Beleaguered Prime Minister John Major, shaken by a series of scandals in the previous few months, announced that he was setting up a committee ‘to examine current concerns about standards of conduct of all holders of public office’.47 Lord Nolan, the judge who chaired it, would conclude that the register of interests set up after the Maudling scandal was not fit for the job in its present form:
‘such opaque descriptions are routinely being entered so there is disclosure in appearance but not in practice.’48
But if the prime minister thought the announcement of an inquiry would end this particular scandal, he was sorely mistaken: Hamilton hung around like a bad smell for the last three years of his administration – and beyond. Some of this was due to Hamilton’s dogged insistence that he had done nothing wrong, but a great deal of it was down to the determination of some of his colleagues to prevent anyone proving he had. It didn’t help that Mrs Thatcher, a Hamilton fan, kept popping up to offer her support. Right-wing fans banded together to fund his various legal actions. One of Major’s whips, David Willetts, who was meant to be scrupulously disinterested, unwisely put suggestions in writing as to how an inquiry by the Select Committee on Members’ Interests could be blocked, along with a note saying Hamilton ‘wants our advice’.49 When the memo later became public, he tried, even more unwisely, to pretend it meant the MP was ‘in want of’ advice, rather than the plain English meaning of those words that anyone born after the Victorian era would recognize.50 There was even an effort to have the libel case against the Guardian heard not at the High Court but by Parliament under obscure mediaeval statutes. But the wide-ranging claims made by Greer and Hamilton in their libel suits meant that embarrassing details kept emerging as lawyers trawled through documents. They included accounts that clearly showed payments from Greer to Hamilton, as well as descriptions of shopping expeditions taken by Christine after which bills for paintings and garden furniture were sent directly to the very lobbyist with whom her husband claimed to have had no financial relationship.51
Hamilton and Greer abandoned their libel case just a week before it was due to go to trial. It seemed they had become aware of just how much evidence the Guardian had amassed against them. ‘We trust you won’t be running the story in your newspaper,’ the MPs’ lawyers optimistically faxed the broadsheet’s editors on the day they pulled their case out of the courts.52 They got their answer in the form of the next morning’s front page: a photo of Hamilton staring balefully above the headline: ‘A LIAR AND A CHEAT.’53
Still, Hamilton wouldn’t go away. He continued to loudly insist he had only abandoned the libel case for lack of money, and that every accusation against him was a stinking lie. Even when he was forced to admit taking two separate payments from Greer, he anticipated Bill Clinton by claiming this didn’t amount to a ‘financial relationship’.54 Hauled in front of Sir Gordon Downey, the parliamentary commissioner for standards, he whined: ‘I did not mention the commission payments when I spoke to Mr Heseltine…. I knew that if there were to be another cause for adverse media comment against me… it could be used as a very big stick with which to beat me and to cause my resignation to take place.’55 Psychologists could have a field day with the use of the passive voice in that phrasing. Hamilton seemed as incapable of accepting responsibility for his own plight as he was of paying for his own dinners.
Downey was having none of it. ‘He knew that he had had a financial relationship with Mr Greer, and he deliberately decided not to disclose the existence of that relationship to Mr Heseltine,’ the commissioner determined. He followed this up with some magnificent legalese: ‘There appears to be validity in the allegation that the relevant statements by Mr Hamilton were, in varying degrees, untruthful.’56 The verdict on Fayed’s direct ‘brown envelope’ payments came later from the jury in another libel trial. Despite being warned by the judge that the Harrods owner’s ‘appreciation of what is fact and what is fiction and what is truth and what is fantasy is warped’, and they should treat his evidence accordingly, the jury unanimously ruled that ‘on the balance of probabilities…
Mr Al-Fayed has established on highly convincing evidence that Mr Hamilton was corrupt’.57
Of course by then the Hamiltons – very much a double act now – had fought, and lost, the 1997 General Election. The other parties managed to turn the campaign into the last thing John Major wanted, a referendum on sleaze, by standing aside in Tatton and letting squeaky clean former BBC correspondent Martin Bell stand as an independent. A televised ambush on the campaign trail saw Christine bark, ‘Do you accept that my husband is innocent?’ in the voice that launched a thousand cheap reality TV show and panto appearances.58
Two decades later Hamilton made an unlikely return to politics, getting himself elected as a Welsh assembly member for UKIP in 2016. So popular does he remain that a source close to party leader Nigel Farage said at the time of his selection as a candidate: ‘every time someone tries to flush the s[hit] down the toilet he keeps coming back up.’59
‘I think most people who have dealt with me think that I am a pretty straight sort of guy.’
