ANOTHER VOICE
The time when Forte paid Mr Preston's bill in Paris
CHARLES MOORE
My most recent big 'freebie' took place about a month ago. My wife and I went to the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe at Longchamp. The race is sponsored by Forte plc, and Mr Rocco Forte invited a large party of guests. A plan to take us all through the Channel Tunnel had to be dropped because, according to some reports, a little bit of the Channel had found its way into the Tunnel, and so Mr Forte chartered an aeroplane from Gatwick instead. There must have been about 100 of us.
After a breakfast, prolonged by fog in Dublin (too complicated to explain further), at the Forte Crest Hotel, Gatwick, we flew to Orly (in-flight refreshments provided) and there were met by two coaches. The Forte influence had also secured us a police escort who shot ahead on motorcycles, flagging down the traffic so that we would arrive quickly. We English watched all this with a mixture of disapproval and envy at French high-handedness on behalf of the mighty, the envy predominating. At Longchamp, we were taken to a large and comfortable room and given a very good lunch. The return journey was arranged in a similar manner (in-flight refreshments provided). I have no precise idea what it cost, but it must have been more than £500 a head.
Who was there? The party included Mr and Mrs Maurice Saatchi, Sir Charles and Lady Powell, Mr Anthony Nelson, who is a Treasury minister, the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, Lord Wyatt of Weeford, Mr Taki Theodoracopulos, the Earl of Strathclyde, who is the Government Chief Whip in the House of Lords, Lord Hindlip, who runs Christies, Mr Nigel Dempster and Mr Peter Preston, editor of the Guardian, accompanied by Mrs Preston.
It did not occur to me then, and it does not occur to me now, that there was any- thing sinister or improper in Mr Preston's presence. The fact that he was accepting a gift considerably larger than that which he suggests Mr Jonathan Aitken may have accepted from Mr Said Ayas at the Ritz in Paris did not and does not worry me. It never crossed my mind for a moment that, after taking the Forte hospitality, Mr Pre- ston would seek to influence his paper in favour of the Forte takeover of the Savoy or run articles by the restaurant critic prais- ing the cuisine at the South Mimms service station. Even now, when I have discovered that Mr Preston sanctioned the forging of a letter from Mr Aitken to the Ritz in order, as he says, to protect his source (Mr Fayed, owner of the hotel), I cannot countenance the suggestion that Mr Preston was some- how acting as a Ritz spy on Forte, which owns its chief rival in Paris, the George V. If Mr Preston spends his time shuttling back and forth between competing owners of luxury hotels, that is his business, and his alone. The life of the editor of the Guardian is inevitably a grand one, and Mr Preston is an honourable man.
My only point to Mr Preston — and to everyone else who is so very full of indigna- tion about 'sleaze' in government — is that it is fair to assume that MPs are honourable too. It is a general assumption, of course, and there will be numerous individual exceptions to it, but if it is not an assump- tion you are prepared to make, you go a lit- tle bit mad. It is a necessary part of the manners which any society requires if life is to be tolerable. The presumption of honour is like the presumption of innocence in law: any other presumption is uncivilised. The reason I do not suspect that Mr Preston was doing anything base by carousing with Rocco Forte is not because I have studied all the evidence of his paper's coverage of Forte, let alone because I have obtained copies of Mr Preston's bills at various Post Houses by subterfuge and found that he paid them in full, or because I do not sus- pect Mr Forte of trying to suborn him (though I don't), but because it would be low-minded to do otherwise.
So with MPs. No matter how often one meets a Member of Parliament who strikes one as a twerp, no matter that one feels a lit- tle suspicious of the sort of character who is driven by the urge for power and no matter that one would probably prefer that one's daughter did not many one of them, there is still an automatic respect due to an MP because he is an elected representative in the system under which we choose to be gov- erned. His liberty exists for the benefit of our liberty. This certainly means that if he abuses `Can't you do without your mummy — at least until the end of the meeting.' it his betrayal of trust is great, but it also means that we have no choice but to trust him. If we set up outside bodies to watch over him we are negating the justification for having a House of Commons in the first place. It does not follow from this that no newspaper should investigate an MP's con- duct, but it does follow that the means do not always justify the end. Mr Aitken, for example, is not cocaine's Mr Big. He is not known to be guilty of any crime or misde- meanour. Why does he deserve, then, to have a letter forged in his name so that the world may not discover that the Ritz's owner is breaking the hotel's traditional confidentiality about its bills, a fact which potential users of the Ritz surely have — to use Guardian language — a right to know? And does Mr Neil Hamilton, whose only admitted act is to have enjoyed for a week the sort of luxury which Mr Preston and I recently enjoyed for a day, deserve to be brought down by the Guardian on the basis of apparently false accusations made by a highly interested party? Is any dirt-digging equipment all right so long as dirt is found? I could send my glamorous Sunday Tele- graph reporters — male and female down to the Palace of Westminster with instructions to seduce the inmates and I expect that their striking rate would be quite high, but would that reflect as badly on the erring MPs as it would on me? British politicians are corrupt with money, but not in the way that everyone is complaining about. They are reasonably scrupulous about what they take for them- selves, but wildly unprincipled about what they take from us, the taxpayers. For each petty backbench crook who is sneaked £1,000 to ask a question, there are scores of government ministers perfectly happy to spend £1 billion on a project whose sole purpose is to help win the next election and so secure their jobs and power. The level ot, government debt which has dominated, financial policy for the past two years and increased taxes for everyone in the country was chiefly caused by just such projects concocted by Mr Major in the two years before that. Mr Preston does not seem to see that as a scandal at all. PS. I read in Monday's Guardian that `Mohamed Al-Fayed . . last night inter- vened in the row over how the Guardian had obtained Jonathan Aitken's bill, exon: erating the newspaper of any wrong-doing. So that's all right then. I take it all back.
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