To mark the death of Mohamed Al-Fayed on 1 September 2023, this is an extract from Alwyn Turner’s A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s. We pick up the story as the Conservative government plunges to new depths in public opinion…

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If the main impression of the Conservative Party was now one of disunity, it was compounded by a growing reputation for corruption, potentially threatening the perception of politics in Britain more widely. This was regularly lumped in with all the sexual improprieties under the banner headline of sleaze, though as with the Back to Basics circus, some of the stories were less important than others.

They included a 1994 Sunday Times campaign in which undercover reporters, posing as businessmen, approached twenty MPs with the offer of £1000 in exchange for putting down a question in Parliament. All refused save for two Conservatives, Graham Riddick and David Tredinnick, who accepted the proposal, only to find themselves featured prominently in the paper the following week.

There was some justifiable resentment amongst Tories of the tactics used; it was little more than entrapment, in the same way that plain-clothes police officers had once loitered in public lavatories, hoping to provoke homosexual men into making an approach – though, in this instance, there was little condemnation from the liberal left. It was even possible to see the results of the investigation as being relatively reassuring, since they revealed that 90 per cent of the sampled MPs (and one had to assume that it was a targeted selection) were honest; of the two MPs who did accept the offer, Riddick thought better of it later, and had already returned the cheque before the story was printed.

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Among the more serious cases were those centring on the controversial figure of Mohamed Al-Fayed. In 1985 Al-Fayed and his brothers had bought the Harrods department store in a deal that prompted an investigation by the Department of Trade and Industry. When that investigation finally reported in 1990, it was critical of the brothers and, while it did not recommend that any action be taken, it did somewhat tarnish their image, concluding that they had ‘dishonestly misrepresented their origins, wealth and business interests’.

The story really took off, though, in October 1994 when Al-Fayed claimed that, during the 1980s, Ian Greer, the lobbyist he had retained to represent his interests, had asked for money in order to acquire the services of a couple of Conservative MPs, Neil Hamilton and Tim Smith, so that they might ask questions in the House on his behalf. The cash was said to have been passed on in what were always referred to as ‘brown envelopes’, a phrase that had overtones of the ‘plain brown wrappers’ in which pornography was traditionally posted.

In another phrase that stuck in the public consciousness, Al-Fayed alleged that Greer had said: ‘You need to rent an MP just like you rent a London taxi.’ Al-Fayed added: ‘Every month we got a bill for parliamentary services and it would vary from £8,000 to £10,000, depending on the number of questions.’ Both Hamilton and Smith were now ministers, and were obliged to resign, with Smith admitting that he had indeed taken Al-Fayed’s money (though not via Greer). Hamilton, on the other hand, denied the allegations; he and Greer issued writs against the Guardian, which had broken the story, although they abandoned their case in 1996. It was not, however, the end of the matter.

Also caught up in Al-Fayed’s orbit was Jonathan Aitken, the chief secretary to the Treasury, who was accused – again by the Guardian, this time in conjunction with the ITV programme World in Action – of some dubious business dealings, including a stay at the Fayed-owned Paris Ritz hotel, paid for by a Saudi businessman. There were further allegations that the arms company, BMARC, of which Aitken was a non-executive director, had broken an arms embargo on Iran in the 1980s. ‘He was a man with whom one could do business,’ Michael Heseltine noted drily of Aitken. ‘Unfortunately, others felt the same and there arose a series of allegations about his business relationships, especially in the Middle East.’

Aitken too launched a libel action against both the Guardian and World in Action, issuing a clarion cry that was to come back to haunt him: ‘If it 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 British fair play, so be it. I am ready for the fight.’

As these stories broke, an opinion poll in October 1994 found 61 per cent of the public agreeing with the statement that ‘the Tories these days give the impression of being very sleazy and disreputable’.

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