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(Continued from overleaf)
George Gittos
Thank you, Chairman. May I say that I agree entirely with your frame of reference? I am not proposing to go into any lengthy discussion this afternoon on the minutiae of a long tragedy that has run in this country for many moons.
May I briefly say about myself: I am not a lawyer. I am in fact a businessman from the wilds of West Gloucestershire. I run my own small investment business. I am not here receiving a fee of any kind from any person, or even anything in a brown envelope. I have no connection with TV or journalism of any kind. My sole qualification is that I do hold a valid Television Licence, and I am therefore one of those for whose benefit the Act was set up. Those are my sole qualifications for addressing you.
Before we begin, I would like to comment briefly on a curiosity in your procedure. It does strike me that a procedure that ensures that the complainant's case is exposed to the offending licensee, but which denies the complainant a view of the licence holder's rebuttal or reply, is effectively unfair. One side has seen one side of the case, and the other has not had that advantage. This does seem to me, as a non-lawyer I stress, to offend against what one might call the principles of natural justice, which would seem to require a body like yours to act fairly. I merely put that there as a comment at this stage.
I intend to make six points to you. The first is to make clear what the complaint is. The second is to briefly tell you what the story is. The next is to go into whether Granada have an obligation to cover this story, and then to look at the quality or otherwise of the piece of work concerned, and also to take a view on the author, and finally to examine whether there were any mitigating circumstances.
I begin with: what is the complaint? This is by definition not a complaint about a particular series of programmes. It is a complaint about something that did not happen. The complaint, as we see it, is this: in contravention of its obligations under the Broadcasting Act, Granada Television deliberately ignored and suppressed important reports about a major political scandal. That scandal concerned a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice on the part of The Guardian newspaper and others, which amounted, in our view, to an unprecedented assault on the democratic and parliamentary freedoms of this country. There could not, I submit, be a more serious charge to bring against a licence holder.
I want to go on to what the story was. I do not want to go into any detail, but so that we are absolutely clear about the story. The story is not about Neil Hamilton. The story is not about Mr Al Fayed, or Mr Fayed as he subsequently became. Nor is it about Martin Bell, although all of those were key players, or at least the first two, in the details of the story. The story that Mr Hunt produced is not specifically about those people; they were players within that story, but it was not a story about them. It is a story about, and it is difficult to find other words, lies, deliberate deception, misrepresentation, not excluding forgery, over a period of several years by The Guardian newspaper, which is the very pillar of the left wing establishment. It is a story of how that empire used its influence over the whole media industry to create and then to sustain the entire Cash for Questions scandal. As a result, two innocent men, Ian Greer and Neil Hamilton, were ruined. We are all, in my opinion, soiled on that account.
More importantly, these events occurred immediately before and during the 1997 General Election. They could not but have had a very considerable effect in destabilising the democratically elected government of our country. Nobody who was in any way involved can doubt that sleaze was a major component of the success of the Blair government. I remember myself, on the occasion of that election, being discovered outside a polling booth, sporting a large blue rosette. A lady whom I had never met before came up and spat at me with absolute horror and said, 'I hate sleaze.' We cannot doubt that that had a major effect on the parliamentary election. The famous Fayed is on the record subsequently claiming that he had donated 80 seats to the Blair government.
By way of postscript, this story is how false evidence, lies and false documents were produced to Sir Gordon Downey, the Parliamentary commissioner, and how that Parliamentary Commissioner was deceived into making a damning report. That is a measure of the enormity of this charge. As the Chairman has already said, it is not for us this afternoon to form a view of the veracity of these allegations, but there can be no doubt at all about the enormous importance of those allegations.
By way of illustration, you may recall in the Appendices that Jonathan sent you, a Daily Telegraph first Leader on Thursday, 20 October 1998. It says, 'now the matter' - Cash for Questions - 'has escalated further with the publication of a book by a freelance journalist, Jonathan Hunt, who goes so far as to accuse The Guardian of mistaken reporting, and then covering its tracks by providing misleading documents to the investigation of Sir Gordon Downey, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards. This is a grave allegation to make about a team of respected journalists including the past and present editor of The Guardian. If it were true' - no comment whether it is - 'it would be the worst British press scandal in modern times.' That is the story about which Granada, by their own admission, said nothing. They have made that clear in paragraph 2 of your letter to Mr Hunt, rejecting the complaint. They said nothing.
Let us consider the position of Granada. They hold the franchise in much of the country, but their home territory is the Northwest of England, where the MP in question was a local MP. The Guardian, in my youth, was known as The Manchester Guardian. It has strong local roots in that place. The Scott Trust [which owns the Guardian] is still in Manchester. As a result of that, The Guardian owns and controls a large proportion of the local press, including the Knutsford Express and the Wilmslow Express. Therefore, if there was a story of this consequence local to that area and The Guardian were dominant, clearly the local TV station had a greater duty to make sure that that particular story was expressed. By its own admission, again in paragraph 4 of the letter I just referred to, rejecting Mr Hunt's complaint, Granada admit that they covered one side of the story on at least 23 occasions. Clearly, there was a story of enormous import. That it was met with silence seems to me beyond discussion.
I come now to the question of whether Granada does have an obligation to cover the story. I note that, under the Broadcasting Act, under the general provision about licensing services such as Chapter 1 Section 6, the Commission, with due respect, is required to do, not as much as they can, or what is reasonable, or any funny legal phrases, but 'all that it can' to ensure that 'any news given in whatever form, is presented with due accuracy and impartiality'; and that 'due impartiality is preserved on the part of the person providing the services as respects matters of political or industrial controversy or relating to current public policy'. Further, the ITC code itself, picking up the provision of the Act, goes on in paragraph 3-4, that 'in dealing with major matters of controversy, licensees must ensure that justice is done to a full range of significant views and perspectives during which time the controversy is active'. The obligation under the code as to impartiality - and that is the question we are dealing with - seems clear. They are required to give 'due weight' to a 'full range' of 'significant views'. If we have some 23 programmes dealing with all aspects of the case, but missing out the aspect of Mr Hunt's report that I have drawn to your attention, clearly, they cannot claim to have covered a full range of significant views.
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