Alan Watkins: Why Christine Hamilton deserves a medal

The second most famous former pupil of my old school is Mr Neil Hamilton. The most famous is or, at any rate, used to be Donald ("By a babbling brook") Peers, the Tom Jones of his day. On the whole, however, we are a self-effacing lot, numbering among ourselves at least one other MP who, like Mr Hamilton, departed the House in sad but less spectacular circumstances, Dr Roger Thomas; several notable rugby players; numerous learned professors; an abundance of college lecturers; and countless schoolteachers.

I mention this because, in all the reams of paper that have been devoted to Mr Hamilton and his wife, hardly anyone has thought it worth mentioning that he was brought up in Ammanford, Carmarthenshire, where he attended the local grammar school. From there he went on to the University of Wales at Aberystwyth (Economics) and thence to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (Law).

This could not have been an easy progress 30-odd years ago, even for someone whose father was as prosperous and well established as Mr Hamilton's. He was not a native of the area but had migrated from Monmouthshire to assume the post of chief engineer for the coal board, a position previously held by Lord Richard's father. There are six near-contemporary politicians who were all brought up within a short, narrow coastal strip of South-west Wales, from Carmarthen in the west to Aberavon in the east: Denzil Davies, Neil Hamilton, Michael Heseltine, Michael Howard, Geoffrey Howe and Ivor Richard. And they all speak differently. True, Mr Heseltine, Lord Howe and Lord Richard were sent away to school. But that cannot account for the variations in the speech of the other three. It goes to show that Welsh people cannot be stereotyped as they tend to be, perhaps to a greater extent than natives of other countries are.

Mr Hamilton was called to the Bar at the comparatively advanced age of 30. He was four years older when he married Christine Holman, a Commons secretary. This happened during the election campaign of 1983, when Mr Hamilton won Tatton. They had first met in student politics, and married after an interrupted courtship. Mrs Hamilton was quoted on a previous occasion as saying that her function was to inject some vim, zip, drive and initiative into her husband, who would otherwise have been a perpetual student. And indeed – to indulge in some generalising of my own – there is a tendency for people from Mr Hamilton's part of the world to put things off, to find excuses for inaction. A favourite formulation is: "I'll do it fory," fory being a contraction of yfory, or "tomorrow", further defined as "like mañana, but without the same sense of urgency". It is, however, worth pointing out that Mr Hamilton was one of the best speakers of the post-1983 generation.

Mrs Hamilton is from Hampshire and not like him. Indeed, anyone who can shop in the afternoon, go to a drinks party at Claridge's and then prepare dinner for six, as she claims to have done on the evening in question, deserves the Shirley Conran Memorial Medal. In similar circumstances I should have been sweating over a hot stove for hours beforehand. What surprises me even more than Mrs Hamilton's domestic agility is that she and her husband did not seem to remember the trip to Claridge's when they first put forward their alibi. This referred only to the dinner party at their Battersea flat and, in ironic mode, to the difficulty of making a journey by helicopter from Battersea to Ilford and back in the time available.

Whether the Hamiltons were wise to make these and other claims is disputed. We have long had "constitutional experts" who are wheeled on to our screens whenever there is anything about the royal family. We now, God help us, have "experts on media law" who turn out to be lugubrious characters I have never heard of. The consensus, supported by the ubiquitous Mr Max Clifford, was that the Hamiltons would have been better advised to keep their heads down and say as little as possible.

I am not so sure about that. In fact I tend to agree with Lord Harris of High Cross, a friend of theirs, who said they were perfectly entitled to defend themselves. After all, it was the police who made the first move. It was chance that supplied Mr Louis Theroux's cameras. He happened to be making a programme about the couple. The Hamiltons' private camera team – or so it must have appeared – clearly discomposed the constabulary. But the various television cameras were out in force as well. Who tipped them off to be at Barkingside police station on time? Was it the police? Or Mr Clifford?

The other woman involved besides Mrs Hamilton has to go by the name of Miss A, or whatever, because of the Criminal Justice Act 1988. This measure persisted with the anonymity of the woman in a rape case which had been established by the Sexual Offences Act 1976. The 1976 Act had also established the anonymity of the alleged rapist. The latter was withdrawn by the 1988 Act; while the anonymity of the victim was continued. It would clearly be better to revert to the position in 1976–88, when both accuser and accused were given anonymity.

Mr Clifford's position was put most clearly in The Spectator: "He met the woman and her uncle on 2 May, when they came to London to tell him about an alleged sex story involving the Hamiltons – not the one now on the police files. Clifford asked the woman if she had proof. She said she would provide the proof. Four days later the woman rang Clifford with a new story: she had been raped. 'I told her to go to the police because this was an entirely different matter and she said she had already been to the police and that they were investigating. And that was the sum total of my involvement.'"

This resolves, up to a point, the discrepancy in Mr Clifford's evidence to various television cameras last week. He started the week by saying merely that he had sent Miss A to the police – much as the Hamiltons began by mentioning the dinner party but not the drinks at Claridge's beforehand. So now we have two stories: one about what our great papers call "sex romps" and the other about a rape.

The papers are split: the Telegraph and the Mail titles on the Hamiltons' side, The Sun and The Guardian against them. The most tendentious in its reporting has been The Guardian. C P Scott, Alastair Hetherington and its greatest editor, A P Wadsworth, would have been ashamed. The Sun has been more circumspect. Even so, our contempt of court laws are now being flouted daily. It is clearly time for the new Attorney, Lord Goldsmith, to take a hand.