Then they closed the border and we were land-locked. There was a lot of politics being thrown around in those days. Franco was tub- thumping to distract from the disastrous economy and the British government was giving out the most atrocious flag-waving rubbish about the British Empire. The fact is that the native Gibraltarians are a strange interbred brew of complete scoundrels who only foster a dribbling allegiance to Queen and Country because every last one of them are in the rackets and it very much suits them to do so. Unlike the Falklanders, who are directly British and can show genuine allegiance, the Gibboes are a hotch-potch of Spanish, Arab, gypsy, and visiting seamen from everywhere on the globe. Their only basic British blood comes from pirates, deserters, vagabonds, adventurers and soldiers. This makes an interesting and colourful mixture, and watching them at work and play is as fascinating as watching the apes piss on the tourists. The Gibraltarian hierarchy and "society" made all their wealth almost exclusively from piracy, smuggling, opportunism and confidence tricks. And they are all still at it. The Second World War provided them with their greatest heyday, for the black market flourished as nowhere else on earth.
It is very true that a combination of Gibraltar, the Suez and Malta held the key to the Mediterranean, and consequently North Africa. They became impregnable. But Malta behaved honourably and with great courage, while Gib weltered in corruption. Franco himself is often accused of being a Nazi-sympathiser and, of course, he was. But he held out against a Nazi invasion of Gibraltar from the mainland. Enough for Churchill, after the war, to write a letter of great praise and thanks.
Had Franco have allowed this, the crucial battle of the Med. may well have been lost and therefore the war itself - and Gibraltar would have gone irretrievably to Spain in recognition of Franco's help and connivance. Gib no longer has the slightest strategic value and it is about time to get to the negotiating table, as they have in Hong Kong. It should become a Spanish controlled free port within the EU, and if they want to serve bacon and eggs for breakfast, and pints of English bitter in the pubs so be it.
Clifford, on the other hand, is a very shrewd publicist who knows his subjects intimately and his targets even more so. I admire him for his honesty in saying he often made things up. So do they all. They verbal people, which Max never actually does; they sport clearly misleading headlines (Kelvin McKenzie was the worst in history); they bully people into making statements they do not mean; or, as in the recent case of Scallywag versus Portillo, they sneak around offering "help" and then swiftly stitch you up. Clifford never does anything of this. It is just simply much easier to make up his own headline and then put a known name under it.
The other reason for the choice was that they were about to create Israel under the Balfour Declaration and again they wanted a safe buffer zone against the more troublesome Arab states. If you look at Jordan's original borders they are symmetrically and politically logical but meaningless in any other way. The old Arabia didn't have boundaries, it merely had magnificent cities like Damascus or Bhagdad which were ethnic centres of culture and commerce. So, in many ways King Hussain is a pretender created by political cynicism. As such, the Hussains were a good choice and the King has prospered well.
Before the 1968 five day war, Hussain had a policy of getting on with Israel and saw the West Bank as a convenient depository for the dissident Palestinians who were altogether far more civilised, educated, and worldly than the Jordanian Bedouin who worshipped him. Palestinians are also predominantly Christian. The five-day war buggered everything up. I was there and I still have a haunting image.
Tens of thousands of Palestinians had to flee the West Bank and, before it was blown up, crossed the Allenby Bridge where the Jordanian forces, under arms, forbade them to go further. So refugee camps were set up all along the eastern river bank. Quite cynically, Hussain used these camps as a buffer between Amman and Israel - depending on international opinion to intervene if the Israelis crossed the river. These refugee camps were incredibly pitiful and became the melting pot for the future fledgling PLO. There was acute starvation; the winters were freezing, and babies were dying by the sack-full from malnutrition. I still have this image in my head of going down after the battle of Kharami (where the Jordanian forces had shelled the camps and blamed it on the Israelis) and hearing nothing but the plaintive wail of crying babies, often abandoned crawling around in the sand searching desperately for their parents.
The humanity that King Hussain is now sporting on the international stage was strangely absent in those sad days. Had it not been, I truly believe the PLO would never have been born and thirty years of heartache and bloodshed could have been avoided.
On the evening of April 16th Scallywag was invited to give a somewhat controversial talk on the alternative press to a seminar of media graduates at the University College London in Tavistock Square. By and large the semi-lecture went down rather well and the audience were eager to ask several relevant questions.
Naturally, the name Julian Lewis had come up from time to time in the 40-minute speech, but really only in passing. The subject of the Alternative Press is so vast and complicated that Julian only plays a minor part. But, it seems, that was enough.
Many people had put their hands up to question when they were interrupted rather suddenly and loudly by a furtive lout at the back who had been hovering in the doorway trying to be unobtrusive. Brandishing a copy of Scallywag No. 30 which maintained that Julian's doctorship may have been suspect, the lout accused Scallywag of getting all his facts wrong. Before Scallywag could reply, the lout screamed out: "You do not even know who I am. I am Julian Lewis and you are a lying skunk. I am not a homosexual."
In what appeared to be a carefully stage-managed heist of the meeting Lewis (for it was indeed he) then pointed to a rather attractive lady in her forties and shouted, "This is the woman you call a harlot." (this referred to an accusation we had made that Julian had hired escort girls to accompany him to the New Forest where he is standing as a Tory, hoping the selection committee would believe he was a heterosexual).
The woman displayed herself like a mannequin on the catwalk and said "I deeply resent what you have said about my former boyfriend. I can assure you he is not a homosexual. I love him to death and if I were a man I'd come forward and give you a punch on the nose."
"How," Scallywag asked her, "do you know he is not a homosexual?"
She promptly sat down, whereupon former News of the World photographer Ian Cutler, who was in the audience, got up and said: "I have been to most brothels in London and I recognise you. You are a tart."
However, another lady had taken to the floor saying, "I represent the blue rinse brigade that you are so disparaging about, and we definitely know Dr Lewis is not a homosexual." She didn't look terribly blue rinse, but then she didn't look like an escort girl either.
By this time the room was buzzing, naturally, and the audience was beginning to enjoy it. But Julian got into a tantrum and was screaming abuse. It had all the makings of a farce. He was red-faced with fury and bobbing up and down from his seat like a yo-yo.
