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The Little Book of Bell

However, whereas after the general election the new Labour-dominated committee endorsed Downey's completely unjustifiable comment on Neil Hamilton:

'There is a general obligation on Members to this effect: "if in doubt, register". Mr Hamilton seems to have taken the opposite principle and, if in doubt, gave himself the benefit of it.'

- the same committee took a rather different view when deciding on Geoffrey Robinson, in spite of Robinson's failures of registration being without any unrealistic mitigation, more numerous, and of a much greater magnitude.  Their report concluded:

'Mr Robinson did not meet all the requirements of registration. His conduct as a Member of Parliament does not reach the threshold which would justify the imposition of any penalty by the House.'

Though he entered the election supposedly to clean up politics, Martin Bell actually endorsed this communiqué.  Given that Robinson's 'wrongdoing' was inordinately more severe than that of Neil Hamilton's, Bell's (new) posture - that he entered the election on the issue of Hamilton's 'wrongdoing' - is shown once again to be a lie.  After all, Bell could hardly claim that he was justified in ousting Hamilton from Parliament on his wrongdoing, if Robinson's incomparably greater wrongdoing didn't even warrant Bell's rebuke.

And there is just one more thing about Martin Bell that doesn't add up.  Apart from his own non-declaration of £9,400-worth of legal advice from the Labour and LibDem parties during the May 1997 General Election, it seems that since he became an MP he also has had some kind of dialogue with Mohamed 'Al' Fayed - because his daughter, Melissa, and her fiancé, Peter Bracken, somehow managed to acquire seats in Fayed's private box to watch Fulham Football Club's first game of the '97-'98 season, on 9 August, 1997.

Perhaps Melissa received this gesture from Fayed directly, and maybe her father had no friendly contact with Mohamed Al Fayed at all.  But if Bell had met Fayed privately and taken his hospitality, he would have done so in full awareness of his outrageous character, either as a notorious briber of MPs, or a wicked man who made such allegations falsely, or both.  Which, some people might say, would certainly be behaviour 'unbecoming of an MP'. 

This contrasts sharply with Bell's predecessor, Neil Hamilton, who had enjoyed Fayed's friendship during the 1980s - at which time Fayed was an official Foreign Office emissary to the Sultan of Brunei, and newspapers like the Daily Mail carried editorials complimenting the Egyptian on his 'munificence'.

Chapter Six, Part One

Chapter Seven