Tony Blair, interview, BBC On the Record,16 November 1997
Before Lord Nolan had even finished his stint overseeing the new committee on standards in public life, the Labour Party and its bright shiny new leader were making political capital out of what he wouldn’t look at. ‘In the light of the concern expressed even in Government circles about the funding of political parties, is not the right, fair and honourable thing to do to widen the remit of the Nolan committee so that the funding of all political parties could be looked at in a proper and impartial manner?’ demanded Tony Blair at Prime Minister’s Questions on 21 May 1996. Across the dispatch boxes John Major, horribly aware that he would have to fight an election campaign within the year and would be unable to do so without the generous funds of anonymous businesspeople which traditionally flowed towards the Tory party, could only splutter, ‘I do not believe that that is the right way to proceed,’ and try to divert the exchange onto Labour’s bankrolling by the trade unions.60 It was a bit of a non-starter. The trade unions hated Tony Blair nearly as much as he hated them, and were zipping their wallets shut as fast as they could.
Fast-forward a year and swap ends. ‘New’ Labour was now in power and enjoying a lengthy honeymoon, with what felt like the whole country entertaining an uncharacteristic optimism that the bad old days of sleaze were over and everything was going to be cool in Britannia. The prime minister even felt confident enough to make a declaration in his party conference speech at the end of September: ‘I can announce to you we are going to bring forward a Bill to ban foreign donations to political parties and to compel all parties to make contributions above £5,000 public. And we will ask the Nolan Committee to look at the wider question of Party funding. At the next election all political parties will at last compete on a level playing field.’61
Just over a month later the roof fell in. Tessa Jowell, the public health minister, declared that the outlawing of tobacco advertising and sponsorship in sport – something Labour had promised in their manifesto, and pledged to implement in their first Queen’s Speech just a few months before – should make an exemption for Formula One, on the grounds that the motor racing business might move overseas and take up to 200,000 jobs with it.62 Both Jowell and her boss, Health Secretary Frank Dobson, had previously argued vociferously for an outright ban; journalists smelt a rat.63 The first suspect was Jowell herself, or rather her husband David Mills, who had been involved with the F1 team run by the Benetton family (he had a thing about rich Italians, becoming disastrously tangled with Silvio Berlusconi later on).64 But Jowell was only obeying orders. Blair had instructed Dobson to push for the F1 exemption two weeks earlier, after personally entertaining at Number 10 the F1 owner Bernie Ecclestone; Max Mosley, the head of the motor sports governing body Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile; and their political lobbyist David Ward.65 In keeping with Blair’s r
elaxed, ‘call me Tony’, government-from-the-sofa style, no official minute of the meeting had been taken. So no one can say for sure whether or not the subject of donations came up. But Blair knew full well that the Labour Party’s ‘high value donors unit’ were at the time actively soliciting cash from Ecclestone – and, more to the point, that they had already accepted no less than £1 million from him that January, to add to their election war chest.66
