by antiaristo » Wed Feb 01, 2006 2:09 pm
<!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr><!--EZCODE FONT START--><span style="font-size:small;">Thatcher faced disaster over son's business dealings</span><!--EZCODE FONT END--> <br><br>· Oman contract could have forced resignation <br>· Labour failed to press home its attack<br><br>Read the documents here: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 <br><br>David Leigh and Rob Evans<br>Wednesday February 1, 2006<br>The Guardian <br><br><br>Margaret Thatcher was poised to make a remarkable admission about a financial scandal involving her son which might have led to her early resignation, documents have revealed.<br>But the former prime minister never had to make the statement to the House of Commons because <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Labour failed to press home its attack over the issue.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br><br>The undelivered speech focuses on the conduct of her son, Mark, during the Oman affair, a controversy concerning his secret financial links which dogged her premiership in the mid-1980s.<br><br>Politicians from that era say that had she made those disclosures at the time she might have been forced to resign midway through her 11-year premiership.<br><br>Inside No 10 she drafted a statement disclosing a conflict of interest over a construction deal she promoted in the Gulf state of Oman. Her son was secretly paid by the firm which got the £216m contract.<br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Yet because the Labour frontbench let go their attack, the prime minister was never obliged to tell parliament</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END-->. The scandal died away and she remained safe. Her undelivered draft remained a secret in a Whitehall dossier, until it was released to the Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act.<br><br>In the unpublished draft she admits she should not have allowed Mark to follow her around the world profiting from a British prime minister's relationships with foreign rulers. She also admits she knew that, during her official sales trip to Oman in 1981, her son was in the pay of the construction firm Cementation.<br><br>She wrote: "My son ... had a minor involvement in Cementation's efforts to obtain the university contract ... I knew ... the parent company of Cementation was one of several companies with which my son had a connection."<br><br>She also admitted that the Thatcher family deliberately kept Mark's financial interests secret. She treated her son's "business relationships" as confidential.<br><br>After inspecting the documents, one former Thatcher Foreign Office minister told the Guardian: "If [she] had declared she knew her son had a commercial interest [while visiting Oman], then I think she ... could have been forced to resign."<br><br>Lord Campbell-Savours, who as a Labour backbencher harried her over the Oman deal, recalled: "I was told by someone who knew that she considered resigning over this." She had "told cabinet members" about it.<br><br>The former chairman of the Commons public accounts committee, the Labour MP Alan Williams, said: "There would have been a major row ... it would have done her enormous damage."<br><br>The draft in the Downing St files is undated but internal evidence places it in March 1984, when the Oman furore was at its height after revelations in the Observer of Mark's secret business links. A confidential cable asks the British ambassador to assure the Sultan of Oman that "the prime minister has no present intention of using the statement and hopes that it will not be necessary to do so". The draft is heavily annotated in the handwriting of <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Robin Butler, then her private secretary, now Lord Butler of Brockwell</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END-->. He appears to have helped her in the drafting of the more awkward passages.<br><br>Mrs Thatcher tries to portray herself as an innocent who urged the sultan to buy British but was in the dark about her son's activities. "My son is over 30 and leads his own life. He is under no obligation to reveal to me ... his personal or business affairs." <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Mark lived at No 10 at the time.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br><br>The sultan invited Mark to join her party and she says she was surprised when the sultan offered "in confidence" to hand the entire contract immediately to the firm her son represented, with no competitive bidding. The Foreign Office said the sultan appeared to have awarded the contract purely as a "political gesture".<br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>According to the papers, Mrs Thatcher concealed the sultan's private deal from her party</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END-->, which included the ambassador, Ivor Lucas; when the latter found out about the contract he was puzzled, pointing out in a confidential telegram that a firm linked to Mark Thatcher had unexpectedly "scooped the jackpot". In London, Mrs Thatcher demanded that British officials provide unpublicised favours - from the taxpayer - to sweeten the Cementation deal. <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>These included British troops at cheap rates to prop up the sultan, increased overseas aid to Oman, and pressure on a reluctant Treasury to grant soft loans to finance the contract.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br><br>Officials stressed that ministers had ruled that countries had to pay for military advisers in full. Mrs Thatcher scrawled on the minute: "I thoroughly disagree. This approach does us immense harm. These people are our true friends and we treat them badly by [such] trifling matters."<br><br>To get the "soft loan", Cementation executives pressured the department of trade. The DTI told the Treasury that Mrs Thatcher wished "to be informed" of the deal's progress. The Foreign Office noted her "strong interest in the project".<br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>The decision that taxpayers should underwrite the loans was concealed from parliament, as was the financial interest of Mark Thatcher</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END-->. Mark Hollingsworth, Mark's biographer, said last night: "The information in these documents is extremely startling. If these facts had emerged at the time, the resulting scandal could well have swept her away."<br><br>A spokeswoman for her office said yesterday: "She does not comment on the release of papers under the Freedom of Information Act."<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/freedom/Story/0,,1699314,00.html">www.guardian.co.uk/freedo...14,00.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>Lord Kinnock, leader of Labour at the time, will no doubt be seeking to help Gordon Brown assume the position when Blair is drummed out. I did not know that he had been so corrupt, for so long.<br><br>Robin Butler is the author of the Butler Report on the missing WMD. <p></p><i></i>
