In my own defence
Sir: In last week’s editorial (2 February) about Derek Conway and ‘sleaze’, you conjured up the demons of ‘cash for questions, the Neil Hamilton saga and brown paper envelopes.’ In the mid-1990s, under Frank Johnson, The Spectator was one of the few publications which allowed me to defend myself against these false allegations. True, the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner, Sir Gordon Downey, later concluded I did take cash from Mr Fayed. But the media widely derided his inquiry as botched and a denial of natural justice to me. Ann Widdecombe resigned from the Standards Committee in protest at my treatment.
After I robustly defended myself in a live televised appearance before the Standards Committee, the Labour-dominated committee refused to endorse Downey’s conclusion that I had received cash in brown envelopes. They were right. The Inland Revenue later investigated too, demanding income tax on any cash payments and threatening a criminal prosecution for tax fraud. The burden of proof was on me to refute the allegations. The Revenue’s elite fraud-busters, the Special Compliance Office, crawled over my financial affairs for the years 1987–97 with a microscope. After a two-year investigation, they dismissed the allegations and asked for not a single penny in extra tax.
How many of my detractors could be confident of emerging unscathed from such exhaustive scrutiny of so many tax years?
Neil Hamilton
Hullavington, Wiltshire
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