Scallywag said something about how, if the Conservatives ever did get in again, Julian would make the ideal cabinet minister, but he was shouted down with abuse. So much so that the organiser of the symposium, a worried man called Eddie, had to physically eject Lewis from the hall and threaten that if he returned the security guards would be called.
The two women stood up in support and left with him, whereby the stunned audience could hear shouting and bellyaching as Lewis was hustled out of the building.
Altogether an extraordinary outburst from a man who is very likely to be in the next parliament and had taken all the trouble to come up from Lyndhurst for his ten-minute moment of glory.
As he left he was shouting, (to Scallywag) "You would not dare let us meet in this very hall for a full debate. I'd tell you just what I think."
Scallywag said there was simply no point at all in a loud and rude slanging match, but he would be delighted to meet him in the New Forest at the venue of his choice so that his wannabe constituents could witness his behaviour at first hand." This he refused.
When the building had quietened down somewhat one member of the audience got up to say: "If there had been any doubts at all about anything you have alleged in your talks, they are now dismissed. I can see exactly what you mean. I have never witnessed anything quite so extraordinary."
Another, a lady, stood up to say: "This so-called doctor has just given us an excellent example of how desperate the Tories really are."
Mustering as much dignity as possible Scallywag thanked the audience for hearing him out, and thanked the departed Julian Lewis for giving such a graphic illustration of what a complete little shit he was. There was a standing ovation before all parties retired to the nearby Tavistock Hotel for a brief libation.
Virtually the entire meeting went to the bar and most of them shook Scallywag's hand and said they could not recall a livelier seminar. If Julian had hoped to gain points, he was sadly mistaken.
As most of the guests were budding journalists several tapes had been taken of the outburst and it was not long before the press were calling Scallywag for confirmation. Including the Southern Evening Echo which covers the constituency and who published the story prominently the following day.
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"Alternative" does not just mean minority, although several minority magazines are alternative to the mainstream. My own definition of it is that part of the media which is not run by, firstly the cost accountants but even more by the all- pervading lawyers. For libel and nearly a dozen other legal gagging laws has always been Britain's most formidable weapon of the establishment. And "establishment" itself is a much overused and misunderstood word. If, like myself with Scallywag, you have operated for so long outside the rules then you quickly begin to understand that the "establishment" is not just a few old boys enjoying their pink gins in Whites, or the reds under the beds theorists, nor even the freemasons, although there is undoubtedly a strong streak of hand-shaking which pervades the establishment. The establishment has many stratas but between them they dominate, rule and control every last facet of our very lives and largely we remain unsuspecting of its tremendous influence. It includes, of course, the monarchy and the church; Westminster and Whitehall; and the police and the judiciary. They are the obvious ones. But it also pervades the City and high finances, local government and our education system. What is not fully realised is that both the Unions and the media are also high in the establishment structure. So is the world of publishing and advertising. Between them all they dominate how we think and behave, spend our money or even act.An alternative press is not so much anti-establishment but existing and acting independently from it. It should attempt to tell alternative truths, even if they are libelous and sometimes especially if they are libelous. I forget which pundit said opinions are free: facts are sacred. I feel it should be the opposite. Facts are relevant and in modern journalism often highly suspect. Eyewitness accounts of almost anything differ madly. But opinions should be considered sacred in any society which pretends it is free.
Royal Tapes
Some fifteen years ago I first experienced the combined weight of the establishment when it hit me like a steamroller. It concerned a taped conversation between Prince Charles and the then Lady Diana Spencer eight weeks before they were married. The conversation itself was all innocence and merely tittle-tattle between two young people who were pretending to be in love with each other. It was taped by Telecom engineers in Sydney, Australia. These days, after toe sucking and the Crown Prince wanting to be a Tampax; mass infidelity, divorce and the virtual moral destruction of the entire monarchy, it seems strange that the Buckingham Palace machine could have then been so very sensitive about an ordinary conversation which revealed nothing controversial. But that wasn't the point. They were incensed because someone somewhere had the temerity to dare to invade Royal privacy. The Queen was incredibly shocked and ordered a mass reaction in which Commissioners from Scotland Yard, the entire security services, and almost every section of Whitehall, including the Home Office and the Foreign Office, and the judiciary, conspired to put a total gag on all newspapers and then arrest me for treason. Today such a reaction would be laughed at. Deservedly so. But this was in the days when the establishment was clearly identifiable and it had created over many centuries the system of the status quo. It is still in operation, but more subtly so. It is widely believed in Wapping (I can no longer say Fleet Street), that, among other things, Edward is gay; Andrew has aids and is not the son of Prince Philip, that Philip himself has several illegitimate children, that Margaret is alcoholic and likes toy boys, etcetera, etcetera. If they did not know it before, they did after Scallywag told them so with some graphic proof. The whole Camilla-Charles love tryst was common knowledge years before Squidgygate.Affairs
Just as we have alleged that Portillo and Lilly had had a long affair, that lobbyists Derek Laud and disgraced Ian Greer, had provided young boys recruited from the children's homes in North Wales (now under huge official scrutiny), for Conservative MPs in return for influence in parliament. This included Lord McAlpine who we named only a few weeks after he prematurely "retired" from being the Tory fund- raiser. We also made severe allegations about a Superintendent Gordon Anglesea who regularly committed paedophile acts at Bryn Esten, one of the homes. And it was here that even the so-called legitimate press, like the Guardian and Sunday Times were sued for libel, in another establishment steamroller. The allegations of child abuse throughout North Wales had been widely known to the police for a decade. So it was with the local authorities that turned a blind eye when they actually recruited known paedophiles to run the homes.During the libel action despite the fact that George Carmen QC skillfully got a confession out of Anglesea that he had consistently lied to the court, the judges summing up - and I was in court throughout - was so biased that the jury had virtually no other alternative but to find for Anglesea. Both, of course, were freemasons.
