Sir: Paul Johnson's piece may have puzzled some readers. Why
does Mr Johnson rage against Mohamed Al Fayed, Brian Mawhinney, the Guardian, Peter Preston, me, Stephen Glover and The Spectator? Does he really believe that Mr Al Fayed, who has caused the sacking of four Tory ministers, is somehow in cahoots with the Conservative party against the Labour party and Sir James Goldsmith's Referen- dum party? In my own case, Mr Johnson mentions 'dubious insinuations' I've made in the Daily Mail's Ephraim Hardcastle col- umn. Since he's coy about spelling these out, allow me to help. I said Sir Charles Powell and his wife Carla — friends of Mr Johnson — had given evidence to Sir Gor- don Downey, who was investigating bribery charges made against the Home Secretary Michael Howard by Mohamed Al Fayed. The Powells confirmed to Sir Gordon that they were friends of Mr Al Fayed and Mrs Al Fayed. Lady Powell said she had `no desire to contradict' Mr Al Fayed, but denied she had told him Mr Howard had ordered a DTI investigation of Harrods. After several discussions with the couple, Sir Gordon accepted Sir Charles and Lady Powell's version of events.
These 'dubious insinuations,' as Mr John- son calls them, came from Sir Gordon's report (HMSO, £14.70). Both Ephraim Hardcastle and Stephen Glover later men- tioned a video produced by Mr Al Fayed in evidence in which Lady Powell is seen danc- ing around the tycoon's office, calling him 'darling' and saying Margaret Thatcher 'ruined' the Powells' lives by failing to enno- ble Sir Charles. This, too, was part of the evidence considered by Sir Gordon Downey.
Sir Charles was Margaret Thatcher's pri- vate secretary. He and his wife were — and, presumably, remain — close to Lady Thatcher. So it may be unfortunate that anything they did or said gave the impres- sion — even if Sir Gordon later discounted it — that they caused trouble for Mr Howard or that they felt let down by Lady Thatcher on the question of a peerage. But Mr Johnson's intervention on their behalf does not help matters much. His lip-smack- ing anticipation of a new Privacy Bill 'which will enable not merely the gossip columnist but his editor and possibly his proprietor to be sent to Wormwood Scrubs' is an old Johnson refrain. His racial slurs, embrace of English nationalism and support of prison sentences for journalists who breach new laws on 'privacy' — in other words, unhelpful facts he doesn't want to see in the papers — isn't difficult to decode; nor are his sycophantic references to Lord Rothermere and Paul Dacre. To describe him in the kind of language he favours, Paul Bede Johnson is a snivelling creep who has sucked up to Labour, then to the Conservatives, now to New Labour and Sir James Goldsmith simultaneously, a politi- cal basket case — and, for all I know, a nut- ter in every other conceivable respect, too.
Peter McKay Cheston House, Kensington Court, London W8
Media studies, page 30
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