Not that Maudling intended to stand down from the Commons to do so. It was terribly agreeable representing Chipping Barnet, and the position did tend to open doors. The salary wasn’t up to much – £3,250 a year, not even three times the average white-collar wage of £1,220 – but any MP worth his salt could bump that up significantly.6 After all, there was no obligation on parliamentarians to declare any outside earnings. Maudling’s civil servants might have issued mild protests about his role as a ‘Lloyd’s Name’ – an underwriter of one of the biggest players in the insurance market – when he also had ministerial responsibility for the sector as president of the Board of Trade, but he had brushed their concerns aside. Now that he was a mere backbencher, no one was going to be bothered about what he got up to – not least because he was prepared to be very imaginative when it came to disguising how he was remunerated.
First he took a consultancy with the Peachey Property Corporation, which was worth £5,000 a year.7 Taking that as a salary would mean handing over a big chunk of his earnings to the Treasury, and Maudling knew from the inside that they would only waste it. Far better for Peachey to buy the freehold of his large country house, and lease it back to him at a peppercorn rent: that way he got all the financial benefits without having to trouble the taxman. Then a very successful architect and developer offered him a seat on the board of one of his companies. Maudling accepted it in return for an unusual pay deal that took care of both Beryl, who received an £8,000 annual covenant for the ballet theatre she was trying to establish in East Grinstead, and his son Martin, who got a job as a director of a related company straight out of university.8 All three of them also took shares in the developer’s businesses. In return Maudling was only too happy to make speeches in the Commons that aided the developer’s building projects. Finally Maudling went international, taking a job as president of the Real Estate Fund of America. He got twenty-five thousand shares in the company for his efforts.9
My god, he knew how to pick them. The Peachey Property Corporation was chaired by Sir Eric Miller, who shot himself in 1977 while under investigation by the fraud squad over large sums of money that had gone missing from the company. The architect was John Poulson, whose success in landing public sector building contracts was down to the fact he had bribed local politicians on an epic scale; he ended up being sent to prison for seven years in 1973 by a judge who called him ‘an “incalculably evil” man’.10 The Real Estate Fund of America was the first of the three to explode, in 1970. Its founder, Jerome Hoffman, was indicted in the US on thirty-two charges of fraud and arrested in Rome. He was convicted on a single count in 1972 and sentenced to two years in prison. Maudling, tipped off by a Sunday Times exposé of Hoffman’s previous fraudulent business, had jumped ship the year before.11 But when the full extent of his financial interests emerged, more than one journalist was moved to paraphrase Oscar Wilde: to be associated with one conman may be regarded as a misfortune, two looks like carelessness, but three?
It all caught up with Maudling in 1972, when Poulson’s business empire collapsed into bankruptcy and police started trawling through his web of contacts. By then Maudling was back in government, and installed as home secretary, which meant he was technically in charge of an investigation that was inevitably going to have to look into himself. He handed in his resignation to the prime minister on 18 July, getting a gushing reply from Ted Heath. ‘I profoundly regret your going now,’ he assured Maudling, ‘and I hope that it will not be long before you are able to resume your position in the public life of this country.’12 The Daily Express praised Maudling’s honour in standing down despite no evidence (yet) that he had done anything wrong: ‘a gesture without parallel in recent politics’.13 The Sun’s front page declared it a ‘tragedy’ for ‘the man who could have been Premier’.14
No one picked up on the paragraph Maudling included in his resignation letter having a pop at the press for ‘inexcusably’ invading his family’s privacy. The chutzpah was incredible. Father, mother and son were in it up to their necks, and it wasn’t as if they had limited their links to the professional. Reggie and Beryl liked to show off the swimming pool that had been put in for free at their Hertfordshire home by Poulson (it leaked), and were regular dinner guests at Eric Miller’s house, where they nibbled on caviar, gauchely served on baked potatoes. Miller once presented Beryl with a silver chess set worth £2,750 as a gift.15 Martin Maudling went to work for Miller on his father’s recommendation too: one of his jobs was apparently to hand round a cigar box at the end of business lunches so the guests could help themselves to the contents – not Havanas, but hand-rolled fifty pound notes.16
It would, however, take a long time for these niceties to come out. In addition, the sheer scale of Poulson’s corruption – two other MPs, one Tory and one Labour, had also been on retainers, not to mention dozens of local politicians and public servants – and the strong links between Miller and Labour leader Harold Wilson tended to draw attention away from Maudling. The most serious charges against Maudling, over the parliamentary interventions he had made on Poulson’s behalf, did not emerge until 1974. They prompted the creation of the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, which obliged MPs to ‘disclose any relevant pecuniary interest or benefit of whatever nature, whether direct or indirect, that he may have had, may have or may be expecting to have’ when conducting parliamentary business – or at least come up with clever ways not to.17
It took a further three years for a specially convened select committee to rule that Maudling had not only indulged in ‘conduct inconsistent with the standards which the House is entitled to expect from its members’, but written a resignation letter which was ‘lacking in frankness’.18 By then he was well on his way to drinking himself into an early grave. He started in the mornings on a mixture of gin and sweet vermouth. He could afford it.
