SCANDAL

In British terms, Martin Bell is a reliable mix of Dan Rather and Edward R. Murrow, In his trademark white suit with optional flak jacket, he has brought the war zones of the world into the living rooms of the BBC-TV audience for more than 20 years. And now it is hard to understand the British general election, to be held May 1, without him.

Not that he is covering it. He has left his BBC job to run as an independent anti-corruption candidate, against an incumbent Conservative MP and former minister, Neil Hamilton. The other two parties, Labor and Liberal-Democrat, have backed Bell’s apolitical race, and the latest opinion poll in the comfortable constituency of Tratton gives him 71%.

Hamilton is not the only man who has helped transform the British election of 1997 into the sleaze campaign, though he had the honor of an entire front page of a national newspaper to himself, with the headline “A Liar and A Cheat.”

All this goes back to one of London’s most familiar landmarks, the grand old department store of Harrod’s and its colorful owner, Mohamed al Fayed. His purchase of the store, in the teeth of opposition from a rival company that also happened to own a prominent newspaper, provoked huge controversy--nationalist complaints about this Egyptian-born interloper buying up the English heritage and government inquiries into whether he had been entirely frank about the sources of his investment.

To protect himself and his interests, and later to try and secure British citizenship, Fayed hired a prominent public-relations consultant and parliamentary lobbyist, Ian Greer. Half of the public storm that has ensued comes from British shock that the Mother of Parliaments has proved almost as receptive to the blandishments of lobbyists as the U.S. Congress. Of course, British prices are lower.

Greer kept a number of MPs on his books, not difficult, when their salaries were less then $50,000 a year, among the lowest in the Western world. One was Hamilton, junior minister for corporate affairs in the Department of Trade and Industry, the very government agency that launched the inquiry into Fayed’s fitness to sell goods to the British gentry who patronized Harrod’s.

Hamilton admits getting $1,500 of garden furniture and another $1,000 in antiques from Greer, and more than $9,000 in cash for his political work on the Tobacco Products Act of 1989. Greer had been retained by U.S. Tobacco. Hamilton did not tell the health ministers whom he was lobbying that he was being paid by U.S. Tobacco, nor list this on the Register of Interests.

“We were wrong. And now I bitterly regret that we did not register it,” he told the inquiry, and also apologized for not telling ministers of his interest.

Hamilton also admits taking 10,000 pounds (about $16,000) and free holidays with his wife at the luxurious Ritz Hotel in Paris, which Fayed also owns. “It seemed to me no different from staying at a rich man’s house,” Hamilton later explained to the official inquiry.

Iris Bond, Fayed’s secretary, told the official inquiry: “Fayed would say, ‘Oh, Hamilton is coming up. I must give him some money.’ And he would take a wad, one wad, which would be 2,500 pounds (about $3,800), hurriedly put it in an envelope and say: ‘Here, this is for him.’ He never made any secret of the fact that he was giving Neil Hamilton money.”

Although Hamilton denies taking the cash in return for political favors, he put down questions in Parliament and went to meetings with ministers about Fayed’s difficulties; initiated and signed parliamentary motions on his behalf, and wrote letters supporting “one of the world’s most significant businessmen.”

None of this is illegal. MPs are entitled to outside earnings, as long as they list them in Parliament’s Register of Interests, which Hamilton neglected to do. He also neglected, until the affair surfaced, to list the payments with the tax authorities. He also denied to the deputy leader of his party having any “financial relationship” with Greer.

Protesting his innocence, he sought and obtained special leave from Parliament to bring a libel suit against the Guardian newspaper for its allegations against him. When he dropped that case, in the face of overwhelming evidence, the paper responded with its “Liar” front page.

The report of the official judicial inquiry into the matter by Sir Gordon Downey, the parliamentary commissioner, has yet to be published, because Prime Minister John Major announced the start of the election campaign just in time to pre-empt it. But Bell’s anti-corruption candidacy means the issue will not go away--to the delight of the opposition parties. All this is being cheered on by a vengeful Fayed, who reckoned he got neither value nor gratitude from the Tory MPs. They took his money, but did not give him the British passport he craved.

“I don’t care how much this costs me,” he declared as the campaign opened. “I am proud to have exposed this bunch of liars, shirt-lifters and crooks. They would sell their mothers.” So far, he has secured the resignations of one Cabinet minister, three junior ministers and broken the reputations of two Tory MPs.

Note that colorful but enigmatic phrase “shirt-lifters.” It is upper-class British slang for homosexuals. And while there is no suggestion that the happily married Hamilton is anything but straight, Fayed was gleefully reminding British voters of all the spicy sexual scandals that have plagued the Conservative government, despite its pious calls for “Back to Basics” family values.

There was Stephen Milligan, the Tory MP found dead in his apartment, dressed in women’s underwear with an orange in his mouth and a noose round his neck. There was Sports Minister David Mellor, who resigned after his mistress revealed that he liked to wear the shorts and jersey of the Chelsea football club under the gray suit he wore to Parliament--and during their dalliances.

The checkbooks of the tabloid press ensured that political seasons were punctuated with the confessions of rent boys, good-time girls, outraged wives and pregnant mistresses, and the embarrassed comments of government colleagues.

“Out Yeo go, you dirty so-and-so,” trumpeted the front page of Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid, the Sun, when environment minister Tim Yeo confessed to impregnating a Conservative counselor at the party conference, having fathered another love child some years earlier.

“This is a sleazy, dishonest administration led by a political pygmy,” wrote the Sun, before turning its attention to the Tory MP in the adjoining constituency, Richard Spring, for a juicy three-in-a-bed scandal.

“Clearly, the Tories are the most evil, greedy, lust-crazed humans on the planet,” said TV talk-show host Jonathan Ross, in a characteristic summary of the current political debate in placid Olde Englande.

All this has left little room for comment on what should be the real political outrages of the government. Even scandal-hardened veterans of the Clinton administration whistled in disbelief to learn that Her Majesty’s last foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, had gone directly from dealing with the Balkan crisis to a top $400,000-a-year banking job--where his first big client was Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia.

Hurd secured the contract to manage the privatization of the country’s post and telecommunications system, which should be worth $10 million in fees, and another to advise Serbia on managing its international debts. Joining Hurd at the bank, and helping to secure the contract to advise Serbia on financial matters, was Paula Neville-Jones, his former political director at the Foreign Office who represented Britain at the Dayton peace talks on Bosnia’s fate. Since there was no sex involved, few in Britain seemed to care.

It is remarkable to observe the way that the traditional high politics of grand issues--like the state of the economy, the European single currency or the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization--have been replaced by the low politics of sleaze and scandal. It points to the way the tabloid agenda has overwhelmed the usual high-minded concerns of the serious media, the way in which BBC war correspondent Bell has turned from the high drama of the battlefield to the low comedy of Hamilton’s cash-stuffed envelopes.

In the past, when British elections hinged on the doings of foreigners, they were figures like Adolf Hitler and Leonid I. Brezhnev, on Kaiser Wilhelm II or the Argentine generals who invaded the Falklands Islands. In a curious way, it is good news that the first British general election since the 1920s to take place in conditions of peace and prosperity owe quite so much to a cosmopolitan shopkeeper named Fayed.