Ecclestone does like throwing large amounts of money around – in 2014, apparently oblivious to any irony, he paid a German court £60 million to drop bribery charges against him – but why the tycoon decided to hand over so much money to Labour seemed a bit of a mystery, even to him. ‘I thought Blair had the same ideas as me, that he was anti-European and anti-Common Market,’ he later told the Sunday Telegraph, which suggests he needed to watch the news more carefully.67 Mosley, who had moved on from supporting his fascist father Oswald’s Union Movement in the 1960s to New Labour in the 1990s, claimed he had teased his colleague into making the donation when he noted how much money he would save thanks to the party’s pledge not to raise income tax. Labour would be obliged to declare the cash, like they did with all donations over £5,000, but because it fell into the 1997 accounting period, the rules said they wouldn’t have to do so until way off in September 1998.68 And that, Blair and his closest advisers swiftly decided, was how they wanted things to stay. Instead of coming clean about the donation and denying it had anything to do with the change in policy, they would sit tight, despite the journalists sniffing around. Gordon Brown ‘got him to agree that unless we were absolutely clear the press had the story itself, we should hold fire, and let it dribble out,’ wrote Downing Street spin doctor Alastair Campbell in his diary. He agreed to the plan despite personally thinking ‘we were just waiting around for a car crash to happen.’69 Labour press officer David Hill would subsequently confess: ‘My job… was to try to throw everyone off the scent…. I did not say to journalists that Ecclestone had not given us any money, although I know I did say everything but that.’70 Ecclestone agreed: ‘If someone puts me up against the wall with a machine gun, I will not confirm or deny anything.’71
In the meantime Blair and Co. sent a confidential letter to Sir Patrick Neill, Lord Nolan’s successor as commissioner on standards in public life, about the donation – and the possibility of a second one – so that if journalists did stumble across the truth, they would be able to produce correspondence to show they were doing the right thing. Except they couldn’t even bring themselves to be honest in covering their backs. The letter was written in Downing Street, but sent in the name of the Labour Party’s general secretary, further blurring the very lines between party and government that they were supposedly highlighting. And the letter failed to describe the gobsmacking scale of the January donation; it simply said it was ‘substantial’. Neill, not unreasonably, assumed that meant something around the one-hundred-thousand mark, not ten times as much. Yet still he came back with the last response Labour wanted: not only should they refuse any further donations, but they should give back the first one, to avoid ‘even the appearance of undue influence on policy’.72
By that point, however, things had got considerably worse in the bunker. Gordon Brown, who had been party to the whole thing and knew every detail, was questioned on the BBC’s Today programme about whether or not Ecclestone had donated any money, and panicked. He replied, ‘You’ll have to wait and see, like I’ll have to wait and see when the list is published. I’ve not been told and I certainly don’t know what the true position is.’73 According to Andrew Rawnsley, the most informed historian of the Blair–Brown period, the chancellor came storming back to the Treasury ‘in a red mist which staggered even those who had long endured his titanic tempers. Brown raged at his staff: “I lied. I lied. My credibility will be in shreds. If this gets out, I’ll be destroyed.”’74 His spokesman later denied this version of events.
The following afternoon Ecclestone, who was getting heartily sick of being badgered by the press, confirmed he had given the party a cool million. The wangling over the second donation dribbled out twenty-four hours later. ‘Day after day we were forced to reveal more and more, look like we had more and more to hide,’ grumbled Campbell to his diary. ‘It was a disaster.’75
Any chance of making the argument that the donation had had no influence on the policy change – which Blair insists to this day was the case – was long gone. It was as if the whole top tier of the government had been so paralysed by the fear of how bad the donation would look, they failed to realize it would look even worse to be caught hiding it.
