Written by Loretta Vendetta
Published in The Guardian 5th November 1994:
Ever since District Auditor John Magill announced his provisional view that she was one of the Westminster gerrymanderers, Dame Shirley Porter has protested her innocence. She has protested it from her second home in Tel Aviv, from her holiday home in Florida, and through her long-serving adviser and mouthpiece, Roger Rosewell, a former Trotskyist turned Mail On Sunday leader writer. She has protested it via Anthony Scrivener QC and his team, whose services are thought likely to cost the Tesco heiress around a quarter of a million pounds. Eventually, the former leader of the Conservative 'flagship' local authority protested it from the steps of the council building in Marylebone Road where her writ once ran with the zeal of the dedicated Thatcherite, where the hearings into Magill's provisional findings are in progress and where Porter's response to the criticisms made by Magill will, from Monday, at long last begin to be made.
For five years - ever since Panorama rooted out the first evidence that she was intent on fixing the borough's electoral demographics to secure her party's hold on power following its hair's breadth victory over Labour in 1986 - Porter has been protesting that she and her Conservative colleagues did nothing wrong. But documents from the Westminster filing cabinets, which have now been made public at the hearings, suggest she and various associates may have many more years of protesting ahead.
