He had gone through the due process, the initial charges being investigated by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, Kathryn Stone, then examined by the all-party Committee on Standards, which upheld them unanimously.

The charge against him was that he had broken the rules on lobbying, pocketing large sums by taking parliamentary action on behalf of two companies paying him hundreds of thousands of pounds. The Honourable Member for North Shropshire was facing suspension from Parliament for 30 working days.

In my other life as a TV war reporter, I had encountered ambushes from Biafra to Bosnia – but nothing like the one on Knutsford Heath, when the Hamiltons confronted me (wearing my trademark white suit) before the Press demanding, among other things, whether I ‘accepted that he was innocent’ The move scandalised the Commons and the country – and one rebellious Tory MP called it ‘a dark day for democracy’. In my other life as a TV war reporter, I had encountered ambushes from Biafra to Bosnia – but nothing like the one on Knutsford Heath, when the Hamiltons confronted me (wearing my trademark white suit) before the Press demanding, among other things, whether I ‘accepted that he was innocent’.Īll of this came flooding back to me, as if in a dream, on Wednesday this week, when I watched the majority of Conservative MPs blocking the disciplinary action against one of their number, Owen Paterson. He changed his mind about the first part of that, but was probably right about the second. In the course of the contest, Hamilton described me as ‘a nice enough man but totally unsuited to politics’. I played a part in that political downfall, standing as an independent ‘anti-corruption’ MP and turning Hamilton’s majority of 22,000 into a majority against him of more than 11,000. Neil was the MP for Tatton in Cheshire, one of the safest Conservative seats in the country, from 1983 to 1997, when he lost it over a ‘sleaze’ scandal, after allegations he had been bribed to ask questions in Parliament on behalf of a business tycoon. And his wife, the self-styled battle-axe Christine? I remember her too, perhaps even more vividly.

Do you remember Neil Hamilton? I certainly do.

Source of the corruption legion