‘Mr Hamilton has given him an absolute assurance that he had no financial relationship with Mr Greer, and the president [of the Board of Trade] has accepted this.’
Cabinet Office, memo on response of Neil Hamilton to Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, 20 October 1994
The tip-off that led to the disgrace of our current subject, Neil Hamilton, in the cash-for-questions affair, came from Mohamed Al-Fayed, the owner of Harrods. The tip-off that led to the downfall of Jonathan Aitken, which we will study in the next chapter, also came from Fayed. So too did the tip-off that led the Sunday Times to offer a number of backbenchers cash to ask parliamentary questions in the summer of 1994. Two snapped at the bait: one, David Tredinnick, gulped it down whole, then angrily claimed he ‘did not expect to receive a cheque… I refused to accept a cheque’, only for the paper to release a recording of him asking for a cheque to be sent to his home address. He was suspended from Parliament for a month.19 For a while Mohamed Fayed was the biggest source of tip-offs in town.
This poses a problem, since Fayed is one of the world’s most egregious liars. He is a man incapable of telling the truth even about his name or date of birth – he added the honorific ‘Al’ to the surname on his passport in 1970, knocking a few years off his age at the same time.20 His wild lies about the death of Princess Diana, backed up with legal threats, prevented her inquest from being heard for an entire decade, at which point he lied that the delay was down to a conspiracy to keep him from discovering the truth.21 He’s a man – and don’t take my word for it, these are the words of a team appointed by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) to conduct an exhaustive, year-long inspection of his businesses and the various claims he had made about his career – whose lies ‘created a new fact: that lies were the truth and that the truth was a lie.’22
Trouble was, as such a man, Mohamed Fayed tended to surround himself with scoundrels and liars too. And sometimes – when it suited his own interests – he told the truth about them. He only told the truth about Neil Hamilton after the MP had outlived his usefulness and, in the businessman’s view, betrayed him. And his disclosures, when
they came, painted himself in just as bad a light as the politician, because for every corrupted MP there is also a corrupter, and Fayed admitted to enthusiastically corrupting not just Hamilton but, both personally and with the help of lobbyist Ian Greer, several other MPs too. He did so, he claimed, because Greer had informed him that, when it came to the Parliament of Great Britain, you ‘rent an MP just like you rent a London taxi.’23
It began with the titanic struggle between Fayed and Roland ‘Tiny’ Rowland, a business mogul with equal enthusiasm for immorality, palm-greasing and feuds, over control of department store chain House of Fraser and its flagship, Harrods, during the early eighties. Fayed and his two brothers won the battle in 1984 with a £615 million cash bid. Rowland immediately devoted all his resources – which extended into every part of the globe and included a national newspaper, the Observer – to exposing the Fayed siblings as fibbing about the sources of their cash. The Fayeds claimed it was inherited wealth from their ancestral business empire in Egypt. The DTI inspectors would subsequently conclude that such claims were ‘completely bogus’; the Fayeds’ father had actually been a primary teacher turned school inspector.24 Mohamed had built up his fortune, and the illusion of an even bigger one, through a series of dubious associations with powerful and wealthy men: Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, Haitian dictator François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier, and the Sultan of Brunei (it was his money Rowland was convinced had been used for the House of Fraser deal).25
Tiny Rowland wanted more than newspaper exposés. Vowing to ‘never forgive or forget’, he strained every sinew towards forcing a government inquiry into the purchase.26 Fayed became equally obsessed with preventing such an outcome, pursuing his vendetta with the same obsessive determination he would bring to his quest a decade later to convince the world that someone – anyone – other than his own drunken security boss was to blame for the deaths of his son and Princess Diana.
