Trial by Conspiracy: The Guardian newspaper's cover-up exposed

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Section Seven Index

Trial by Conspiracy: The lies, cover-ups and injustices behind the Neil Hamilton affair

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    Trial By Conspiracy (ISBN 0473051230) is available in hardback from good bookshops for £15.99 or less.
    Politico's Bookshop, Westminster, carries stock at all times. Click on image of book to purchase directly from Politico's website.
    To purchase a copy by credit card signed by Jonathan Boyd Hunt, Neil Hamilton, and Christine Hamilton, price £16 including UK postage, use the 'PayPal' secure payment button at the base of this page.
    Trial by Conspiracy is also available on searchable CDROM, together with books by John Redwood, Christopher Booker and others. Price £20 for two. To order via The Silent Majority's website CLICK HERE

Press Quotations

The Journal
Book Review

The book that exposes how a newspaper brought down a government by using a liar's endorsement of its invented story of corruption.

The Spectator: article
by Paul Johnson

The London Miscellany:
Book Review

Freedom Today:
Book Review

LM Magazine: Cash,
Questions, & Answers

SYNOPSIS

The Setting:

The Houses of Parliament, Westminster, London; and rural Cheshire.

The Time:

1984 to 1998

The Protagonists:

Mohamed Fayed

Implacable enemy of swashbuckling magnate Tiny Rowland. Super-rich, ruthless, unscrupulous.
In his life-long ambition to be an Englishman, he invented a respectable background and bought world-famous Harrods store -- with money he had stolen from the world's richest man.
When Rowland found out he spread the word. Fayed fought back with lies and more lies. He employed London's leading lobbyist to counter Rowland's barracking of Parliament. He seduced the British press with his largess and donations to charity -- whilst quietly destroying with false allegations and intimidation those who inadvertently crossed him.
When his last chance for a British passport evaporated in the European Court of Human Rights, he unleashed his animus on those ministers whom he believed had cost him his quest -- and his lust for revenge happened to dovetail perfectly with the political aims of a newspaper…

Ian Greer

London's leading lobbyist. He had the ear of ministers. He was a friend of Prime Minister John Major. And he had a glittering array of blue-chip clients -- including the volatile Egyptian, Mohamed Al Fayed. But rumours had been circulating for years that Greer's rise to power had been oiled by cash favours to the chairman of an influential Tory committee -- a committee upon which two of Fayed's other former supporters had also sat, before they became ministers….

Neil Hamilton

MP and Junior Trade Minister in the Tory Government of John Major. Capable, conscientious, honourable. In the 1980s he successfully sued the BBC for libel, leading to a rout of its journalists and executives -- and was reviled within the British media thereafter.
    He was a friend of the lobbyist Ian Greer. He also sat on the Conservative back-bench Trade & Industry Committee and had sympathised with Mohamed Fayed a decade earlier. The Guardian's suspicions were aroused…
    And then, when he refused to help Fayed acquire British citizenship, he aroused the Egyptian's enmity too…
    A tragedy was in the making. It was merely a question of time. He was a doomed man…

The Guardian

When John Scott, the son and heir of The Manchester Guardian's celebrated editor and proprietor, C P Scott, set up The Scott Trust in 1936 and bequeathed the newspaper to its journalists, the paper's reputation grew as the home of liberal opinion. The shedding of its regional identity in the 1950s and move to London in the 1970s helped consolidate further The Guardian's position as the sophisticated voice of Britain's media elite...
    By 1993 the journalists who controlled The Guardian had acquired sufficient power to dictate the nation's agenda. Fifteen years of Conservative Government had made them desperate for change. And their suspicions about Mohamed Al Fayed's lobbyist, Ian Greer, had been simmering for years...
    When Fayed finally corroborated those suspicions in a rage over his blocked passport a year later The Guardian's editor thought Fayed really was blowing the whistle on corruption. Within days The Guardian's presses were running off a story that the lobbyist had corrupted Tory ministers Tim Smith and Neil Hamilton...
    When it hit the newsstands Greer and Hamilton served the paper with libel writs -- whereas Smith resigned in silence, convincing all and sundry that The Guardian's story had foundation. But The Guardian's tale was false. Greer had not paid Smith. The Guardian's dark suspicions about the lobbyist were misplaced and Fayed had endorsed them out of spite against the Conservatives...
    The Guardian soon learned the truth. But it was in too deep. It could not back down. And so its editors, journalists and lawyers embarked on a sophisticated cover-up of Watergate proportions....
....and used their influence to deceive an entire democratic nation…

The author

In 1997 Jonathan Boyd Hunt was shortlisted by the NW Royal Television Society for Best News Reporter of the Year.
Before entering journalism Hunt had already established a chequered career. He started out in the cut-throat road haulage industry, where he established his own successful company, before progressing to importer of classic cars, oil exploration technician in Libya, PR executive, corporate film director, and TV reporter. And, now the author of his first book: a brilliant exposé of the fascinating true untold story of the 'cash for questions' affair.
Hunt concludes:

"The 'cash for questions' affair is no longer a story about Neil Hamilton. It is instead a story about how a British national newspaper got a major story totally wrong and then entered into an audacious conspiracy with Mohamed Fayed and their lawyers to cover their tracks. That they succeeded in suborning those institutions upon which our democracy depends -- including the BBC and the rest of the press; Parliament; and even the High Court itself -- is a positively terrifying indictment of the power a single newspaper, unchecked, is able to wield within modern British society."