Sleaze v. stealth
From Mr Gordon M.L. Smith Sir: Peter Oborne (`The great pretender', 30 September), commenting on the Labour journalist Andrew Rawnsley's revelations concerning Bernie Ecclestone's famous £1 million donation, declares magisterially, `No lie uttered by New Labour stands com- parison with the evil falsehoods uttered by Jonathan Aitken.' Aitken can speak for himself but, for the record, it should be noted how trivial his single, harmless but disastrous lie was.
Exasperated by journalists' groundless innuendoes about a secretary on his staff during negotiations at the Ritz in Paris, Aitken, possibly jocularly, said this inno- cent woman was his wife. The Guardian's spies lured him into repeating that lie on oath, then proved that his wife had been in Geneva that day, and so ruined him.
Aitken's was one of the three widely publicised libel actions on which promi- nent Conservatives embarked, and because of which the label 'sleaze' was attached to the entire party. This Tory sleaze on which Labour won the 1997 elec- tion was a matter of personal indiscre- tions, and had ,little effect on the country as a whole. Labour's 'stealth' is a very dif- ferent issue and will affect us all.
Policy is almost agreed between Labour and Conservatives. Spend more and more on education and health, and go for the female and old-age vote. The former Tory establishment has given way to the Labour elite, Tory fat cats to Labour people's mil- lionaires, and the government is stealthily putting the interests of the 30 per cent prosperous elite before the interests of the `pathetic, immature and insecure' 70 per cent Eurosceptics, to whom further inte- gration into Europe means vast mergers and continental alliances, followed by `streamlining' — redundancy for many thousands of middle-class, non-manual workers. This can be stealthily justified as `pruning of wasteful oveiheads'.
Gordon Smith
Storrington, West Sussex
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