Enter Ian Greer, whose eponymous lobbying company kept several MPs on its books, paying them both for ‘consultancy’ on behalf of clients, and with ‘introduction fees’ for any potential customers the politicians could push in their direction.27 Sometimes these would be declared to Parliament, sometimes not: a star performer, Michael Grylls, declared one payment on the Register of Members’ Interests when he had actually received at least three, belatedly added another when it was exposed in print and was later found to have ‘seriously misled’ the authorities when it turned out he had actually banked at least six or seven.28
In 1985 Fayed agreed to pay £25,000 a year to Ian Greer Associates for lobbying services.29 Before long he got his first result: the lobbyist wrote to say, ‘I have spoken to Neil Hamilton MP, Vice-Chairman of the Conservative Party’s Trade and Industry Committee, who has agreed to table a question’.30
Hamilton, elected as MP for Tatton in 1983, was way out on the right wing of the Tory party, a member of the Monday Club, who attacked the BBC for broadcasting a concert on behalf of the imprisoned Nelson Mandela and described the African National Congress as a ‘typical terrorist organisation’.31 Hamilton was not especially bright, talented or charismatic, and his preference for brightly coloured bow ties was not enough to make him the ‘bit of a character’ he obviously yearned to be. However, he was greedy and, having signed up to ‘consult’ for Greer’s company as soon as he won his seat, quite happy to attack Rowland in the Commons on Fayed’s behalf. The MP fired off questions about the ownership of the Observer, which Rowland was turning into his own demented propaganda sheet, even publishing special midweek editions of the Sunday title when he gathered sufficient dirt on the Harrods boss. Hamilton also pushed for a meeting with the trade secretary, Paul Channon, to complain about Rowland’s persecution of Fayed. But after Rowland started pushing dodgy claims that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s son, Mark, had been recruited to help Fayed in the run-up to the 1987 General Election, Channon could no longer resist the political pressure, and he launched an official investigation into the House of Fraser purchase.
So much for the ‘official’ side of things. Fayed also claimed that during 1987 he started personally handing over brown envelopes filled with extra wads of both fifty-pound notes and Harrods gift vouchers to Hamilton after ‘he came to me and complained that he wasn’t getting enough from Greer alone.’32 Hamilton certainly stepped up his efforts at this stage. He fired off a letter of complaint, on official House of Commons notepaper, about Rowland’s business practices to the head of the London Stock Exchange, not forgetting to point out that he was ‘Vice-Chairman of the Conservative Trade and Industry Committee’, and personally visited new trade and industry secretary, Lord Young, to try to persuade him either to cut the House of Fraser inquiry short or launch a reciprocal one into Rowland’s own businesses.33
That September Hamilton got a spectacular reward: an all-expensespaid trip to the Paris Ritz, which Fayed owned, along with his wife, Christine. The couple certainly ensured that all expenses meant all expenses. They requested five nights in the hotel, which would have cost up to £3,000 for the room alone, stayed for six and dined in the most expensive in-house restaurant every night. The bill for their vintage Bollinger and lobster (the latter, Hamilton would later protest, was only a starter-sized portion), all their other meals (including afternoon tea) and their enthusiastic use of the minibar came to over £2,000, which Hamilton signed and left for Fayed to pay. Bear in mind, these are 1987 prices. ‘I felt that he was abusing my hospitality,’ grumbled Fayed, a man who used to press expensive gifts on every visitor to his office, sometimes smuggling them into the boot of their car in the valeted car park if they demurred.34 Greer, too, later complained that Christine was always asking him for upgrades and extra freebies on the jaunts he organized for the couple, to the point where ‘my patience was wearing thin.’35 When the Hamiltons rang the Ritz to request an extra free stay on the way back from their subsequent holiday elsewhere in France, Fayed ordered staff to pretend that the hotel was full.
