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Trial By Conspiracy:
The Lies, Cover-ups and injustices behind the Neil Hamilton Affair
By Jonathan Boyd Hunt
Published by Greenzone
Andy Smith
I'm not naturally sympathetic to the Conservative Government Ministers who fell foul of media investigations into corruption. I disliked the Major Government and at the time I felt that pretty much anything nasty that happened to 'Honest John' and his chums was fine by me. There was a stench of corruption about that government - although much that we have learned since then about the cosy relationship between New Labour and Big Business shows all too clearly that governments of any political stripe are perfectly capable of behaving dishonestly. If there's a difference, it's perhaps that it took the Conservatives rather longer than Labour to get their hands dirty.
There have been several books about the 'cash for questions' scandals of the mid-1990s, in which the Conservatives were generally shown at their worst, and the best known is David Leigh's Sleaze: The Corruption of Parliament published by the book arm of Guardian Newspapers to support the Guardian's long-running campaign against Hamilton and his associates both in Parliament and in the PR industry. Like Leigh's previous books - most famously The Wilson Plot which charts the downfall of Harold Wilson - Sleaze requires the reader to believe that most things that happen in British politics are the result of secret machinations by a right-wing Establishment centred on the media, the City and the security and intelligence services.
A marvellous antidote to Sleaze, and the Guardian version of events, is Manchester journalist Jonathan Boyd Hunt's Trial by Conspiracy: The Lies, Cover-ups and Injustices behind the Neil Hamilton Affair. It's been out for a couple of years already, but it's well worth getting, especially if you read it in conjunction with the author's website www.guardianlies.com.
Trial is essentially a defence of Neil Hamilton against the Guardian allegations that he took cash from Mohamed Fayed in return for asking questions in the House of Commons that were either favourable to Fayed and/or unfavourable to the Egyptian's arch-rival, Lonrho boss Tiny Rowland. It's a substantial tome, with plenty of detail, and without giving too much of it away I am willing to declare here and now that I am far more inclined to believe Jonathan Hunt's explanation in Trial than the 'evidence', such as it is, offered up by Fayed and, indeed, the Guardian. What is absolutely clear from Hunt's book is that the Guardian was out to get Hamilton from the start - even if it meant taking the word of somebody like Mohamed Fayed, a man who believes, or says he believes, that Prince Philip ordered MI5 to murder Princess Diana!
Central to Hunt's argument is his assertion that the detailed findings of the Downey Report - Sir Gordon Downey was the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards who investigated the cash for questions affair - do not support the Guardian's version of events, subsequently accepted as 'the facts' by most of the media and, I imagine, the British public, and that indeed there are huge discrepancies between the report itself, which essentially exonerated Neil Hamilton, and the summary issued to the press, which found Hamilton guilty as charged. The contradictions are even more numerous, and startling, in Fayed's testimony during the Hamilton libel trial.
Hunt catalogues the whole cash for questions affair from start to finish. Of course, the book is very much one man's view of those years and is, I'm sure, far from comprehensive. But the evidence that Hunt proffers, and the arguments that he marshals in defence of Hamilton, are extremely convincing - certainly more so than the Guardian's theories. Above all, what trial shows is the extent to which much of the news media has followed the Guardian's lead without seriously questioning either the Guardian's allegations or the prejudices that underpinned them.
(This was Andy Smith's final contribution to The Journal in his capacity as President of the Institute of Journalists prior to handing over the presidency on 7 February 2003).
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