ANOTHER VOICE

I would like to say something on behalf of a man who has been left to sink

MATTHEW PARRIS

It can happen to a columnist that he wants to write something, then, discretion being the better part of valour, reconsiders. `Maybe I'm wrong? Or maybe the whole tenor of the times is against me. People will think me a dupe.'

So he scraps the idea. Then wakes in the night, suddenly sure the piece should be written; then thinks better of it the next day: 'Fools rush in . . . No, let somebody else write it.' But nobody does, and he wakes again in the night.

So here goes. I have the feeling — and it won't go — that Ian Greer has been unjustly treated. I have the impression of a sort of hounding by the Guardian that has gone just a step beyond the enthusiasm we expect from a crusading newspaper, There was something McCarthyite in the air.

Best to lay my cards on the table. I have known Mr Greer for many years, as an MP then as a friend. I've never worked for him — never done anything, really, for him. Years ago he asked if I would think about joining his board as a paid non-executive director. I never pursued the idea, but was completely satisfied that it was for my advice as a consultant that he wanted me. I would have been some use.

A subsidiary motive, I suspect, was that of kindness. On losing my job in television in 1988, Ian Greer had asked if I needed help personally, which I did not. But he has helped me very materially in fundraising for the Stonewall Group, who lobby for homosexual equality. He has bought me lunch, too. I have eaten strawberries on his lawn. I have met his poodle.

It is very easy in these suspicious times to say 'Friendship? Hospitality? Strawberries? Poodle? Ah no, this was all part of the con- struction of a network of indebtedness', and, to the extent that all of us in the media, politics and business do 'network' and do trade on contacts, friendships and introductions, then — yes — Mr Greer was a networker, and for his clients an effective one. But this is what everyone in his indus- try does. Greer did it with charm and good humour, but he was also (and separately) a generous and sociable man. He knows me well enough to know that what little influ- ence I had could not be bought. Over the decade of our acquaintance there has never been the least hint of any attempt to try. He has never asked me to write in his defence, not even now.

We are falling into the error of setting, in the changed context of the Ninetiess, a period during the Eighties when things were done differently. We are demonising one man because that is easier — and makes more sensational newspaper copy than reflecting that we have all changed. It is notable that the whole lobbying industry has gone very quiet at the fall of Greer: holding their breaths and hoping he will carry their own past practices, too, on his back and off into the wilderness.

But in those days the payment of com- mission for business introductions did not look sinister, as now it does. The recruiting of an MP to act as a consultant did not look sinister, as now it may. The assertion that, once the introduction between client and MP had been effected, such arrangements as they made or declared were a matter for them, may sound lame now, but sounded common sense then. We all bantered mer- rily of 'having a tame MP' on board. People did pay, or lunch, or invite out the MP and he or she did make helpful interventions in Parliament. And many, many lobbyists not just Mr Greer — used to boast of the facility with which they arranged these things.

In years to come it may be possible to assess how important or corrupt any of this was — in the current overheated atmo- sphere that is impossible — but what can- not be sustained is the implication that one man was the author of it. So far from taking the lid off, this style of crusading on the part of papers like the Guardian becomes part of the lid: demonising an individual can trivialise, obscuring the deeper, less newsworthy argument- So much has changed. Take this business of Mr Greer's donations to Conservative MPs and to Chris Smith. There was a time when giving money to help a politician's campaign was considered public-spirited, and it is to that tradition that Mr Greer belongs. He supported Chris because he admired him personally. He supported Conservative friends because he was a Conservative. He thought it mattered. He started his career as a Conservative agent.

But now the MPs who benefited are asked why they accepted the money. Accepted the money? Why. in the Eighties I spent much of my time in West Derbyshire actually soliciting donations from business- men for my re-election campaigns. Some gave large sums. You could stick me in front of a TV camera now and say 'Why do you think they gave you the money, Mr Parris?' and I would stammer that I thought they wanted to help — and sound, I realise, shifty and unconvincing. But if any had tried to use me, I believed I could deal with that. No one did. No one confronts Tony Blair with a microphone and asks why he thinks the millionaires who have given him money have done so.

Then there is the matter of brown paper envelopes handed to MPs. Some of Mr Al Fayed's employees have testified to this, and it has done more than anything, recent- ly, to damn Mr Greer in the newspaper- reader's eyes. I would like to believe that if some of Mr Greer's employees offered the Guardian testimony to the contrary then, in the climate of opinion the paper has helped create, respect would be accorded to that testimony too. But I do not believe it.

Before Ian Greer dropped his trial, one of his lawyers rang to ask me whether I thought the Guardian's investigative jour- nalists were conducting a crusade against Mr Greer, and whether I would say so in court. I replied that I did think there was a crusade, but that I would not say so in court because some of the best journalism is crusading and the question in this case should not be 'Was it a crusade?' but 'Was it fair?' In fact (I did not tell the lawyer this) I had overheard a Guardian journalist in a phone box at a party conference say, with a strange glee, 'We're gonna fuck Greer'.

I would never have testified to that in court because less than you might assume can be drawn from the remark. It is how journalists sometimes talk, and may have had little significance. 1 would like to believe that the journalist concerned, had he overheard Ian Greer making a similar remark about someone, would have extend- ed to Mr Greer the benefit of the same tol- erant doubt. But I do not believe it, It would have been on the front page of the Guardian = and think how it would look.

I do not know whether Ian Greer was blameless, but I doubt he was wicked. A man who did not deserve to sink like this has sunk. A lady — the Baroness Turner who seemed honest has sunk with him. Hardly a voice has been raised for either. Two small eddies, then, in the tide of affairs. The tide unsettles me.

Matthew Parris is parliamentary sketchwriter of the Times.