MEDIA STUDIES
In praise of the Roundhead
who exposed the warped Cavalier
STEPHEN GLOVER
The Guardian is perhaps our most influential newspaper. It has succeeded in painting the Tories as the sleazy party, and where it led the rest of the media followed. At the beginning of the election campaign, the paper let off another barrage against a familiar gallery of Tory rogues: Neil Hamil- ton, Tim Smith et al. For the next ten days we heard about nothing else but sleaze.
My complaint was never that the Guar- dian publishes lies. The paper has been proved right so far. What was objectionable was the loss of all sense of proportion. To read it you might think the whole Tory party was riddled with corruption from top to toe, whereas in fact the paper had 'fin- gered' no more than 20 Tory MPs, and lev- elled really serious charges against four or five. Four or five is far too many, but hardly enough to justify the contention that the British people have been betrayed by Par- liament in general and the Tories in particular.
The Guardian led from the front with the Jonathan Aitken affair, albeit with covering fire from the television programme World in Action. But its presentation of the story last Saturday lacked the customary anti- Tory hysteria. Why paste the Conservatives when they have already been pasted by the electorate? Some Tory MPs and right-wing newspapers have nonetheless received the paper's revelation of Mr Aitken's mendaci- ty as more of the same. For them the Guardian is the enemy, the paper which set out to bring the Tory party to its knees, too steeped in adversarial politics to deserve a fair hearing.
Then there are those right-wing friends of Mr Aitken who root around for some respectable explanation to justify his now proven lie that his wife paid his hotel bill at the Paris Ritz in September 1993. They simply cannot believe that this witty, charming and generous man should be a barefaced liar. Was he perhaps engaged on some necessarily clandestine patriotic busi- ness that meant he could not admit that his bill had been paid by Saudi friends? And surely the matter of who paid a hotel bill is of very little significance? There is no proof, they still maintain, that Mr Aitken is guilty of the other charges the Guardian and World in Action have made against him.
It does Mr Aitken's friends great credit that they should try to find some respectable explanation for his behaviour, but their efforts won't wash. The Guar- dian's revelation of Mr Aitken's dishonesty is a journalistic triumph. People of every political belief and of none should raise a cheer. It doesn't matter that the news- paper's original motives were in part anti- Tory. That is beside the point, as are Mr Aitken's supposedly sterling qualities and — if you believe the tabloids — his alleged weakness for sado-masochistic sex. The point is that he was caught out telling a big lie. Don't underestimate what it cost the Guardian to establish this fact.
It probably cost the newspaper's previous editor, Peter Preston, his job. It all began when in October 1993 Mohamed Al Fayed, owner of the Paris Ritz, telephoned Mr Preston to tell him that Mr Aitken's bill had been paid by a Saudi businessman, Said Ayas. This would have been a serious contravention of government regulations, Mr Aitken being at the time the minister in charge of defence procurement. A leisurely correspondence ensued between Mr Pres- ton and Mr Aitken, who knew each other slightly. Mr Preston almost gave up but Mr Aitken's elaborate answers disquieted him. Mr Preston then made a big mistake.
He felt the Guardian couldn't advance much further without a copy of the bill paid in Mr Aitken's name. He should have insisted that his new friend, Mr Al Fayed, requisition a copy as the owner of the hotel. Instead, with Mr Al Fayed's connivance, he faxed the Ritz in Mr Aitken's name requesting a copy. When his impersonation became known, Mr Preston was put in the doghouse and Mr Aitken danced on the moral high ground. After 20 generally dis- tinguished years Mr Preston's editorship was vulnerable for other reasons and the `cod fax' probably finally did for him. He was kicked upstairs soon afterwards.
But his persistence had not wavered, and his instinct about the Ritz bill was right. His successor Alan Rusbridger took over where Mr Preston left off. At the last minute, Excuse me, any chance you might upgrade me to business class?' though, he had qualms. He thought the newspaper might lose on two of the five charges against Mr Aitken. It faced the prospect of appalling costs. Mr Rusbridger met Mr Aitken twice. A deal was discussed which would have allowed Mr Aitken to claim a partial victory, but he declined. He cannot have known that the Guardian would still find a way of proving his wife did not pay his Ritz bill.
As Nicholas Farrell relates in his article on page 11, less than two weeks ago the paper sent a reporter to the Hotel Bristol in the Swiss village of Villars, having obtained (from its old friend Mr Al Fayed) the telephone log of calls made by Mr Aitken from the Ritz on the Sunday morn- ing, 19 September 1993. A sharp lawyer not a journalist — noticed that Mr Aitken had rung the Hotel Bristol at 10.15 a.m. Mr Aitken's lawyers replied that he had spoken to his mother-in-law. Though the hotel has closed, a Guardian reporter called Owen Bowcott spent three days wading through records in its basement. He found that Mrs Aitken had been there alone on the day in question. Further enquiries revealed that she had flown to and from Geneva without passing through Paris.
Now some people are saying that all this business about a hotel bill hardly matters. But Mr Aitken made it matter a very great deal, for reasons which even now are not wholly clear. He told the original lie and stuck with it through thick and thin. He was on the verge of putting his wife and daugh- ter in the witness box to compound his own perjury. If the judge had believed the lie (and who could blame him if he had?) Mr Aitken might cheerfully have taken the Guardian for a great deal of money on this and other charges. He was in effect trying to defraud the newspaper, as well as mis- lead the court. Why on earth shouldn't Mr Rusbridger ask the Director of Public Pros- ecutions to look into the matter?
This is not so much a story of outstand- ing investigative journalism — Mr Al Fayed and the Guardian's lawyers appear to have delivered many of the goods — as of dogged persistence. The paper was driven by a desire to do down a leading Tory, but it also wanted to get at the truth. It wouldn't have happened without Peter Preston. He is a strange, crabby but honest man — a sort of virtuous Roundhead. And better, far better, a virtuous Roundhead than a warped Cavalier.
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