Anglesea and others never had the gumption to sue Scallywag. Nonetheless, we did not get out of this and other scandals lightly, because as the Conservative Central Office, and their chief dirty trickster at the time, Julian Lewis, managed to unleash a massive counter attack which became an onslaught and finally closed the magazine down. They did this by the simple expedient of issuing a writ to every small trader who stocked us, including, as it happened, an old soldier outside Westminster tube station who sold a thousand copies a week, mainly to MPs. They also sued the distributors and printers. This was the precedent started by John Major and it hurt. At this point, if you are trying to publish an alternative magazine, you come across the formidable establishment double-act of Smith's and Menzies.
They do have important high street retail sites, including airports and railway station but they also monopolise magazine wholesaling and distribution in the UK. If they refuse to handle you, you will have scant access to some 75% of the retail market and you have to rely on about two dozen cowboys who go in underneath the main two. We twice had wholesalers who, as soon as they owed us sufficient money, simply liquidated and started under a new name.
The Smith-Menzies monopoly is the main reason why Private Eye is a mere shadow of its old self. When Smith's agreed to handle the Eye they did so on the proviso that their own lawyers vetted each edition. That immediately gutted the whole concept of the paper, but it made them very rich indeed. While the early Private Eye was the epitome of the alternative press, it is now just another establishment organ and it has basically been bought off. That is a very great shame. Alternatives either get prosecuted out of existence, like Oz and ourselves, or they sell out and lose their integrity and vitality. Scallywag has been persecuted by just about every gagging clause open to the establishment and now I have discovered a new one. I "acquired" some computer discs which had been put out by Michael Portillo's office to be cleaned up. I was able to copy the contents on to my own computer. The Sunday Times heard about this and promptly sold me out to special branch. I was arrested and incarcerated in Belgravia police station. I have not yet been charged but if I am the charge will be that I "appropriated information for my own gain." Under section five of the Data Protection Act. This is an extraordinary new twist in censorship and it means that virtually any piece of information that might come a journalist's way might be subject to criminal proceedings if it does not actually belong to him. The implications are enormous and invidious. The "leak industry" which pervades both Parliament and Whitehall and from which most responsible newspapers get their best stories is now criminal and subject to six months imprisonment.
Over the years every one of our stories was well known to many journalists and in several cases the facts were supplied to us by senior lobby correspondents who could not get the story through their own lawyers. It was these same people who always denied they had a grudging respect for our devil-may-care attitude to the libel laws and knocked us whenever they had the chance. In the establishment that is the village of Westminster you don't queer your pitch or your contacts. ********
Almost every facet of the cash for questions debacle was in Scallywag three years ago. I don't claim that Scallywag itself came anywhere near to bringing down the government. They were two powerful for that, but we did create a great mood of doubt in the minds of both MPs and the press to whom we often sent complimentary copies.
One of the charges regularly laid against us is that we sat in the bath and dreamt up our stories. This was even from journalists who had supplied us with information in the beginning. This is preposterous and they know it. But when it comes to making things up, you only have to look at Wapping to find the real artists at work. In the hall tonight is former News of the World photographer Ian Cutler. As a result of his testimony we published a whole series of articles in which he gave chapter and verse that virtually every single one of the major exposes he was involved in were made up in the Printer's Pie at the top of Bouverie Street. For example, a whole series which was Murdoch-inspired concerning welfare scroungers consisted of NoW staffers bribing winos to pose outside social services offices. On another, alleging that the main HQ of the YMCA was a gay brothel, Cutler's pictures depicted three shots of the same paid-for model, wearing different clothes and hats.
Max Clifford admits he regularly makes up stories. In fact I like Max a lot and he has always been a keen Scallywag supporter. It was he, for example, who told us originally that Clare Latimer had been to see him trying to peddle her story and she had let it be known that the Prime Minister suffered from premature ejaculation. In short, they never actually made love because he couldn't manage it. It was a story that not even he could sell. Max is an alternative publicist who is essentially taking the piss. The same newspapers which queue at his door when they sniff he has a story, will admonish him the following week for being a liar. As they have consistently done with us.
But if you completely lose all distribution and run out of money, and are faced with a relentless tide of writs wherever you turn, then eventually you go out of business. At that stage virtually the only way you can keep your voice going is to go on the internet which we now are and sustain a surprising readership of some two thousand bites a day. For a while, before resorting to the net as a last resort, we managed to get some sponsorship from anti-government figures like Owen Oyston who is now unfortunately in prison for rape. Even they ran out and it was back to the Internet.
But apart from the fact that you never really know who your readers are and you cannot get a financial return, the Internet is also a very strange animal. It is by nature largely amateur open not only to much intellectual debate but also every nutcase who ever walked the planet. It has now become, however, one vast alternative medium, which is a healthy and welcome addition to our freedom of speech. It is still virtually untouched by the evil hand of censorship, although Julian Lewis and Tory Central Office are presently suing the server Demon over a story it carried for us concerning Julian Lewis. The outcome of this remains to be seen.
One last area where an alternative press has become incredibly important is political correctness. By and large we have fully supported the feminine movement as such. It needed to happen and much has been achieved. But a hard corps of rampageous feminists, most of them social misfits, has gone way over the mark to the point of absurdity. They had publishers cowering and forcing very good writers to re-write very good books to eliminate such mundane words as fat or small. They are busy re-writing history, the bible, Shakespeare, to say nothing of Enid Blyton and poor little Noddy. Someone had to stand up to it and we did with a column called The Monstrous Regiment. This column, which was pure satire and humour, caused more controversy than anything else we published. The people we satirised took it very seriously indeed and were completely unable to look at themselves objectively. Causing controversy by debate is the essence of the alternative press.
Anyway, as I dislike the whole concept of soundbites, I'm going to leave it at that unless there are any questions?
The CIA actually described the change as "Mission Unclear" and the hugely over-manned GCHQ at Cheltenham realised there was very little left to listen to. That is still the case.
Recent reports show the CIA is operating at an "impossibly low level of morale". And agents have descended into investigating each other. In England all the security services are now concentrating almost purely on terrorism and drugs. They have crossed the line into the conventional police forces.
