Rights in order to be free to fight his action. There was a scarcely concealed fury among many MPs that a newspaper should vigorously attack corruption in parliament – just as they vented their wrath on the Sunday Times (and, later, the Daily Telegraph) for their own work in the same area.
In September 1996 – on the eve of the High Court hearing which could have cost the Guardian several million pounds – the Hamilton/Greer case collapsed with nine minutes to spare. ‘A Liar and a Cheat’ was our blunt front-page headline the following morning. There followed another five years of inquiries, committees, further libel actions (thankfully, not directly against the Guardian) and appeals. At one stage we were almost certainly in contempt of parliament, for publishing an embargoed copy of the official report into the allegations of parliamentary sleaze we had uncovered.
*
The Hamilton action coincided with another marathon successful defence of a case brought by five police officers based at Stoke Newington police station in North London, who were caught up in a corruption inquiry and could have been awarded £125,000 each if they had won.1 The point was this: robust, inquiring journalism was time consuming, difficult and expensive. It was knotty, hard and often exhausting to do; and usually laborious, labyrinthine and prohibitively costly to defend. A single journalist on their own could be picked off and silenced. A journalist doing brave work needed to know their organisation would defend their reporting. In the absence of that defence, journalism meant nothing. The institutional strength of the media was all.
The next gargantuan battle – with the Cabinet minister and Conservative MP Jonathan Aitken – was hardly typical. But within three months of becoming editor I was plunged into yet another drawn-out gladiatorial battle over a series of articles questioning the minister’s involvement with assorted figures, including arms dealers, in the Middle East. There were unanswered questions about who had paid his hotel bill when staying at the Ritz hotel in Paris while a government minister. Was it the Saudi businessmen who were also staying there or was it, as Aitken claimed, his wife?
We had taken up this questioning where my predecessor, Peter Preston, had left off. One day in April 1995 a colleague rushed into my office and told me to switch on the television. There was Aitken broadcasting live to the nation: ‘If it now falls to me to start a fight to cut out the cancer of bent and twisted journalism in our country with the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of traditional British fair play, so be it.’
He was going to sue us – and, in an act of supreme bravado, had announced the fact live on television to the nation. I experienced a sensation that had previously just been a figure of speech: my stomach turned over. This was going to be an unforgivingly public fight. Alongside us in the dock would be Granada TV, who had made a parallel programme, Jonathan of Arabia. They were insured for costs. We weren’t.
We had – as in previous trials – the solicitor Geraldine Proudler and the QC George Carman running our case. Carman – a diminutive, chain-smoking, by then semi-alcoholic in his late 60s – was perhaps the most famous barrister in Britain, with a reputation for pulling legal rabbits out of the hat at the last minute.2 We were going to need one. The requirement that a defendant has to prove the truth of everything they have written (the opposite of the law in most parts of the world)3 meant the onus was on us to determine who had been where, when; and who had paid what.
That was only possible by exhaustive and expensive disclosure of Aitken’s financial records, which was never going to be easy. In the run-up to the trial Aitken’s supporters in the media anticipated with lip-smacking relish the impending humbling of the Guardian. Political loyalties – with some notable exceptions – trumped journalistic solidarity.4 At this point Aitken was still seen as a future prime minister – handsome, charming, intelligent and well-connected. His £8 million,5 six-bedroomed house at 8 Lord North Street – barely five minutes’ walk from the House of Commons – had a private ballroom and was the perfect venue for political soirées and intrigues. His only serious mistake to date had supposedly been to break the heart of Margaret Thatcher’s daughter – a romantic crime for which he had to serve considerable time in the political wilderness.
A newspaper article, once it ends up as an exhibit in a High Court action, becomes cadaver for repeated dissection. Every sentence – every word – is excised and held up to the light. Was it precisely right? What did it mean? Was it balanced by other words or sentences? By this stage it is useless for the journalist to argue what they intended by their words. A judge will decide the meaning. You may end up having to defend a judge’s decision about what a sentence meant, rather than what you actually meant.
The case was multi-pronged. On some prongs, we knew we were right but would struggle to prove it. Sources will sometimes tell you things they know to be true, but would run a mile rather than appear as a witness on oath in court in the full glare of the world’s press. On some allegations we knew we were right, but – without full access to the movements and financial records of Aitken and his family – we lacked the killer proof. With other prongs we could defend our meaning of our words, but not a judge’s view of what he thought we meant to say.
Aitken’s subsequent autobiography showed that he, too, had internal turmoil about the ordeal ahead. But, as he observed our exhaustive and expensive attempts at discovery of paperwork, he shrewdly, if recklessly, deduced that we were far from home and dry.
About a month before we were due to lock horns in the High Court I tried a last-ditch effort at resolving the case through Aitken’s friend, the advertising magnate Maurice Saatchi, who duly suggested a lunch with Aitken at Wilton’s, an old-world fish restaurant near Piccadilly. Saatchi was optimistic he could broker a deal that would save face all round. I turned up at the agreed time: Aitken didn’t. He was out campaigning for the impending general election and obviously felt sufficiently confident he was going to trounce us.
The trial paperwork was mounting up. Aitken’s witness statement alone ran to 280 pages. He had 80 witness statements to bolster his case: we had 70. Between them, they ran to 1,800 pages. On top of that there were a further 1,450 documents that might be needed during the course of the High Court hearing. Over the months the 255 pages of pleadings were (in legal jargon) amended, re-amended, re-re-amended and even re-re-re-amended. Every amendment took time. Time was money, and this case was already becoming eye-wateringly expensive for whoever lost.
Every hour I spent locked away with lawyers was an hour away from learning the ropes of editing; or from thinking about the digital future; or from planning the Guardian I wanted to shape.
Aitken’s QC, Charles Gray, secured a trial without a jury. This was a blow. In the police federation case, the common sense of 12 fellow citizens had saved us from defeat. Trial by jury was the norm for libel actions, and we’d hoped that the Aitken case would be heard by one, too.
But our fate now rested in the hands of Sir Oliver Popplewell, a 70-year-old patrician figure whose own attitude to journalists was perhaps betrayed by his memoirs, which appeared to dismiss them as ‘scribblers’. Doubtless, Popplewell would have put his feelings to one side but one reason we had chosen Carman was because he was a supreme jury advocate. His down-to-earth mix of bluntness and twinkly charm might not be so effective in a trial by a judge alone.
Two days before the case started Proudler had suggested a mission so apparently desperate I was at first disinclined to take it seriously. She suggested sending a reporter to Switzerland to see if they could obtain the relevant hotel records to show the whereabouts of Lolicia Aitken at the time the Ritz hotel bill in Paris had been settled. I had little faith that a reporter would be able to gain access to individual client records, but eventually agreed to send Owen Bowcott, a reliable and experienced journalist, on the trail.
The trial opened to a packed court 10 on 4 June 1997 – more than
