Main Index to all Sections

Section Two Index:
Cover-up at The Guardian

Three months after The Guardian had undertaken a few cursory inquiries into leading parliamentary lobbyists Ian Greer Associates, whom The Guardian's editor Peter Preston and his staff had suspected of bribing Conservative MPs, The Guardian published a gushing profile on Greer's company entitled: "The power and prestige of Ian Greer".  The article caught the attention of a researcher of Britain's top investigative TV programme The Cook Report, hosted by New Zealand-born Roger Cook, which led to a 'sting' operation being enacted by the programme to try and verify The Guardian's longstanding dark suspicions.

    But despite extensive and sophisticated preparation the sting failed to deliver any of its principal objectives and Central Television's executives cancelled the programme accordingly.  However, so piqued was Peter Preston, that Central had opted not to broadcast a negative programme on Greer by using disingenuously the inconsequential material the programme had managed to acquire, The Guardian then turned its guns on Central TV and Central's new owners, Carlton TV.  In an amazing campaign undertaken in collaboration with certain influential backbench Labour MPs, The Guardian conducted an all-out war on Central and Carlton until The Guardian's false mantra -- that the programme had exposed great wrongdoing by Greer and that Central had cancelled it out of loyalty to the Conservative Party -- became accepted as truth.

    The One That Got Away is the result of hundreds of hours of research into the affair, from scrutiny of scores of documents, including several confidential Guardian documents, and places each event of the Cook Report sting operation into fascinating context with other contemporaneous events.
    Because of the high amount of work involved in converting this 221KB 33-page document to web-page format, it is available for downloading only in Rich Text Format (rtf).  This is compatible with all word-processing software.

The Brainwashing of a Democratic State

The Guardian's original 'cash for questions' article dismembered