John Major: liar, cheat, hypocrite
by Steve Platt, Tribune, 11 October 2002

ALMOST 10 years after John Major’s libel action against the New Statesman virtually bankrupted the magazine and reduced my editorship to a desperate scramble for financial survival, the confirmation that the former Prime Minister is a liar, a cheat and a hypocrite offers little satisfaction.

In one sense, the fact that Major conducted a clandestine four-year affair with Edwina Currie is neither here nor there.

The New Statesman article over which he sued never alleged that he was an adulterer.

Rather, it was concerned with the media and Westminster rumour mill, and with the sustained campaign of denigration being waged against the Tory leader by some of his own colleagues.

Our principal legal worries as we went through the early article drafts were that one of these, not Major himself, might sue for libel if we accused any of them directly.

Given that this was so, it was something of a puzzle at the time as to why Major reacted in the way that he did.

In hurling writs at not only myself and the magazine, but at the printers, distributors and anyone who showed the slightest inclination to reproduce, stock or sell the offending issue, he seemed to have gone entirely over the top.

Now it all becomes clear.

Major was deliberately, shamelessly, kicking around the weakest kid in the playground – a magazine that could not afford to go to court over a case it felt sure it would win – in an attempt to keep the bigger bullies of the press from kicking him around instead.

I confess that there have been times over the past decade when I contemplated sending a private letter of regret to the former Prime Minister, expressing sorrow for any pain that the New Statesman article may have caused to him or his family.

I found it difficult to comprehend why, other than for reasons of deep personal distress, he should have responded to its appearance with such seemingly irrational vehemence.

I was naive.

I should have realised that no one protests so loudly as the crook who is rightly accused, but can claim innocence in particular circumstances.

John Major describes his affair with Edwina Currie as the most shameful episode in his life.

He is wrong.

Far more shameful than sin is hypocrisy, and he has shown that in spades.

There is no shred of integrity that now remains intact from his wretched, disingenuous premiership.

Every minister or MP who was ticked off, disciplined, denied office or forced to resign because of personal indiscretions or infidelities now bears testimony to the double standards and deceits of a man who lived his entire time in office as a lie.

So what’s new, cynics might suggest: what else do you expect from the world of politics?

Power is its own justification; deceit simply oils its wheels.

Of course, I have a vested personal interest.

Major’s hypocrisy cost me dearly, both professionally and personally.

I hope I am not being vindictive in saying, now that the truth is out, that I hope he too will pay a price.

My advice to my old magazine, whose lawyers are on the case, is the same as that offered by a certain female Tory MP at the time of his libel action against me: to sue him till it hurts.

There is, as ever though, a wider issue. Lies and hypocrisy pollute the body politic – and the use of the law to prevent proper debate corrupts the very culture of democracy.

John Major now stands revealed as the latest in a long line of those who have used Britain’s Draconian libel laws to crush their critics or stifle their opponents.

From Robert Maxwell to Jeffrey Archer, on through to the former holder of the highest office in the land, people with wealth and power have been able to use or threaten libel actions to conceal their calumnies and corruption.

It is time to take a leaf out of the American libel book, so that those in positions of power and authority cannot so easily conceal the truth by the use or threat of writs that are too costly to challenge.

John Major’s libel writs – which we could not afford to contest in court, confident though we were of winning had we been able to do so – came desperately close 10 years ago to shutting down one of Britain’s few independent voices of dissent.

The case for making sure that no cheat, liar or hypocrite gets the chance to do so again is more powerful than ever.