At the same time the police are to be allowed, indeed encouraged, to step up all criminal surveillances with a free-for-all on bugging, even in doctor’s surgeries and at church confessions.
The combination of these two factors happening more at less at the same time has transformed the United Kingdom, virtually overnight, into a police state. The word "confidential" has now been all but eliminated from the English scene and language. There is now no such thing left. For any user of computer equipment systems of any kind, then be warned, any word you may communicate is now vulnerable.
In Scallywag’s case, for example - even before the new legislation comes into force - there are serious considerations to take into account. On "suspicion" of theft, all his computer equipment was confiscated, and every floppy disc taken into custody for analysis. There is, he believes, nothing on these which can lead to a criminal charge, but there was much information which he wrote in confidence.
For example, he has several daughters one of who was going through a teenage trauma while abroad. Scallywag wrote a lengthy personal letter, mainly of fatherly advice. There are also many letters of a legal nature concerning the several pieces of litigation which came his way, including actions he has himself activated against, among others, Julian Lewis. The seizing of his equipment with these documents gives the "other side" a clear view of strategies he might have employed.
Scallywag also had many parliamentary contacts who were quite legally keeping him informed of the goings on in Westminster. Some of these were from members of the shadow cabinet who naturally wrote in "complete confidence". It is a divine right, and a tested law, that a journalist may protect his sources and refuse to reveal names of those who keep him legally informed. This right has now been cruelly violated on a mere "suspicion." And this is before the right to bug indiscriminately becomes law.
It is mooted by the security forces that those of us who have nothing to fear because we live legal lives are protesting too much. But why should a laboratory technician hired by the police (incredibly the Metropolitan has no computers experts of their own) read Scallywag’s personal and private letters and have access to his private correspondence to his lawyer discussing his own legal strategy? Now it is not just doctors and priests who may be bugged, but solicitors too. This confiscates almost all proper legal rights to anyone to talk in confidence to anyone.
A very, very serious cloud is descending on this country which is already overloaded with gagging clauses which seriously threaten the myth of "freedom of the press" or even the freedom to hold personal views on controversial subjects.
It is a sad day.
Instead it was a bland, almost pathetic excuse for his sleaze activity without mentioning his clandestine sexual- political manipulations.
In this dubious self-aggrandising tome he takes Private Eye to task for not having the guts to call him a faggot. They referred, he said, to the fact that he had a live-in male 'companion', but did not go the "whole hog" and call him gay.
He refrained from saying that over a two-year period Scallywag had done so on many occasions. Although he has not ever come "out" in print, at least he is a not a hypocrite, like so many Tory gays. He was blatantly, almost gloriously, a raging poofta who wore make-up and regularly hosted notorious gay parties in which he dressed up in exotic silk clothes, sometimes of Eastern origin.
Not only that, he ran the world's most successful "boys for questions" agency to first woo and then exploit many of the hundred or so homosexuals on the Tory benches. (Source: Matthew Parris, himself a former Conservative MP, now a celebrated Times parliamentary columnist who has "come out" and has said in print that there were at least 100 gays in the parliamentary Tory party).
Greer's now scandalous Christmas parties were virtually all-male shindigs to which many of the gay MPs were invited to dance with a whole bevy of handpicked rent boys. But during the rest of the year he would also regularly throw wild and very exclusive gay parties for MPs, either at his elegant Pimlico flat, or at a suit his company hired permanently in Dolphin Square.
This only came to light when Scallywag and others obtained affidavits from young men who had been recruited from children's homes in North Wales - a sordid, ghastly, paedophile network which, after years of wild rumour and several successful prosecutions, is only just being fully investigated in a year-long judicial probe.
If the inquiries are allowed to go the whole way, then the path will lead directly to Pimlico where, we alleged, Lord McAlpine among many others, was a regular visitor. (See next item).
Apart from his live-in lover, the two of them enjoy the company of a raving queer butler and two highly active poodles.
Naturally, it is not known how many times Greer Associates exploited the situation when his guests got back to Parliament. The scam was that he charged his clients exorbitant fees to pay MP's but pocketed the money himself and paid out only the modest fees for rent boys.
When it was realised that a scorned Greer was about to publish his memoirs, many an MP had a few sleepless nights.
As we now know, they could have slept sweetly.
The other "boys for questions" sleaze artist, by coincidence also in residence at another Pimlico flat, was Derek Laud, then standing for parliament against Bernie Grant in North London. (See Portillo files). Laud, who ran the highly successful but deeply controversial Ludgate Communications, also has a live-in lover - but no butler. He prefers instead the affections of his chauffeur. And, of course, the regular friendship of the Defence Minister.
Laud was forced to pull out of the election when he was found guilty of drunken driving while on a clandestine trip to New England. He thought he had got off lightly when he was sentenced to 80 hours community service. But now the passengers in the other car are suing him for nine and a half million dollars and he has gone into hiding. Are his friends helping him?
Laud was a regular visitor to the Portillo household, especially to the private party to celebrate the return of Portillo and friends from Barbados. Michael Brown was one of the revellers in the West Indies and is an "outed" gay. He is also one of the three MPs being officially investigated by the cash-for-questions scandal inquiry into Neil Hamilton (the other is Tim Smith, another listed Portillo partygoer).
Other constant visitors to both men's male dens of iniquity were the many gay incumbents of Tory Central Office at Smith Square. They constitute a sort of glorious old schoolboys network. This naturally included Scallywag's most devoted fan, the ebullient Julian Lewis, now in parliament for the New Forest.
It fact, it is merely bitchy and it completely whitewashes the real truth about Tory finances when he was their fundraiser - and Thatcher's favourite Boy Scout. It is bitchy because McAlpine is a bitch.
It is only remarkable in what it does not reveal. One minute he is pouring scorn on Michael Heseltine, then claiming him as a friend. He refers to the fact that his wife nursed Heseltine at their opulent Venice home when Michael had his heart attack. What he does not reveal is that at the time of his demise, Heseltine was on the job with his titled long-time mistress who had to be hustled onto the next plane as Mrs Heseltine rushed from London. They must have passed mid-air. According to other pundits, Heseltine had gone out there to find out where the "missing millions" had gone from Tory party funds. Apparently they had one "hell of a row."