Now that the worst had happened, they all refused to take responsibility. ‘TB… went straight into head-in-sand mode,’ wrote Campbell. ‘There was a problem with his mindset, in that he was thinking he could do no wrong, and that people would therefore not assume he could do any wrong on issues like this. But in part because of the way we had handled it, it looked like he had done something wrong. We had made a big mistake in not going up-front, but he would not admit it.’76 Brown’s spin team were going round falsely briefing journalists that he had been ‘out of the loop’ on the whole thing. The rest of the cabinet, who really hadn’t known what was going on, were refusing to defend the government; Jeremy Paxman sneered that ‘no ministerial bottom’ could be found for the empty chair in the Newsnight studio.77 The only person who was happy was John Major, who, having barely been heard of since being swept out of office in May, was now making loud noises about ‘hypocrisy on a very grand scale’.78
Eventually Campbell persuaded the prime minister, who had begun to convince himself that the scandal might end his premiership before it had even got going, that he needed to kill the story by ‘taking a kicking’ on live TV.79 John Humphrys, one of the BBC’s most ferocious attack dogs, was invited down to Chequers on Sunday morning to administer it. But even at this point, Blair could neither bring himself to say sorry properly – ‘It hasn’t been handled well, and for that I take full responsibility, and I apologize for that’ – nor to give an honest explanation. ‘Before any journalist had been in touch, anything to do with donations and Mr Ecclestone, we had informed his people that we couldn’t accept further donations,’ he told Humphrys. ‘What about the original donation? We decided to seek the advice of Sir Patrick Neill. We did so on the Friday.’80 This was nonsense. The letter to Neill had specifically been about whether they were allowed to accept a second donation, and didn’t ask anything about the first. Even Blair’s most sympathetic biographer, John Rentoul, admits bluntly: ‘this was simply untrue.’81 Loyal sidekick Peter Mandelson offered his own euphemism for how the team handled the whole thing in his memoirs: ‘we got into trouble over the chain of events.’82
Blair felt the objective truth was not as important as his own self-belief. ‘I hope that people know me well enough and realize the type of person I am, to realize that I would never do anything to harm the country or anything improper,’ he simpered as the interview drew towards a close. ‘I think most people who have dealt with me, think I’m a pretty straight sort of guy and I am.’83
Indeed, most people did give him the benefit of the doubt. Well, it was early days.
‘I confirm this form has been completed by myself or at my dictation and that the information given is true to the best of my knowledge and belief and all material information as explained above has been disclosed.’
Peter Mandelson, signed declaration on mortgage application, 30 August 1996
Odd fish, Peter Mandelson. Feted – admittedly largely by himself – as a PR genius, able to spin any story so it showed Labour in a good light, or strangle an unfavourable one at birth. And yet at the height of his powers it was almost impossible to find anyone with anything nice to say about him, and when the media spotlight moved in his own direction, you could guarantee he would bungle things so badly the story would run for days. When political journalist Matthew Parris blurted out on air that ‘Peter Mandelson is
certainly gay’ – it was a secret everyone already knew.84 Further, Mandelson was in a settled long-term relationship, the happiest he had ever been, and so secure in his Hartlepool constituency that the local paper ran the headline: ‘WHO CARES IF OUR MP IS GAY?’ Somehow he still managed to cackhandedly escalate the remark into a rolling scandal of media censorship by demanding action from the BBC’s director-general and chairman of governors, and then trying to claim he hadn’t done anything of the sort.
It was exactly the same with his house-hunting. Instead of upgrading from his ‘small flat in not-yet-up-and-coming Clerkenwell’ to somewhere a little bit bigger that he could afford on an MP’s salary – a salary which, by the by, received an unprecedented boost in 1996 from £34,000 to £43,00085 – he had to have an entire house in Notting Hill, that even he admitted ‘I obviously could not afford.’86 When writing about it in an allegedly contrite mood in his memoirs over a decade later, he claimed he had only been looking for ‘a real home of my own, a place I could be proud of, with a desk on which to spread out my papers, shelves filled with my books’, as if such facilities did not exist anywhere outside London W11.87 He spent £475,000 on the house, enough to buy an entire street in his constituency, and invited Lord Snowdon round to take a photo portrait with him reclining in a chair that was captioned as costing £1,800.88
The Lies of the Land Page 8