Hamilton did at least up his efforts, sending an OTT letter to Lord Young ahead of Fayed’s first appointment with the DTI inspectors to say that the exercise was ‘such a monstrous injustice… a twentieth-century Spanish Inquisition’.36 He wrote an equally ridiculous letter to his paymaster, assuring him that ‘everyone knows the Fayeds to be among the world’s most significant businessmen.’37 He tabled question after question in an attempt to cast doubt on the inquiry.
But it was not enough for the Harrods owner. Nothing ever could be. ‘I want processions in Parliament!’ he bellowed at Greer.38 Fayed had a habit of demanding the impossible, then accusing those who failed to achieve it of betraying him. Alas, that was exactly Hamilton’s fate. In 1992, long after the inspectors had ruled that Mohamed and his brothers had ‘dishonestly represented their origins, their wealth, their business interests’, the MP was promoted to a junior ministerial role at the DTI.39 Fayed, who then was attempting to get the European Court of Human Rights to overturn the report’s conclusions, assumed it was time to call in his favours. But while Hamilton was quite happy to carry on dealing with any number of other Greer clients in his new job without declaring any interest, the court action put Fayed in direct opposition to the department he now represented. The minister had no choice but to reject his former benefactor, U-turn on everything he had said from the backbenches and announce publicly that the inquiry was ‘independent… a carefully considered and thorough investigation’.40 Fayed’s conclusion was blunt: ‘The Government have shat on me.’41 Now he had to get his revenge.
His weapon of choice was an odd one: the Guardian, whose editor, Peter Preston, he invited to Harrods for a series of meetings in 1993. In the book a team of Guardian journalists subsequently published about the cash-for-questions affair, they claim Preston ‘put on the biggest pair of kid gloves he could find, and carried a very long spoon’ before dealing with Fayed, but he was unable to resist the story he had to offer.42 The problem was standing it up: Fayed changed the details with
every telling, and he was surrounded by less loquacious aides who refused to hand over vital evidence and worried about Fayed incriminating himself. The meetings dragged on inconclusively for nearly eighteen months until the verdict from the Court of Human Rights came through – against Fayed – and he was finally ready to go on the record. ‘TORY MPS WERE PAID TO PLANT QUESTIONS SAYS HARRODS CHIEF’ roared the Guardian’s front page on 20 October 1994.43
It didn’t come as a surprise in Downing Street. Fayed had been spouting off to so many people that Number 10 already knew what he was saying. The previous month, Hamilton and Tim Smith, another of the MPs recruited to Fayed’s cause, had been pulled in for questioning by the cabinet secretary, Robin Butler. Smith had admitted everything, and resigned from his own junior ministerial position on the morning of the Guardian splash. Hamilton bluffed it out. He denied any misbehaviour, gave misleading accounts of the Ritz stay and his acquaintanceship with Fayed, and instructed London’s fiercest libel lawyers, Peter Carter-Ruck and Partners, to rain a blizzard of writs down on the paper. (Greer, who was equally guilty, did the same.) Finally he took a call from his boss, Trade and Industry Secretary Michael Heseltine, who asked him the key questions again: had he ever taken any money from Fayed, and had he had a financial relationship with Ian Greer’s company? Hamilton answered no to both, so he was allowed to keep his job.44
He lasted five days. On 25 October he was summoned to face the bad-cop/bad-cop/bad-cop combo of Butler, Heseltine and the chief whip. They informed him that further revelations – about undeclared payments from lobbyists for the South African regime and Mobil Oil – meant he had no choice but to resign. (In the later, unsuccessful libel case Hamilton brought against Fayed, barrister George Carman said that the £10,000 he got from Mobil alone ‘establishes corruption on the part of a Member of Parliament’.45) There was also the problem of Hamilton attending the annual general meeting of a firm he had previously been a non-executive director of after becoming a minister, not least because the company had since collapsed and was under investigation by his own department. Once again, greed had been Hamilton’s undoing: he protested he had only gone to the meeting ‘for a good lunch’.46
The Lies of the Land Page 7