalls his saying, “I can’t lie!” Bell admitted that he was also determined to get back at Henderson for pushing him out of the company. As Wilson remembers it, Bell used the word “revenge.”

“I was trying to protect the business,” Wilson told me. “He was intent on murdering it.”

As the difficult exchange drew to a close, Bell said, “Today’s a big day for them with Bahrain.” The Bahrain account was Bell Pottinger’s largest, and without it the firm would implode. Bell mentioned teasingly that his friend Lord Chadlington advised the Bahrainis on communications matters. Wilson realized that Bell was signalling his awareness that Bell Pottinger was already doomed.

The Bahrain account was indeed lost, and the next day Bell Pottinger was declared insolvent. Many of the firm’s employees and partners lost their jobs immediately; some stayed on to help administrators wind down the business. Operations ceased within weeks. Henderson lost both his fortune and his fiancée. Kerzner had invested heavily in Bell Pottinger—she’d bought shares in 2017—and when the business collapsed so did her relationship with Henderson. They postponed a wedding planned for November.

Earlier this year, the couple reconciled. Henderson established a new P.R. firm, J&H Communications. It has signed a few clients, but even former allies of Henderson’s worry that his name will forever be tainted by the Oakbay scandal. “A P.R. firm that can’t manage its own reputation isn’t worth much in the marketplace,” one said. In April, the Daily Mail reported that Kerzner and Henderson had split up for good, and that she was “on the look-out for love again.”

Bell’s public image, meanwhile, has suffered little damage, and Sans Frontières appears to be prospering. Bell recently represented the Russian reality-TV star Ksenia Sobchak, who ran against Vladimir Putin in the 2018 Presidential election. Bell’s new firm has also bid for a large account in Bahrain. His recent media appearances have felt like a victory lap. The Mail on Sunday noted, in a sympathetic interview, that Bell’s “fame—or notoriety—has gone skywards” since he left Bell Pottinger. An article in the New York Times described him as having “stepped directly out of an Evelyn Waugh novel” and made note of his “ingratiating candor.” On his seventy-sixth birthday, a month after Bell Pottinger’s collapse, Bell married Jacky Phillips. The headline in the Daily Mail: “BELL POTTINGER FOUNDER BEATS HIS RIVAL JAMES HENDERSON BY MARRYING FIRST.” The feud, by its own petty terms, has ended decisively in Bell’s favor.

The legacy of a boardroom tussle between two privileged white businessmen in London will have a longer effect in South Africa. After the firm collapsed, Thuli Madonsela, the official who published “State of Capture,” said that, in a democracy as young as South Africa’s, Bell Pottinger’s P.R. campaign had been “reckless and dangerous.” By hijacking a legitimate debate about economic inequality on behalf of mercenary aims, the firm had poisoned political discourse in South Africa.

In mid-February, an arrest warrant was issued for Ajay Gupta, on corruption charges. But he and his brothers had apparently gone abroad. (Their whereabouts are unknown.) South Africa’s national prosecutor now considers Ajay Gupta to be a “fugitive from justice,” and other South African prosecutors wish to bring Atul and Tony Gupta back to South Africa to face charges. In addition, the Financial Times has reported that the F.B.I. is investigating the brothers’ allegedly corrupt business dealings in the United States.

On February 14th, Jacob Zuma stepped down as the President of South Africa. In his resignation speech, Zuma—who had previously said that to resign would be to “surrender” to “white monopoly capital”—suggested that he had been a victim of a conspiracy. As if repeating Bell Pottinger’s talking points about economic apartheid, he framed his ouster—which was primarily about his incompetence and dishonesty—as the result of racism. “I respect each member and leader of this glorious movement,” Zuma said. “I respect its gallant fight against centuries of white-minority brutality, whose relics remain today and continue to be entrenched, in all manner of sophisticated ways.” ♦