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Introduction to Guardian Lies Nos. 6, 7 & 8
The
Guardian’s original ‘cash for questions’ article of
20 October 1994 focused on parliamentary lobbyist Ian Greer’s
supposed corruption of Tory MPs Neil Hamilton & Tim Smith. When the article
appeared the lobbyist and Hamilton issued libel proceedings immediately, whereas
Smith resigned.
Weeks later in November the Guardian
discovered that Smith had resigned not because he had taken payments
from Greer, but because he had taken payments from Fayed himself,
which the Guardian had not alleged, and which the evidence shows the
paper had not known about.
A couple of weeks later again in early December 1994,
Fayed then alleged that he had given Hamilton bundles of £50 notes behind
closed doors, with nobody present, and that only he and the MP knew about the
arrangement. This brand new allegation tallied exactly with the private
arrangement that had existed between Fayed and Tim Smith. Hamilton denied this
new allegation with the same fervency that he had denied the first, and
suggested that Fayed had used his arrangement with Smith as a template upon
which he had invented similar allegations against him to condemn him by
association.
Hunt & Keith-Hill’s research showed that the Guardian’s
original article accusing Ian Greer of corrupting Hamilton & Smith
had actually been based on its long-standing belief that Greer bribed MPs via
his convention of granting commission payments to people when they introduced
new clients to his firm. However, rather than stating its theory explicitly,
whereupon it could be challenged, at this stage the Guardian only made
obscure references to Greer’s commission payments.
In their witness statements for the first libel action
of 1994-1996 Neil Hamilton acknowledged receiving two such commissions from
Greer (totalling £10,000) during the 1980s. Greer clarified that he had granted
these when the MP had introduced two new clients, but he insisted that he had
not sought anything from Hamilton in return. For his part Hamilton stated that
the commissions had not influenced his decision to support Fayed or any other of
Greer’s clients. Indeed, his interest in the battle for Harrods had begun over
a year before Fayed had engaged Greer, and he began tabling questions probing
Fayed’s enemy, Tiny Rowland, well before he had received his first commission.
However,
from a reading of the Guardian’s articles, submissions, and David Leigh’s
book Sleaze, it is obvious that the Guardian’s political staff
believed that Greer’s introductory commissions were indeed bribes to reward
MPs for championing his clients in Parliament. Most importantly, research by
Hunt & Keith-Hill showed that the Guardian had planned its defence to
Greer’s & Hamilton’s libel action on the basis of being able to prove
in court that Greer’s commissions were the means by which Smith and
Hamilton had been paid to support Fayed.
Most significantly, in the weeks
leading up to the first day of the trial the Guardian’s lawyers had
gone to a great deal of trouble to discover whether Greer had also given Tim
Smith a commission payment. With just ten days to go Ian Greer provided the Guardian’s
lawyers with documents showing that, contrary to their expectations, Smith had
not received a commission (Smith later confirmed this).
Equally significantly, the Guardian’s belated
realisation that its planned defence was now invalid happened to occur at around
same time as a hastily-arranged meeting between the Guardian’s lawyers
and Fayed’s personal legal advisers. And, so the Guardian’s story
goes, it was during this meeting that one of those present suggested that Fayed’s
office staff might have been involved in paying cash to Greer and Hamilton. And
so, supposedly, inquiries were made the next day, which led in turn to the
timely ‘discovery’ of the involvement of three of Fayed’s closest and
longest-serving employees in processing cash bribes to the lobbyist and the MP,
supposedly left in envelopes for their collection at the entrance to Fayed’s
apartment block at 60 Park Lane, London.
These employees signed witness
statements dated 27 September 1996, which the Guardian served on Hamilton
& Greer’s solicitors two days later on the very eve of the trial — by
which time (unknown to the Guardian) Greer and Hamilton had already
decided to withdraw their actions (for an explanation see "The concise true
story of the ‘cash for questions’ affair", situated in Section Two).
To Hunt and Keith-Hill it was also
significant that the three employees’ witness statements contained no inking
as to why they had been silent for two years or as to how they came to be ‘discovered’
at the last minute. To Hunt and Keith-Hill it seemed clear that none of the
three had given any explanation because the Guardian’s and Fayed’s
legal teams had not invented a story for them at this stage.
The two freelances mused whether the Guardian had
decided to leave the invention of a story until after the trial had begun. After
all, Hamilton and Greer were due to go in the witness box first, and their
evidence was expected to take up to two weeks. This would give the Guardian plenty
of time to invent a story before the employees had to go in the witness box
themselves. However, in the event Hamilton and Greer settled their actions
on the first day of the trial and so no explanation was needed at that time.
For the next three months Sir Gordon
repeatedly requested that the Guardian put its case, but the paper’s
editor Alan Rusbridger and its solicitor Geraldine Proudler kept on stalling. It
was not until 16 January 1997 that the Guardian presented its case, and
not until another six days later on 22 January that the Guardian presented
its official explanation of the three employees’ late emergence. They had been
discovered, so the paper claimed, by Fayed’s American lawyer, Doug Marvin, who
happened to be in London.
It seemed obvious to Hunt and Keith-Hill that the Guardian’s and
Fayed’s legal teams had invented the walk-on role of Doug Marvin to prevent
any of them from having to testify themselves as to how the three employees had
been ‘discovered’. Accordingly, Hunt & Keith-Hill concentrated
their research on whether the Fayed and Guardian camps had put out any
other contradictory explanations in the interim while Proudler and Robertson conjured
up Marvin's supposed role.
The existence of incompatible stories is of
paramount importance, for this would constitute proof that the three employees’
late emergence was a fraud, and from this it must follow that their claims to
have been involved in processing bribes were in fact false.
And so it proved to be. Hunt & Keith-Hill discovered three entirely
different stories put out at various times by the Guardian and Fayed
camps to explain how the three Fayed employees’ had emerged from two years’
hibernation.
These various stories are discussed here in Guardian Lies
Nos. 6, 7, & 8. Each is irreconcilable with the other two, and each is also incompatible with other evidence. Taken together they prove unambiguously that the three Fayed employees' late emergence is a gigantic fraud, involving
Mohamed Al Fayed, Fayed's employees, Fayed's lawyers,
The Guardian,
and
The Guardian's
lawyers — and that the employees' claimed involvement in paying Neil Hamilton and Ian Greer 'cash in envelopes' is undoubtedly a complete fabrication.
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