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Letter from Mr Andrew Roth to the Parliamentary
Commissioner for Standards
I hasten to respond to your letter of 27 February,
which only arrived this morning.
The basic facts about my activities in Sleaze
are accurate. I was interviewed about my role by David Leigh,
whom I have known for some years as a professional colleague,
and by The Guardian lawyers previous to the scheduled
libel trial. I saw a proof of the relevant section of the book
before publication and, although I felt the writing was rather
lurid, all I had to correct factually was the description of me
as a Canadian. I was born in New York.
Because I have been covering Parliament since
1950, all of the people involved have been known to me for many
years. I first knew Ian Greer when he was in partnership with
John Russell, for whom Parliamentary Profiles did research
about twenty years ago on which I reported monthly to Russell
and Greer in their lavish Whitehall offices. What impressed me
at those monthly meetings was Greer's admiration for aggressive,
American-style lobbying, of the sort carried out by one of their
clients, McDonnell-Douglas. It was this aircraft-building firm
which was later shown to have massively corrupted the Japanese
government in order to sell their planes.
I have known Christine Hamilton, Neil's wife,
since her first job with the late Sir Gerald Nabarro MP. I was
invited to - and attended - the party celebrating the victory
over the BBC of Neil Hamilton and Gerald Howarth in their libel
action over "Maggie's Militant Tendency". (That party,
I later learned, was paid for by the rich, Rightwing mother of
Dale Campbell-Savours.) I attended because I thought that they
had been unfairly libelled as semi-Fascists, although I was closer
personally and in outlook to its producer, Michael Cockerell.
He asked me to help save the BBC's bacon on the morning after
it was telecast. I told him not to be silly and to apologise
and pay up for a badly-researched programme, which they finally
had to do much later and much more expensively.
To answer your query specifically, some months
before I finished writing the E-K volume of my Parliamentary
Profiles in 1989, I learned from a former employee of Ian
Greer Associates that Michael Grylls MP had been receiving a
commission on all business he referred to Ian Greer Associates.
He said he was particularly shocked that Grylls even referred
his constituency businessmen to Greer, thus securing a cut of
what they paid. When I asked what commission Grylls collected,
he said he did not know precisely but thought it was 5 per cent
or 10 per cent. He claimed that he had left Ian Greer Associates
because of his distaste for such activities, which was unknown
among other lobbyists. After checking with the Register that Grylls
had not entered this activity, I included it in a line of the
draft profile I was preparing for Grylls for the E-K volume.
It has been my practice to send draft profiles
to all MPs in a volume being prepared for publication. This has
two purposes. One is to avoid errors deriving from poor reporting
of MPs' activities. The second is to minimise the possibility
of libel actions. Most MPs are co-operative once they are convinced
you are trying to be fair and accurate. But a minority - who
tend to come from either extreme of the political spectrum - refuse
to co-operate and then charge you with unfairness and libel.
By sending them a draft, requesting factual corrections,
you almost obviate libel actions.
Most MPs simply correct the drafts and mail
them back. But I also offer them the right to discuss the corrections
with me in the Commons or my office. Again this time, Grylls availed
himself of this right and we met on the Terrace in June 1989
for some ninety minutes to go over the draft, line-by-line. He
again objected to my reference to his being fined for violating
exchange rules while involved in the Spanish wine trade during
the period of tight exchange controls. He wanted me to make this
a "minor" infraction. To my surprise and delight he
did not object to my reference to his commission on referring
business to Greer. I rushed back to my office, photocopied his
corrections and wrote a note in our office daybook that he had
okayed a very slightly modified version.
I did not know at the time that this unexpected
behaviour was probably the result of a tactical decision within
the Greer organisation. Geoffrey Robertson - the barrister who
prepared the case for The Guardian in the period before
the libel action of Greer and Hamilton was abandoned - later told
me that my planned disclosure of Grylls' commission payments
compelled the Greer organisation to take evasive action. Having
acquired and examined great numbers of documents under the "discovery"
procedure in libel actions, he said that they had fabricated
a number of invoice documents to cover them but which would have
been self-incriminating in the event of a libel action.
I proceeded with the publication of the E-K
volume the following autumn of 1989. I alerted my press colleagues
to the line in the Grylls profile. All of those who approached
Grylls in the Lobby were told by him that my entry was a lie
and that he was briefing his lawyers at the end of the week to
sue me for libel. The word "libel" was enough to prevent
any press publicity about the entry. It was my information, from
a leak from within the Greer office, that he did see his lawyer
and accountant on the Thursday and they advised him to forget
about a libel action and to be sure to enter his link with Ian
Greer in the Register of Members' Interests. There
was a very curious overlap. At the end of the same week, a very
sceptical Dale Campbell-Savours telephoned me about the Grylls
entry and then came to my office when I failed to convince him
fully. After a lengthy cross-examination, in which I had to show
him the visual evidence of Grylls' handwritten corrections, I
finally convinced him. He went back to the next meeting of the
Members' Interests Select Committee and persuaded its Conservative
majority that the only way to clear Grylls' name was to have an
inquiry. Just after this was passed, the Secretary of the Committee
told its members that Grylls had entered his connection with
Greer a few days before.
