AND ANOTHER THING

Smoke and mirrors, Liverpool camels, forgery, lies, bribes and perjury

PAUL JOHNSON

What detonated the explosion of rage on John Major's part, leading to his dra- matic throwing down of the gauntlet, was the behaviour of Michael Heseltine. Hezza has been using his own ministry to manipu- late the defence sales crisis provoked by the Scott inquiry, ostensibly to damage Jonathan Aitken but in reality to destabilise the Government and Major. To some extent indeed Major identifies his predica- ment with Aitken's. He sees himself as sim- flatly victimised by a systematic media cam- paign, and that is one reason why he has been uncharacteristically supportive of Aitken.

However, there are important differ- ences between the two campaigns. In the first place, Major has been the victim main- ly of abuse, Aitken of downright falsehoods or even deliberate lies. Second, Major's media assassins are to be found almost entirely in the Tory press. Pro-Labour newspapers and the BBC have scarcely gone for him at all because it is an axiom in the Labour camp that Major is easier to beat than any conceivable successor.

By contrast, Aitken has been the target of the Left. It is often said that the British media is overwhelmingly Tory but the coalition Aitken faces proves otherwise. It includes the Guardian and its Sunday side- kick, the Observer, the three Mirror tabloids and the two Independents which the Mirror Group now controls, and a large section of the ITV network, especially Granada TV, its oldest and richest component, and, more particularly, Granada's hatchet-week- ly, World in Action. Then, to repeat, amplify and present as objective 'news' the accusa- tions of the others, there is the BBC. Many of the reporters involved in the anti-Aitken campaign work in partnership, swapping and pooling information, so the coalition is bigger than the sum of its parts.

Unlike the Major affair, which is a simple matter of personality, Aitken's struggle for survival raises important issues of principle. First there is the smoke-and-mirrors aspect of the character assassination. The strategy is to overwhelm Aitken with the sheer quantity of the accusations against him. The fact that none of the accusations may be true is pushed aside. The campaign psy- chology is to persuade people that the number of charges itself proves their truth; and that 'one more accusation' will 'break the camel's back'. So more accusations come off the production line. But close inspection shows that all the `fresh' charges are in fact recycled old ones. There is noth- ing new about any of those produced this month other than their media presentation.

It is also said, and partly believed by the public, that Aitken has `failed to answer' the charges and that unless he does so 'he must go'. In fact, Aitken has done little else but answer charges, in detail and in full, in every forum open to him. None of his answers has ever been published by the anti-Aitken media except within a frame- work of tendentious commentary and fresh falsehoods. The only objective body to con- sider the charges, with access to all the papers, is the Cabinet Office, and Sir Robin Butler has given Aitken a clean bill of health. The only response of the left-wing media to this has been to attack Butler.

Hence Aitken has taken the unusual step, for a minister, of suing some of his accusers for libel. He has made it clear that he is looking forward to the action with rel- ish and that, in turn, has set up a tremor of apprehension throughout the anti-Aitken camp. Having had their bluff called by Aitken's writs, they are now scrabbling around for evidence which will stand up in court. This applies both to those who are already being sued and those likely to receive further writs — in a sense they all sink or swim together. My lawyer friends tell me huge sums are now at stake. The charges against Aitken are so serious, and have been repeated so often, and the ele- ment of malice in the campaign is so bla- tant, that if a jury finds for the minister, the damages will necessarily be enormous.

`Take me as your leader!' Taken in conjunction with the costs of a six- week case, those already being sued could face a bill as high as £5 million.

Hence, for those members of the media involved, the truth — never very important to them anyway — is now secondary to their own survival. This brings me to the second point at issue: the total lack of scru- ple in the media. I have never seen any- thing like it. There was, for instance, the forged Aitken letter, with the forged signa- ture of his private secretary. The editor responsible for this has since been kicked upstairs but he has not yet been sacked.

More recently, there was the stolen fax, whose contents were wilfully misrepresent- ed — an imposture exposed in the Times.

Granada's World in Action programme on Aitken was the most palpably dishonest I have ever seen, if one excludes the notori- ous demonisation of Mother Teresa on Channel 4. Actors were dressed up as real people, lines written for them, a camel was hired at £1,000 a day and filmed on the beach near Liverpool — presented to view- ers as the Arabian desert. When real 'wit- nesses' were used, their faces, names etc.

were usually concealed, which gave the impression they were under threat by Aitken or others. Two of the genuine wit- nesses were only induced to appear by tac- tics crude even by television standards.

The latest device of the anti-Aitken media is large-scale bribery. So far there have been six attempts to bribe former employees of Aitken. The most recent sum offered was £30,000 in return for a sworn statement. The man concerned refused and told Aitken what had happened.

This brings me to the third issue. The campaign against Aitken has been so pro- longed, mendacious and cruel as to consti- tute a real threat to our political system. His wife, a Swiss lady who is still shocked by the turpitude of our media, said to me last week, `I can't understand why any decent person should want to go into British politics when they are treated like this.'

I dare say Norma Major would echo that sentiment. Character assassination by media deception is beginning to impoverish our politics, as it has already done in the United States. By hounding the honest men and women beyond endurance, and driving them out of public service, the no-holds- barred media will end up by giving us polit- ical leaders as dishonest as themselves.