He bitchily has a go at Major for asking him to approach the dubious Greek shipping tycoon, John Latsis, who immediately signed a banking order for half a million pounds. He fails to mention that Thatcher had already stung the maverick millionaire for similar sums. And that he had fixed it.
A book like this had a golden opportunity to explain the "Missing Millions" once and for all. According to a wide- ranging investigation by Business Age, recently re- launched, the magazine alleged that at least £150 million were completely unaccounted for during the Thatcher years.
This is an allegation, which is widely accepted throughout parliament and led directly to the Nolan Report which heavily recommend that all parties should reveal the identities of their sponsors and the amount of their donations. Despite this wise suggestion, applauded by John Major himself, Tory Party finances are still a "bag of worms" (Guardian).
During her long and boring tenure in office, Margaret Thatcher, and her family, became very rich indeed. McAlpine himself lost millions (At least £120m) in an abortive scheme in Australia to build a sort of rich man's Disneyland.
All McAlpine had to do to sort out the widespread rumours was use this opportunity to explain exactly where the money went to.
Major, by the way, immediately announced that he never took part in any fund raising and let the CCO work entirely autonomously. This is claptrap. The Prime Minister, any Tory Prime Minister, is the de facto "chairman" of the CCO. It is entirely his tool. It is accountable to no one else, not even accountants, for they are not required under present law to present their accounts for any kind of proper perusal.
On charges that he is a paedophile there is not a word, except a mention by Lynn Barber in the Observer Review in which she had asked him why he had not sued us. He refused to comment, except to say that if she repeated the allegation, he would sue the Observer.
He dismisses, in the book and in subsequent interviews, the cabinet meeting in which Margaret Thatcher and the rest of her government considered the consequences to the Tory party if senior police investigations into the paedophile activities resulted in a prosecution. Thatcher herself decided he would have to go, and if he went quietly, they would say no more about the matter unless there was an arrest. It was that close.
When he slid away, breathlessly relieved at the close shave, to go abroad in voluntary exile for "tax reasons," the Tories were £10 m in debt. Yet he claimed he had raised £150 m for them. It literally doesn't add up.
After huge pressure, which has largely been executed in the media, former Minister of the Army, Nicholas Soames rose to tell parliament that..."well.....eh.......yes......it is true.....but no one told me about it. I agree it's a terrible thing, but I just didn't know."
Likewise, dithering Douglas Hogg, when asked why the damning abattoir report had not been published said smugly: "It was available to anyone who asked." He has not yet admitted that behind his back the civil servants, sensing scandal, had not only watered down the report, but clouded it in so much gobbledegook that it was virtually unreadable.
This was a carefully executed whitewash by the grey men of the ministry who could walk all over the former government's least credible minister: Little wonder they call him "Hogwash".
The chemical warfare was a ghastly scandal of the first magnitude. It should never have been allowed to happen in the first place and when it did, presumably without the Ministry of Defence knowing anything about it - and the Generals would have been responsible for that - it should have been admitted and dealt with as soon as it became clear.
Instead we had all sorts of curious reports of "Gulf War Syndrome" which became so widespread that it simply could not be ignored, quickly followed by strenuous denials, and silenced by the array of gagging notices available to the government and its servants.
And what about Michael Portillo, Minister of Defence at the time and Soames' boss? Why was he leaving his under- minister to take all the flack? Was he actually trying to tell us that the widespread use of toxic chemicals in a carefully orchestrated programme of chemical warfare - widely condemned in other countries by parliament - went completely unknown to the Ministry?
If he was trying to tell us that, then it is time ministers took the reins of power back from the mandarins for surely it is a clear indication that Whitehall has taken over and are wielding arbitrary power which is answerable to no one.
I think this is a far greater scandal that all the rest of the sleaze put together. "They" are controlling wide areas of power in which they seem to be making their own decisions and then putting into operation a cover up mechanism that they in turn also control.
In the pecking order of the senior civil service, every man, right to the very top, has an underling to guard his back - and to take the flack the other way when it hits the fan. But now the situation has become very, very unsatisfactory to the point of being dangerous for our health.
Since then, his shareholders and the banks have indulged him even when he made monumental mistakes. At least four times he has very nearly bankrupted News International and its satellites, yet always sprung back smiling. The last venture where he very nearly went to the wall was his acquisition of TV Guide and now he's doing it again with the US satellite station Echostar for $1 billion. Murdoch talks and thinks in billions these days and he has a long, almost incredible, lineage of survival.
But has he gone too far this time? Has he at last become truly megalomaniac and believes he is really the master of the universe? The City is coming to believe it. So am I, and I was once very close to his corporate thinking and am fully aware of his gambling instincts which have done him so well in the past. In fact, early on, I admired them for what they were. Scallywag always had a soft spot for mavericks, and original gamblers.
But, this time, he's betting more than his pot.
The Tories continue to whinge like little schoolboys about bias on the BBC and it is, of course, quite understandable. What has happened is that the Labour machine has caught up with the Tory machine when it comes to media manipulation. Only now has Labour actually created a department which monitors the media. Smith Square have been doing this for years and had a network of party faithful sitting up all night listening to such things as the World Service. All Labour ever did was listen to Radio Four on their way to the House and voice objections if they felt there had been an unfair report.
As Deputy Head of Research, this was often Julian Lewis’s task and he made a lucrative sideline out of the press, especially newspapers, by tipping off his pals. His rules were simple, tell the story his way and he would look after you. If you published any kind of article harmful to the party (unless he had himself leaked it) he would sulk and not talk to you for a month or two. He became so useful to the columnists and pundits of Wapping that they would often play the game. In turn he became rather powerful in Smith Square, enough, anyway, to ensure that he stayed on well after his sell-by date.
The Swiss banking system is obscene and always has been. In fact the Swiss are themselves rather obscene, although, according to Orson Welles, we can’t take the cuckoo clock away from them. There is reputed to be more dodgy money stored in their vaults than the entire wealth of the whole "third world" put together. That is most of Asia, Africa and South America. All of which have appalling poverty and starvation problems which could be easily alleviated by Swiss gold which is not needed, nor even wanted.
