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Letter from Mr Neil Hamilton MP to Parliamentary
Commissioner for Standards
Thank you for your letter of 5 March. There
may be a few extra items which I would like the Committee to
see but, apart from that, I am happy to agree to your appending
to your Report my rebuttal, schedule and submission.
I am coming down to London today and will photocopy
this afternoon the definitive edition of the Submission, fully
paragraphed, and deliver it to you. I have made minor textual
amendments which do not alter the sense of what you have already
seen, except in one particular. I have included new paragraphs
569-579 on the Graham Jones case.
There is one other point I had forgotten but
I do not think it sufficiently important to amend the Submission
further. I was recently sent documents purporting to be a contemporaneous
note by John Mullin of the conversation which I had with him
and Hencke on the Terrace of the House of Commons in July 1993.
Mullin and Hencke have both admitted that they
took no notes of this meeting, (although Hencke was wrong in
saying that there is a rule which prohibits journalists taking
notes on the Terrace).
Mullin's few scrappy notes are, therefore, just
his recollections and cannot be taken to be an accurate record
of a meeting of an hour or more - still less a verbatim account
of anything I said. I stand by what I have already said - that
if any allegation of payment in cash in brown envelopes had been
made to me in that meeting I would hardly have neglected to include
it in my letter of 1 October 1993 to Peter Preston.
11 March 1997
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