Sir Gordon Downey, who has died aged 93, leaves a substantial legacy of parliamentary and government scrutiny. In the 1980s this quiet civil servant created the modern National Audit Office (NAO), and in the following decade investigated major political scandals as parliamentary standards commissioner, among them the “cash for questions” affair, initiated by the Guardian. In this, he found “compelling evidence” that the MP Neil Hamilton accepted cash for lobbying from the former Harrods owner Mohamed Al Fayed.
The matter came to light when Fayed told the editor of the Guardian, Peter Preston, in an aside that he had to pay two Conservative MPs, then junior ministers, Hamilton and Tim Smith, money to ask questions in parliament over a long-running dispute between Fayed and Tiny Rowland, a British businessman, over the ownership of Harrods. He also cited Ian Greer, a former Tory agent who ran one of the biggest parliamentary lobbying companies at the time, as the conduit for the arrangement.
