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Part Two: Face to Face on Knutsford Heath - Our Hero Discomfited!!
That evening Martin Bell checked in to the Longview Hotel overlooking Knutsford Heath, where he adopted the basement bar as his temporary campaign headquarters.
As he settled in, The Guardian sent the paper down the wire to Trafford Park Printers, Manchester, to appear in Knutsford the following morning. Alan Rusbridger and David Leigh must have thought to themselves: 'all Bell needs to do, to be able to claim that he was standing on Hamilton's 'admitted-wrongdoing', is read page 17 over breakfast'.
But if this was their scheme, it failed. Because when Bell woke up the next day, Tuesday, 8 April, 1997, he was too busy digesting the reaction in the papers to his Press conference in London the day before, and too eager to get out in front of the cameras again, to have the time to go through the small print of page 17 of
The Guardian. It was Martin Bell's biggest blunder.
Many of the events that are discussed next were captured by ITN and BBC TV camera crews, and broadcast in fly-on-the-wall documentaries titled: Sleaze, Wives and Videotape and Mr Bell goes to Westminster, which were transmitted after the election on Channel 5 and BBC2 respectively.
After breakfast Bell gave notice of his plan to hold a Press conference on Knutsford Heath. Meanwhile, a Press pack had assembled outside the Hamiltons' home on the outskirts of Alderley Edge, fifteen minutes' drive away. Christine went out to tell them for the umpteenth time that they were not about to make any statement and she suggested that they all leave them alone. A cameraman replied that they all would soon be going anyway, as they had to cover Martin Bell's Press conference at noon on Knutsford Heath.
On impulse Neil immediately decided to confront his accuser so, after a quick change, he and Christine set off for Knutsford in their battered eight-year-old Rover.
The Hamiltons were the first to arrive on the heath, becoming immediately surrounded by news reporters and TV crews. Unaware of their approach, Martin Bell approached his venue, surrounded by his own media scrum. As the three met in kind of replay of a medieval dual, the two scrums merged.
Photographers perched on aluminium step ladders at the back as they tried to get a look in. 'Mr Hamilton! Mr Bell! Martin!' cried one chap. Bell pushed through and confronted his uninvited guests. Handshakes and greetings were exchanged. Hamilton was the first to draw his sword:
'I'd really like to know what allegation of corruption you think I'm guilty of,' he asked. Bell was flummoxed. The last thing he'd expected was for the corrupt Neil Hamilton to demand him to list what his corruption was supposed to be. Didn't everybody know what it was?
'I'll give you my answer,' Bell replied, 'I don't actually intend to talk, about you at all, though people are going to ask me about you . . . I want you to run on your record, against your record or whatever it is. I want a…I want a clean election. I may talk about trust, I think the issue of trust is important. And if, at the end of the day, the electors of Tatton feel they can trust you more than they can trust me, then my goodness they should elect you.'
For Bell to state that he was standing against Hamilton's record, only to let slip that he didn't actually know what Hamilton's record actually was, was a monumental faux pas and highly revealing. An incandescent Christine supported her husband with the obvious question.
'Do you accept that a man is innocent unless proved guilty?'
'Yes, of course I do.' Bell responded.
'So you accept that my husband is innocent?'
'I think there's a lot...'
'Do you accept that my husband is innocent?'
'No - I'm not going to be facing an ambush here...let's just...let's just see...let's just see what I have... I don't know!!... I don't know!... I'm standing here because a lot of local people have asked me to stand here…and the impetus comes from local people…and let them just choose between us.'
Christine rebuked: 'I thought it came from a dinner party…in London?'
Her husband then interjected to force Bell to clarify his position: 'I would just like to say then, that you are prepared to give me the benefit of the doubt on the allegations that have been made against me?'
'Absolutely!' Bell confirmed. 'Absolutely!'
Satisfied that he had obtained Bell's assurance, Neil Hamilton and his wife left. Back in charge of his own Press conference, Bell turned to the cameras. Bereft of any reason to justify his stance, Bell did his best:
'This is not between me and him, it's between him and the voters. This is an election about trust...'
Martin Bell used a technique that would serve him well throughout the rest of his campaign, and ever since. He portrays himself as the very embodiment of trust and as a manifestation of the Tatton electorate, thereby suggesting that any attack on him would be an attack on 'the people of Tatton' themselves.
Later that day, Bell received a fax from Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's Press Secretary, containing an open letter addressed from Bell to Neil Hamilton for Bell to release as if it was his own work. Bell whispered to Melissa to hide it from the camera. Later that evening Bell read it to the Press pack on the steps outside:
'I am prepared to give you the benefit of the doubt on the unproven allegation which remains outstanding against you. This is that you received cash from Mohamed Al Fayed for asking questions and undertaking other activities in Parliament for him.
'Mr Al Fayed says he paid you, his employees report preparing envelopes of cash for you, and you dropped a libel action against
The Guardian which continues to allege that you took cash. Nevertheless you vigorously deny that you accepted any money. The voters will have to decide who is telling the truth in advance of Sir Gordon Downey's report into the matter…
'I will not be making the charge that you took cash from Mr Al Fayed during this campaign. 'Let me list your wrongdoings so that issues in this campaign are crystal clear. You accepted gifts, hospitality and payments in kind from Mr Al Fayed, whilst acting on his behalf in Parliament, and in dealings with ministers, thus breaking the rule that MPs should not be for sale...'
Not one reporter commented on the fact that Bell had just broken the promise he had given Neil Hamilton that he would give him the benefit of the doubt over the allegations against him. After the election, when the BBC interviewed him about this, Bell explained his betrayal thus:
'I'm just not the kind of chap who goes up to a perfect stranger and says: "Sir, you are a liar and a scoundrel"... I don't do that. So what I did, I treated it much as I might have done a Serbian roadblock: look, there's trouble there, I will placate and conciliate and live to deal with it another day. Now afterwards I thought of all the smart things I should have said and how I should have made the distinction between what he was charged with, but was not proven, and the admitted wrongdoing out there.'
Except that most people would consider that to adopt a stance which implied that someone was corrupt, and to then call them a liar behind their back to the TV cameras, is immeasurably worse. It was equally dishonest for Bell to refer to 'admitted wrongdoing', when Hamilton had not made any admissions of wrongdoing at all. But the real reason Bell didn't confront Hamilton with his 'admitted wrongdoing' was simply because he had not read page 17 of that morning's Guardian and learned what Rusbridger and Leigh had concocted it to be. But reinforcements from
The Guardian would put that right.
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