Main Index to all Sections

Section Two Index:
Cover-up at The Guardian

The British 'cash for questions' affair began on 20 October 1994, when The Guardian newspaper published a front-page article alleging that London's leading lobbyist, Ian Greer, had given corrupt payments to Neil Hamilton and another government minister, Tim Smith, a decade earlier during the mid 1980s when both had been backbench MPs.  It was claimed that Greer had bribed the two Conservatives for the support they had given one of his clients, the Egyptian owner of Harrods, Mohamed 'Al' Fayed. 
    Bizarrely, The Guardian's story was based entirely on Mohamed Fayed's unsupported testimony, and four years earlier Fayed had been exposed as intrinsically dishonest.

(On 7 March 1990, the Department of Trade & Industry (DTI) had published a report into the Fayed brothers' purchase of House of Fraser, parent of Harrods, which revealed Fayed to be a vengeful liar who had bought the company with £615 million cash that he had stolen from the world's then richest man, the Sultan of Brunei. 
    The next morning's Guardian had marked the publication of the DTI report with a major front-page article bearing the headline 'Fayeds lied over Harrods', and ten more articles covered The Guardian's centre pages, across the top of which a banner headline shouted: 'Lies, lies, and more lies - the mountain that came from Mohamed'.  In the same issue, The Guardian's editor, Peter Preston, penned a leading article entitled 'How lies bring their own reward', in which he described the Egyptian as a purveyor of 'cock and bull' stories.)

Even more curious, Fayed never claimed to have been party to the supposed payoffs between the lobbyist and the two MPs.  In other words, Fayed was not in any position to prove that Ian Greer had passed money to Neil Hamilton and Tim Smith even if he had been a model of honesty. 

Question:
Why would The Guardian publish corruption allegations against a lobbyist and two government ministers, when they depended entirely on the unsupported testimony of a documented serial liar whom The Guardian itself had lambasted previously, who wasn't even in a position to prove the allegations anyway?

Answer:
For the previous ten years the Guardian's political staff and other political journalists throughout the British media had believed that Ian Greer had been bribing Tory MPs.  The Guardian had published the article when Fayed, in a fit of rage over the government's reluctance to grant him a British passport, had finally agreed to endorse a story that the Guardian had invented to destroy Greer - and damage the Tory government.

[Note: For a detailed chronology of events proving the statements and contentions within this document, digest the next document in Section Two entitled: "The Brainwashing of a Democratic State" and eleven Guardian lies listed in Section Three.]

Part One