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(Continued from overleaf)
1996
February 13: Despite all the controversy, Hamilton is reselected as Conservative MP for Tatton.
Analysis:
The preamble 'Despite all the controversy' implies that the controversy perhaps should have prevented Hamilton being selected. Regardless, the phrase has no news value and no place in a supposedly impartial news bulletin. Furthermore, Hamilton was not reselected as its 'Conservative MP'. He was actually reselected by Tatton's Conservative Association as its prospective Conservative candidate.
[OMISSION OF SIGNIFICANT EVENT: On 4 July 1996, the new Defamation Bill receives Royal Assent, following an amendment to the Bill by Cross-bench Peer Lord Hoffman, which resolves the anomaly caused by the ancient Bill of Rights and thus frees Hamilton to bring his libel action against
The Guardian back into play.]
[OMISSION OF SIGNIFICANT EVENT: On 27 September 1996, just three days before Hamilton & Greer's libel action against
The Guardian is due to be heard, witness statements from three Fayed employees are taken, all claiming that they had a role in paying Neil Hamilton and Ian Greer cash in envelopes.
Two days later, when these witness statements were served on Hamilton & Greer's solicitors, both Hamilton & Greer denied these new allegations, pleading that the three employees had most likely been coerced into giving false evidence simply to bolster
The Guardian's weak case. (Later, The Guardian's barrister, Geoffrey Robertson QC, admitted that prior to their emergence
The Guardian's prospects of winning were bleak, conceding that The Guardian's defence up to that point "rested largely on the word of Mohamed Al Fayed… a man condemned by an official DTI inquiry some years before as a liar").]
September 30: Just hours before his libel action against The Guardian is to be heard, Hamilton drops the action, saying he has run out of money to pay for the legal costs but still maintaining his innocence.
Analysis:
The phraseology is pejorative and highly misleading, for it fails to make clear that Hamilton's decision to abandon his libel action was taken due to circumstances that were not of his making.
Hamilton's decision to withdraw his action was actually taken three days earlier (i.e. before he could have heard about Fayed's three employees' witness statements), when his co-plaintiff Ian Greer withdrew on his solicitors' advice, when it was learned that Greer had given erroneous information to a parliamentary inquiry six years earlier in April 1990.
(Greer's withdrawal then started a chain of events that resulted in Hamilton having to appoint and brief new solicitors. And so, with his funds low; his new lawyers completely unbriefed of the complex aspects involved, and the withdrawal of Ian Greer affecting negatively the perceived strength of his own case; Hamilton was advised that to carry on alone would have been senseless.)
October 15: Fresh allegations in the media trigger a new investigation into Hamilton's affairs by the Standards and Privileges Committee, headed by Sir Gordon Downey.
Analysis:
This is wrong and creates an impression that is the opposite of the truth. It was Hamilton himself who wrote to Downey and requested that he should investigate Fayed's allegations against him. Hamilton did this two weeks earlier on 30 September, prior to announcing his withdrawal of his libel action. The phraseology implies that Downey's inquiry had been instigated by the Standards and Privileges Committee as a consequence of media comment, leaving the reader to the additional mistaken belief that Hamilton might not have welcomed it.
Furthermore, the Standards and Privileges Committee was not 'headed' by Sir Gordon Downey. Downey was the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, which is a civil service post.
1997
January: Channel 4's Dispatches programme features Al Fayed talking about his payments to Hamilton which trigger his libel action.
Analysis:
The phraseology 'talking about his payments to Hamilton' is pejorative and implies wrongly that these were undisputed facts, rather than allegations that Hamilton has denied vehemently from the outset, and which remain unsupported by any evidence of any description save for the word of Fayed's three employees -- who did not emerge until three days before his libel action against
The Guardian
was due to be heard, nearly two years after The
Guardian's story was published.
The remark that the programme 'triggers' Hamilton's libel action without stating when that action was taken out, is also confusing. The phraseology implies wrongly that the action might have been taken out there and then, but Hamilton did not serve Fayed with a libel writ over the programme until a year later, on 8 January 1998.
(It would also have been enlightening to mention that the Dispatches programme in question had been made in association with
The Guardian, with key Guardian staff seconded to the production team.)
March 17: Publication of Sir Gordon's report is delayed by the dissolution of Parliament when John Major calls the general election.
April 7: Hamilton's chances of re-election suffer a serious blow when BBC correspondent Martin Bell announces he will stand as an "anti-sleaze" candidate in his Tatton constituency, in what some claim is a Lib-Lab pact. His decision triggers a bitter campaign, with the former newsman repeatedly caught in angry confrontations with the sitting MP and his wife Christine.
Analysis:
Martin Bell did not enter the election as an 'anti-sleaze' candidate. Bell entered the election as an 'anti-corruption' candidate, but changed it a week later on 15 April when Tatton's Returning Officer, Brian Longden, advised him that his chosen tag left him open to legal challenge (which Bell had confirmed by the Liberal Democrats' solicitors).
The qualification 'what some claim is a Lib-Lab pact' suggests that there might not have been a Lib-Lab pact, which is absurd, given that the Liberal Democrat and Labour Party hierarchy co-operated with Martin Bell's campaign and have never denied that they worked in concert to enable Bell to have the best chance of ousting Neil Hamilton.
The word 'repeatedly' is also used wrongly. There was only one confrontation between the Hamiltons and Martin Bell and that was on Knutsford Heath on 8 April, when Bell gave Hamilton his 'absolute assurance' that he would give him the benefit of the doubt with regard to the allegations against him. (Bell broke his word later that evening when he read out a statement alleging Hamilton was guilty of serious wrongdoing. The statement was prepared for Bell by Labour Leader Tony Blair's press secretary, Alastair Campbell, based on misleading information supplied by
The Guardian).
May 1: Bell becomes the first independent MP elected for 52 years, taking Tatton from Hamilton with an 11,000 majority. Christine Hamilton says the defeat has financially ruined the couple and they launch a media career to raise money.
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