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(Continued from overleaf)

When I first started my investigation, just after the general election of May 1997, I imagined that the whole of Fleet Street would be queuing up to hear Neil Hamilton's side of the story.  But, despite the fact that he had been ousted from the fifth-safest Tory seat in Britain, and though he had shouted his innocence from the rooftops, not one national news reporter interviewed him about Fayed's and The Guardian's allegations.  But this is not their fault, either individually or collectively.  It is the fault of the system itself.

    Initially, many newspapers reported Fayed's allegations at arm's length as a Guardian story.  But it didn't take long for The Guardian's influence to cause the great majority to suspend their critical faculties and accept, without scrutiny, the paper's propaganda.  The BBC also got carried along, converting "Mohamed Al Fayed's allegations" seamlessly into generic "sleaze allegations", without any accreditation to Fayed or The Guardian at all.
    So Britain's journalists formed their views and wrote their columns, based purely on the prevailing received wisdom.  And then the allegations acquired even more credibility from their repetition.  Doubledoubletalk.  It is the stuff of Big Brother.
    But there is hope. Many independent-minded commentators throughout Britain's press have, at one time or another, expressed concern at the way the 'cash for questions' affair has been covered, and allowed to develop unchecked.

The Sunday People, 2 August 1998.  Francoise Levistre gives a wholly different account of the accident to the one he gave on Granada Television's Secrets Behind the Crash.  Granada ignores his change in testimony despite its programme convincing half the world that Diana was murdered by the British secret service.

    My efforts have brought me into contact with many such people who seem, however, to consider themselves powerless against the media's self-perpetuating reliance on centralised thought and quick turnaround of stories.  Some have supported Neil Hamilton and expressed reservations about Fayed and his employees' evidence and probity. Others have tried and failed.
    In September '97 I discussed the affair with a respected columnist on the Sunday Times, the newspaper that first introduced the phrase "cash for questions" into the British psyche with their alleged entrapment of two Tory MPs, Riddick and Tredinnick.  He assured me he had tried to persuade his editor to allow him to write an article supportive of Hamilton, but that he had been turned down repeatedly.  'My editor has treated Hamilton shittily throughout his editorship,' he told me, in some disgust. 
    This stifling of opinion, and the vacant-headed coverage given to Fayed's allegations over the last few years should give rise to a major debate on three central issues: the rights of an individual to sufficient column inches/air-time to answer allegations (for it takes only an instant to make an allegation, but forever to refute it); the effect of wire-driven news services on free thought and balanced coverage; and the ease with which this enables news to be manipulated in Britain by those with the power to do so.

The DTI Inspectors' report from 1990 gives us some insight into how easy it was:

        'In the present case it appears to us that two processes were at work concurrently.  On one
        hand Mohamed Fayed was telling lies about himself and his family to representatives of the press,
        and once those stories were on a cuttings file or in a press cuttings library they grew and
        multiplied without much further inquiry into their accuracy…  As a result of what happened, the
        lies of Mohamed Fayed and his success in "gagging" the press created, as Mr Fisher would put it,
        new fact: that lies were truth and that the truth was a lie.'

It is a disgrace that the British media be deceived twice in ten years, by the same man, using the same, highly-documented methods.  It must never be allowed to happen again.

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