Scallywag once had dealings with a businessman who had a financial interest in a Swiss leisure complex outside Geneva. When the man investigated, he found the banks so willing and eager to give him money that they would charge only one percent interest on an unlimited loan over an unlimited period. They would, they explained, rather have the money being used in some way than simply sitting around.
He was astounded when they also agreed to the same terms on an investment in Belize, to buy up a significant section of primary rain forest to promote "jungle safaris" which had the backing of the World Wildlife Fund. All it needed was a letter of introduction from the Duke of Edinburgh.
Switzerland is so disgustingly rich in reserves that with just one per cent it could finance every programme presently initiated by Oxfam, and most of the other combined charities of that ilk. So a paltry three billion to try and soothe their guilty consciences, is not much of a problem.
The three billion, parliament was told, would also be available to others who they felt had been abused by Switzerland’s so-called neutrality during the war. There were, for example (Arnold Koller revealed) at least 40,000 refugees who were turned away at Swiss borders during the war and, as a consequence of this admitted "faint heartedness," faced almost certain death.
Not surprisingly the Swiss right-wing immediately protested and alleged the government had "lost its head." Somewhat more surprising was that Jonathan Lemberger, head of the Amcha group which helps Holocaust survivors in Israel, immediately jumped up to claim that all the money - the entire three billion - should go exclusively to Jewish victims of the Nazis. Basically, to Amcha.
Jewish holocaust victims who survived and now live in Israel number approximately 5,000, so he is advocating an average £600,000 each. While the holocaust experience cannot be priced in real terms, isn’t this obscenely greedy? Especially when at least an equivalent number of others suffered from Nazi persecution.
Gypsy activists throughout Central Europe, for example, are at this very moment vainly trying to raise money to at least put on record the abuses they received from the Nazis, including at least four million murdered in concentration camps.
The Holocaust simply was not exclusively Jewish and it is completely immoral for Jews to continue hijacking it unconditionally for themselves.
The youngest of the Israeli 5,000-odd survivors must now be in their mid-fifties. Most of them much older.
There are at least another billion souls in the rest of the world who will not be so lucky unless someone somewhere feeds, heals and cares for them.
But the gypsy question is one the Jews simply never consider. The Holocaust for Romanies just didn’t happen and, of course, few gypsies rarely had any real possessions to speak of. Except gold. Money was gold to any gypsy community, and consequently they kept their gold reserves in their mouths. This is not a Jewish habit. Yet it is a well known fact that the Nazis wrenched the gold teeth out of the bodies they had so cruelly incinerated.
Who did the teeth belong to?
First of all, he insulted the good jam-makers flower-arrangers, and faithful party workers of Lymington and environs by ignoring their offers to get on the campaign trail for him in what has hitherto been a safe Tory seat - by importing busloads of right-wingers from Norris Mcwhirter's quasi-Fascist "Freedom" Association.
The bright young, pink-faced platoons were picked up early in the morning at Smith Square to be driven by luxury coach (hostess and bar on board) down to Hampshire where they were wined and dined lavishly between door knocking. The good doctor always does things in style.
The cost per trip was £500 at the very least which, of course, came out of his fixed election expense budget of £6,000. He committed himself to spending at least the full sum on his "little boys".
The fact that eccentric right-winger McWhirter was picking up the tabs did not mean it must not be declared. McWhirter made Julian's acquaintance when the latter was waging a one- man war against the CND. At that stage he was being financed by the Heritage Foundation of Washington, which uses CIA funds to back any foreign cause which witch-hunts "pinkos".
Guardian columnist Matthew Norman made great play of the fact that the campaign song, played constantly on the bus, is Rolf Harris's "Two Little Boys". I wonder how Matthew got it through the lawyers. At any rate, the Guardian couldn't confirm it because Julian steadfastly refuses to talk to Norman any more. Julian got miffed when Matthew suggested that Lewis did not actually exist but was merely a voice on the answer phone.
Secondly, completely misreading vociferous local feelings, he was innocently telling his potential constituents that he was all for "expanding the tourist industry in the New Forest".
As it happens, for some time now, the good and faithful electorate of the famous forest is battling to keep tourists out because they say the millions of visitors already rampaging down there are completely destroying the environment. Julian would have done much better if he had suggested that the whole constituency should become a ghetto for the retired middle classes and that, instead of the horse grids guarding roads, there should be a system of electric wire fences to keep the grockles out.
Alas, he did not do his homework.
Thirdly, the party hierarchy there is a bit confused by Julian's constant, almost frantic, assertions that he is a full-blooded heterosexual. Despite the constant allegations from yours truly that he was a hypocritical closet gay, they were more than willing to believe him when he turned up at the selection meeting with his "fiancée", a lady he had "borrowed" from Smith Square and who was game enough a true blue to go along with the subterfuge - for one day only. Once he had been selected she made herself very scarce and told friends at a North Street dinner party a few days later that she had found Julian "vaguely revolting."
At least she is unlikely to kiss and tell, unlike the girls from the escort agency in Mayfair who he took down while wooing the local big wigs.
Julian couldn't wait to call the Press Association with the news that he had won a libel action "against Scallywag". We were mildly surprised by this on the grounds that, even though we had honoured him with the world's longest continuing libel (we published a single sentence that included 1,200 positive libels), we had never actually received a writ.
His statement was not actually a lie, but it was highly misleading. At the very height of his campaign against us, he had issued some 20 writs to any soft target he could find. These mainly included independent distributors but also some corner-shop distributors.
Three of the distributors - without even consulting me as to a possible defence - had caved in rather than face lengthy and expensive litigation. This is a great shame for, if they had pursued to the courts, Julian himself could not possibly afford to continue. Especially as he has always maintained that he "could not lose" because if the jury found against him he would merely declare himself bankrupt.
As a bankrupt, of course, he could not stand for parliament.
It might have been a fitting end to the matter for the CCO will certainly never let him back in - especially as he left Smith Square and promptly leaked very sensitive information to two of his cronies in the "quality" press.
