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The Guardian set the tone for its campaign with a front page headline attack on The Observer's owners, Lonrho, on 30 July 1988.  Eight months later on 23 March 1989, after being recruited to the campaign Campbell-Savours immediately denounced in the Commons as a "Lonrho plant" a story by political editor Adam Raphael about arms deals that only three days earlier Campbell-Savours had championed.  Observer journalist David Leigh followed through on 27 June by resigning over supposed editorial interference, which The Guardian then reported in a front-page splash of its opinion-forming media section on 3 July. 
    Thereafter, Campbell-Savours orchestrated in Parliament the denunciation of any article that could be construed as having been written to please Tiny Rowland, while steadfastly ignoring all other Observer articles no matter how embarrassing they were to his Tory enemies.  In tandem, Leigh, Campbell-Savours, and other of The Guardian's influential disciples (such as Left-wing journalists Anthony Howard and Tom Bower) put it about that Rowland was a proprietor who "dictated" pro-Lonrho stories to his editor, while The Observer's journalists - especially the City team - were smeared as "lapdogs" who did their master's bidding.
    Such is The Guardian's ability to mould opinion in Britain, the "interfering proprietor" charge became accepted as fact despite the evidence showing that Rowland "interfered" less than other British newspapers' proprietors, such as Robert Maxwell, Eddie Shah, Conrad Black, and Rupert Murdoch. 
    As a consequence of The Guardian's drip-drip innuendo and Campbell-Savours' Parliamentary attacks, Lorana's & her colleagues' reputations were badly tarnished, whilst the reputations of The Observer's editor, Donald Trelford; its political editor, Adam Raphael; and its City editor, Melvyn Marckus, were utterly ruined.  Only Michael Gillard escaped destruction, thanks mainly to the fact that he also contributes to the satirical magazine Private Eye, which is dominated by Guardian journalists and disciples. 
    [Note: To review the articles by Lorana and her colleagues, plus extracts from the resultant 1990 DTI Report, go to Section Six.  To download the Rich Text document chronicling The Guardian's campaign to acquire The Observer by discrediting Tiny Rowland and The Observer's journalists, go to Section Eight.]

INVESTIGATIVE journalists are judged by results. Lorana Sullivan's exposés of share-trading bucket shops helped to inspire the Financial Services Act 1986 to protect investors.  Her detailed unravelling of the bizarre activities of the Rossminster group and its imitators heralded benchmark legal rulings to nullify complex artificial tax avoidance schemes that had sheltered billions.  These were eccentric achievements for an American woman.
    Few of the frauds that attracted Sullivan's painstakingly detailed attentions survived.  One unhappy exception was the Bank of Credit and Commerce International.  Had customers and the Bank of England taken full note of her factual reports, years before the collapse, creditors would have saved many billions.
    Lorana Olcott Sullivan, an imposing but quietly spoken six-footer, was the daughter of a prominent family in Elmira, New York.  She inherited both her New England mother's courtly patrician charm and her lawyer father's combative determination.  Educated at Cornell University, Sullivan was cast to be a society hostess but preferred journalism.  After a violent youthful marriage which she escaped within weeks and which was annulled by the Roman Catholic Church, she threw herself into the hitherto closed male world of financial journalism.  Journalism training at Columbia University and a Pulitzer travelling fellowship helped her to become the first woman journalist to be taken on by The Wall Street Journal.
    She earned a tour as the Journal's London correspondent in 1970.  When it ended, she quit and went native, joining The Sunday Times when it began the high-cost investigative journalism that drove Sunday newspapers in the 1970s and 1980s.  Later, she ploughed a fertile furrow at The Observer.  Her career waxed and waned with that privileged phase in British journalism, when investigations often took weeks to reach the page but frequently affected public policy.
    One of her earliest Sunday Times tasks was to track the burgeoning activities of the Slater Walker group, then London's dominant financial conglomerate, round the Far East and the Pacific. The resultant reports, which combined in-depth analysis of documents with on-the-spot interviews, appeared just as Slater was to merge with a top investment bank.  Revelations of internecine trading fortunately scuppered the deal months before the London banking crisis of 1974.
Though sometimes a prolific writer, Sullivan knew her limitations when it came to translating her mountains of detective work into attractive newspaper copy and was happy to collaborate with sympathetic editors.  Some of her solo efforts were the most striking, however.  After the tax-avoidance scandal, which was used to relaunch The Sunday Times in 1979 after a year of industrial disputes, Sullivan homed in on tricky or dangerous targets, including financial operations connected to organised crime.  She accepted death threats as part of the job.  For The Observer, she revealed the Arabian financial connections of Jonathan Aitken, leading to the former MP's resignation from the board of TV-am.
    Patient sifting and collating of mounds of financial documents was matched by an ability to win the confidence both of the authorities and the light-fingered. Fraudsters wept on her shoulder, sometimes literally, as they spilt the beans.  During an investigation of the offshore financier Robert Vesco, however, Sullivan got on first-name terms with the then President of Costa Rica.  While Sullivan was engrossed in one such exercise, an American admirer insisted against her wishes on giving her a pedigree Kerry Blue terrier.  The admirer, like others, did not last the course.  The dog changed her life.  To accommodate the prize-winning Gotcha and his offspring, Sullivan swapped her West End flat for a converted tithe barn in Hertfordshire, which itself became the subject of a precedent-setting legal judgement, and later for a lodge near Hitchin that earned her an award for restoration.
    Sullivan became a successful shower and breeder though, inevitably, she met controversy.  Fanciers of the Irish strain of Kerry Blues did not at first take kindly to Sullivan's American strain.
    Charm eventually prevailed and Sullivan has willed a permanent prize for Kerry Blues at Crufts.  Her friends may remember her more for the throaty laughter that defused countless tense moments.

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