Curiously enough, the Grylls-Greer connection
was not as secret as I had thought. When tension was highest
over Grylls' threat to sue me for libel, I fell in step with a
Tory MP-accountant from the northwest with whom I had become
friendly during my dozen years as the Political Correspondent
of the Manchester Evening News. When I unburdened my anxieties
- because nobody likes an expensive and time-consuming libel action
- he poopooed them. "All of us on the [Conservative MPs']
Trade and Industry Committee assumed that Mickey Grylls was making
£35-40,000 from his Chairmanship!" Later still,
I found out that the Grylls-Greer relationship had a long history.
When the Russell and Greer firm broke up into Ian Greer Associates
and John Russell Associates, I accepted the widely-held belief
that this was basically the breakup of a homosexual relationship.
I was later told by John Russell that he had broken up the partnership
when he discovered that Ian Greer had been paying Grylls for trips
to the States on the anti-double-taxation account which Grylls
had never taken.
As a result of 45 years of investigative reporting
of Parliament I long ago became convinced that Ian Greer had
become a uniquely corruptive influence in the lobbying field.
I have done research for numerous lobbyists - all of whom buy
my books - and had contacts with them for the whole of the 42
years Parliamentary Profiles has been in operation. About
a dozen present and former lobbyists are still friends. I do not
think I am naive about their activities. It was easy to spot,
many years ago, how many lobbyists made MPs nominal Directors,
paying them as such mainly to enable them to put "researchers"
on MPs' staffs. The function of such MPs' "researchers"
was to obtain Hansard and other Government documents earlier
than it was generally available. They wanted this to provide
specific information for their clients. Much of this petered out
when the Whitehall bookshop of HMSO made documents available
for sale earlier than hitherto.
Over the years I have observed the growth of
the wining and dining of MPs. I have participated in debates
with lobbyists about whether it was more successful to offer to
wine-and-dine all MPs or only target the few of most use
to their clients.
Over the years, I have observed the growth of
the what's-in-it-for-me type of MP, particularly in the eighties.
One lobbyist, himself a Conservative, deplored to me the emergence
of the MP who, when asked to help a particular client's cause,
demanded a consultancy to help pay for his children's fee-paying
schools.
Despite all these causes for generalised cynicism,
I know of no other lobbying organisation with the corrupting
influence of Ian Greer's. I know of no other organisation which
pays MPs directly for putting down questions and peddling their
influence. Greer was the centre of a web around which were deployed
Grylls, Hamilton, and Michael Brown. Greer lied about this initially
on the record, in my hearing. But all my worst suspicions have
been confirmed and documented. While there may well have been
another dimension to their relationship, which does not concern
me, the enduring foundation of their relationship was cash, in
thousands of pounds. This only came into the open because of
their overly cynical exploitation of the gullibility of Mohamed
Al-Fayed, who finally revolted against being played for a sucker
by people who despised him.
The suppressed Central TV scam which televised
Greer offering a pretend Russo-American company special facilities
to buy a Government agency showed him at his classic hard-sell
pitch. He has an undoubted genius as a high-pressure salesman
of lobbying, as shown previously in 1986, when he defeated the
late Nicholas Ridley in Cabinet when the latter tried to keep
two long-distance British airlines going by transferring £20
million in lucrative routes from prosperous British Airways to
faltering British Caledonian. This hard-sell reality was displayed
for all to read in the verbatim text published in The Guardian
on the day John Smith died. In it, Greer offered to make a minister
available in Trade and Industry - where Neil Hamilton was serving
- and also offered to deploy his influence in No. 10, where John
Major had long been a friend. It was probably this last offer
which led Central TV to pull the very newsworthy programme. It
was the publication of that verbatim which began to persuade
Greer's more responsible clients to leave. The job was finished
by The Guardian's bravery in standing up to a libel action
which both Greer and Hamilton hoped would enrich them and bankrupt
The Guardian. The Government's role in making that libel
action possible is known only to a relative few insiders who
know from how high came the order to modify the Bill of Rights
by organising the Lords' amendment and the majority there to
enable Neil Hamilton to sue.
I trust this background information has been
helpful. If there is any aspect of it on which I can help, I am
at your disposal. I am normally in the Palace of Westminster
every morning from around 10.30 am.
Andrew Roth
6 March 1997
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