Scallywag was invited to give a talk on the Alternative Press to a seminar at London University and, when it came to question time, an unruly gatecrasher interrupted proceedings rudely and introduced himself as Julian Lewis. He had two ladies with him. One purported to be his former fiancée who proceeded to use the aisle as a catwalk and said: "You would not call me a whore would you. I can assure you Dr Lewis is a full-blooded heterosexual." Whereupon former News of the World photographer Ian Cutler got up to say: "I have been in nearly every brothel in London and you look very familiar to me." Undaunted, another lady got up and said she was the "blue rinse brigade you are always talking about and I know very well that Dr, Lewis is not gay." Julian then got so unruly that the university security was called and they evicted him bodily.
The title is pompous and so is Captain Baker. So are the other reviews about him by other Naval officers in the Daily Telegraph. So, obviously, was the Admiralty when it admonished him for what amounted to insubordination. Baker came from a long line of captains imbued in naval traditions and the all-embracing, unquestionable, power of the Admiralty. All the more surprising, then that this feisty, ambitious and hitherto well-thought of young officer should have not only stood in the face of traditional admiralty thinking - when he thought it was manifestly wrong - but now published a complete justification for doing so.
He knew his career was over when he got the customary signal saying "you have incurred our displeasure" which never goes on the record but whips like wildfire among the admirals.
Captaining the only British ship in South Atlantic waters - the Endurance, an Antarctic Ice Patrol vessel with a single helicopter and some marines to protect it - his force was the only indication of British power in Falklands waters. When he heard the ship was to be decommissioned he expressed his dismay in no uncertain terms and told the gray beards at home that if the ship left the Argentineans would believe that Britain had no further interest in the area. His only ally was the military attaché in the British Embassy in Buenos Aires, a sort of link man between the defence ministry and the Foreign Office.
The attaché warned that he had clearly detected a build-up of Argentinean forces and a political will to invade. Baker also realised this by being an astute observer of what he considered to be his only potential enemy. He also found out that the Argentineans had landed a force on South Georgia which was supported by a submarine as a pre-emptive move before invasion.
What he found, in effect, was that under Thatcher, the British Government were spoiling for a fight, and so was the navy. It would, by definition, be an Admiralty war and no one in Whitehall didn't relish it. So his, and the attaché's voices, first fell on deaf ears, and then they were simply told to shut up. Baker did not and made the cardinal mistake of airing his views during an interview with the BBC.
It is now obvious that people like Baker had warned the Admiralty and the FO of the impending invasion, but that no steps were taken to either prevent it or create a defending force in Port Stanley which would almost certainly have given Galtiery second thoughts.
It was, in effect, a victorious war - just what Whitehall and Westminster wanted - but it was almost completely unnecessary - and a scandalous and monumental waste of public funds, resources and human lives.
Meanwhile, Nicholas Baker is definitely not welcome at the Army and Navy club.
Whenever I can afford to get away for a month or two I exile myself to a converted slum in the gypsy quarter of a small Andalucian town, where my modest but entirely adequate casa both squats and straddles a ridge below a Moorish Castle on the top of a hill. My neighbours; horse traders, tinkers, thieves, layabouts, iron mongers and breeders of fighting cocks, spend their days as fugitives, or gossiping about their trades and families; flirting, adding rocks to the piece of scrubland they are trying to steal, sitting in the shade smoking pencil-thin joints, or merely gazing at the horizons on both sides and dreaming of escape.
In the evenings there is always the deep and resonant strain of Flamenco coming from radios in the dark depths of their hovels. There is the robust sound and smell of meals being prepared as the men sit outside in the dusk idly whittling. From time to time, for no reason at all, the women will light some twigs in an upturned dustbin lid and others will collect for a juerga, a gitana spree. In this town Flamenco is compulsive and based entirely on clapping, stamping, percussion and singing, for there are no guitars and no one outside a nightclub plays Flamenco with castanets. But I guarantee that the kid with his back-side hanging out of his pants can make more music out of hitting the wall with a plastic bottle than Buddy Rich at his best.
My neighbours all know that "out there" is Spain. They know this because their mother's cousin lives in Huelva, and her uncle is a waiter in Barcelona. They know that "down there" there is Malaga because they can watch the little train wend its way down the valley to the Moorish town and many from the community have gone there to find various opportunities. But most of their vision and interest is limited to the countryside they can see.
Manuel the Horse Trader, head of this particular clan and revered by his immediate family, can tell you the names and even the dates of birth of even the remotest new edition to the family, and where they live and what their aspirations are. His youngest son, Monolo, had forgotten more about horseflesh by the time he was five, than a champion jockey in full flight. Don Manuel might just know who the Mayor of the town is, but he wouldn't have the slightest knowledge of the President of the country, and nor could he care less. Madrid is a million miles away. Manuel, despite his illiteracy is an intelligent man, a family administrator, a dealer of dexterity and wiser than any old owl. But his horizons are strictly limited.
So, into this scenario from time to time, for periods of up to six months, I arrive clutching as many papers, magazines and "books I must read" as I can carry - along with my lap top and mini printer. And set up home. Pepe is always glad to see me and so are the cats. Pepe waters my garden and feeds my wild gypsy cats while I am away. If I ask him for the news, he'll bring me up to date on who has gone to prison, who's had a baby, that there will be two confirmations next week and that the 82-year-old crone down the hill who I call Mama Garcia, has been done on a drugs bust. Two kilos of cocaine. She would have gone down for a long time but her advance age saved her. Pepe knew, and so did the police, that she was harbouring the stuff for her grandson, who was the area's main dealer.
All good, gossipy village stuff which will be forgotten tomorrow as other small dramas continue to unfold. Pepe is bright but by no means deep in intelligence of any kind. He watches quite enthralled as I set up the computer and attach it to the 'phone for the Internet. He is not willing or able to use the phone. He can master switching on a television and a radio, but everything beyond that gets into advanced and incomprehensible science. Outside the perimeters of the quarter, he can talk to me about football or bullfighting, at length and with some profound knowledge. But if I was to ask him what he felt about Bosnia, or the EU, or even the pledge by the Spanish government to change the infrastructure of Andalucia, he would grin sheepishly, glaze over, shrug his shoulders and mumble about the madness of the "outside" world.
At first, and I can't help it, I struggle to locate the BBC World Service and I ration myself to half an hour's reading of the old newspapers and magazines every day with my morning cafe-con- cognac. For the first week I religiously check the "e" mail. It takes a full week to acclimatise myself to the new regimen. But then gradually, without me actually noticing, it becomes less and less important until all the newspapers and magazines have become too well thumbed to read, it is too difficult to find the World Service, and I simply forget to switch on the computer. Then, gradually, the rest of the world recedes until, like Pepe, my horizons run along the river valley to Malaga and whatever is going on "out there" becomes completely irrelevant.
If I am in Spain next May, I will inevitably forget that there is an election in Britain and even if I someone reminds me I won't bother about it until mañana. I might have enough curiosity to find out who won. But it simply won't really matter, and that is the ultimate indulgent bliss. To just not care, and to do that, you seriously have to re-train yourself to just walk away from it.
What it has taught me is that we are obsessed with an acute and compulsive news habit in England, in which most of us need the daily injection, and, because world events are serialised in a news format, evolving with each new, sometimes hourly, chapter, we become hooked. If you can wean yourself off it you begin to wonder what the hell any of it matters anyway. And, like drugs, how infinitely better off without it you really are. Even if the world were to blow itself up, it would do so whether you knew anything about it or not.
Things like bickering in parliament, although I clearly have a vested interest, become so mundane if you refuse to listen to it and then happen to come across it by chance. If you are remote from, say a tube strike in London, it is utterly irrelevant, and you are just mildly glad you are not there. Much like, while the tube strike is going on, it will create huge yawns to a Londoner if there is a serious flood in Bangladesh in which 600 have died and thousands have been made homeless. Especially if you are stuck in a tunnel.
I confess also, that the mañana syndrome also comes into it after a while. When you first experience Andalucia, it can get you hopping around with anger and frustration when you have no water and the plumber is coming mañana, which could mean that afternoon or next month or perhaps never at all. Mañana is merely a good intention, but never a promise. It gives you and excuse to go down to the square to see old Andre and chew the fat about whether Ubrique is really as good as Manolete, as they are saying. Then you can collect water from the well, as they did for so many centuries before civilisation crept into the slums of Andalucia.
Soon, though you are yourself subject to the whole philosophy of mañana and you get to realise it is entirely logical to always put off 'till tomorrow what you could do today. Once you submit to it, it becomes the ultimate pleasure and luxury. You can wallow in it; shrug lazily and just pour the next ice-cold sangria, prepared and imbibed with loving care, and go back to the hazy mists of the horizon. In fact once you have conquered mañana, the only real trauma is when you have to ignore it - like when catching a plane. I now need at least three days to gently psyche myself up to keep any important date.
In mañana mood recently, I was amused to read a MORI poll, which listed the top ten things, which drove us crazy as a nation. Junk mail, telephone queuing, motorway madness, supermarket trolley jams, and so on. All ten were virtual inventions of the past two decades and all of them were originally designed to make our lives easier not more traumatic. All of them regularly make me neurotic and I could add at least another ten, including the little bitch in my laptop that gets capricious whenever she knows I really need her.
But do I ever really need her? My old war-horse, the Hermes Ambassador typewriter, who stood me in good stead for a quarter of a century and looked after me through every kind of social, personal and financial trauma, was always more than sufficient to provide me with a varied living. But, equally, it would have been impossible to have survived without a telephone. Or, say, transport of some kind.
Yet all we really need to survive is shelter, shade in the summer, heat in the winter, food and water, some clothes, the chance to procreate, and the basic implements to facilitate the above. That, by and large, is all my neighbours have in Alora. Although because of state benefits they now enjoy a chance of education, electricity, and survival handouts - even eliminating our own problem - the absolute need to earn a living to pay for everything we think we need.
I suppose everyone has the romantic desert island dream at some stage, but most dismiss it as being completely impractical, which of course it is, unless you are very rich like Richard Branson and can create your own private paradise. Yet living very simply is not at all impractical or even difficult. It is just a matter of philosophy. Laced perhaps with a carefully self-taught talent to allow most of the rest of the world to simply pass you by.
Now I hear, I confess with some real pleasure, that because of original computer timing mechanisms the Millennium is going to be a Doomsday which will cost the world three or four trillion to put right. A simple human error of planning which will basically screw up anything which, and everyone who is dependent on computer systems. Including banks, airlines, the entire defence mechanisms, all modern communications and, I hope things like digital television - another potential 'labour saving' device which, believe you me, will join the list of "world's greatest traumas" only a few months after it becomes operational. What a headache if you are dependent on all of this. What a supreme joy to merely walk away from it and just not give a damn.
The whole amazing computer quandary will only be welcome to the vast computer industry and, I presume, lawyers. Because of this I am fairly sure it was all planned. I mean, in modern technology, people like Bill Gates have always been successfully hell-bent on producing systems which will be redundant before you can even install them. This is why he is sitting there wallowing in obscene wealth - because we all fell for it. And now we are caught in its vile worldwide tentacles.
It would at least be logical to think that the grandfathers of the systems knew exactly what they were doing: that there would be a huge new problem to surmount at the turn of the century. They couldn't have been that stupid.
And, seriously, is the might, enormous wealth, formidable brain-power and massive man-power behind the multi-billion dollar industry seriously telling us it is unable to solve this problem within three years? Well, of course it is. It is very much within their interests to do so. Most of that three trillion will go their way.
When I read about it, however, I smiled smugly to myself and then shrugged for I know that on the millisecond of the Millennium, I shall be sitting on my balcony with Pepe, his family and my other neighbours. I shall be listening to the ancient chimes of the church clock below; and the gentle strains of guitars; supping jugs of a Soberano-based punch; warming my hands on a gypsy fire, and toasting the catastrophe which will be at least a million miles away from all of us.
I can also be sure that, in Alora at least, the sun always rises, mañana.