[A-List] UK state: Wilson plot & Northern Ireland

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

UK residents will probably be aware of the recent imprisonment of a
thoroughly disgusting character, Nicholas "van" Hoogstraten, who has made
his fortune combining astute property dealing with a singularly muscular
approach to negotiations (see below). His links to the apartheid regime in
South Africa endeared him to a range of unsavoury characters we've mentioned
previously in this thread (e.g. the McWhirter brothers) and more recently
he's enhanced his notoriety by parading his cosy relationship with Robert
Mugabe -- and if Patrick Bond or anyone else has anything on that I'd be
most grateful.

To get an idea of what sort of person we are talking about here, here is a
recent Guardian interview that provides enough of a flavour....


Even nastier Nick

His tenants are 'filth'. People in council houses are 'worthless and lazy'.
Ramblers are 'nosy perverts'. Nicholas van Hoogstraten, a man who once paid
for a hand-grenade attack on a business rival, shows Emma Brockes around his
Sussex palace and explains why he's so keen to keep the riff-raff away

Friday September 8, 2000
The Guardian

The ground floor of Nicholas van Hoogstraten's mansion is designed to repel.
The windows, half moons fitted at intervals along the 600ft gallery, are
small and darkened and the front door is deliberately obscured, like
something made for Bilbo Baggins. The grand staircase and reception hall,
those Cinderella features that identify Hamilton Palace as the most
expensive private house built in Britain for a century, are on the first
floor. Van Hoogstraten designed it this way as a "fortification", not
against burglars, but against the more indeterminate threat of what he calls
"passing riff-raff."

Deep in the East Sussex countryside, a mile from the small town of Uckfield
and 40 minutes in the car from Brighton, 54-year-old Van Hoogstraten is
creating a monument to the ideals that, for the past 25 years, have made him
an object of widespread loathing. The comment about riff-raff is not
isolated. He refers to the unemployed as "primitive", to his own tenants as
"filth" and, more recently, to members of the Ramblers Association with whom
he has fought a court battle over rights of way, as "perverts". He is so
absurdly offensive that it is tempting to read his public statements as the
bid for notoriety of a man who would rather be detested than ignored.

The first time I see him, he is climbing over a low wall on to the building
site. Hamilton Palace is two years off completion and combines, in its
design, elements of mid-European Baroque with classical grandeur and
pavilion kitsch. The effect is impressive, if a little sickly, and has
spiralled in cost from an original £3m, to £30m. This is partly due to Van
Hoogstraten's interventions. He made builders dismantle the central stair
case and shift it back four feet, when he discovered his view of the huge
galleries on either side was obscured by pillars. "What's the point in
having professionals when you can do it better yourself?" he says, several
times, over the course of the morning.

He is wearing stout boots and gaiters and strides straight past me towards
the house so that, at first, I mistake him for one of the agitating
ramblers. It is only when I see him poring over plans in the site office and
characteristically refusing to look up when I enter, that it becomes clear
who he is. "He'll be with you in a minute," says his site manager with weary
embarrassment.

When Van Hoogstraten emerges, he shakes hands with due diffidence and, eyes
averted, takes off on a tour of the house and grounds. Hamilton Palace, so
called after the capital of Bermuda where Van Hoogstraten made part of his
estimated £200m fortune, is structurally complete. The lift shafts are in
place, the two cupolas - the smaller costing £60,000, the larger three times
that - have been fitted and what remains to be done is largely cosmetic. The
issue of quality, of using thick stone for the balustrades and bevelling on
the pillars, is something Van Hoogstraten takes seriously, equating it with
quality of an altogether different kind. There is nothing that winds him up
more than contemplating the "white plastic pillars," you see framing the
doorways of the "peasants of Surrey."

Discussions about the peasantry come later, however, when Van Hoogstraten
has reconciled himself to speaking to me directly. For the first 20 minutes,
he issues all his remarks through the photographer, affecting a sort of
buddy-buddy familiarity with him and experiencing some kind of paralysis
when it comes to addressing me. When he is out of earshot, one of the
builders whispers, "he doesn't like women".

The matter is resolved, unexpectedly, when he starts a low-grade rant about
the quality of the press. "You can't even trust the Daily Telegraph these
days," he says, addressing the hedge, since the photographer is several
paces behind us. "Standards of accuracy aren't what they were." I suggest
that it is merely harder to cover up one's mistakes than it once was and he
blinks, rapidly, processing the moment. From then on, he packs it in and the
conversation becomes, if not convivial, then at least functional.

We adjourn from the garden to the house and begin a tour of each floor.
There is nothing much to see; a serious of vast empty rooms covered in a
layer of plaster dust with the occasional nest of brightly coloured wires
forking out of a wall socket. There is a mausoleum in the basement, the only
bit we don't get a tour of because Van Hoogstraten thinks we will poke fun
at it. At each stage, he stops to point out a) the quality of the fittings,
b) the uselessness of the people who installed them. I ask if he enjoys
being aggravated. "I used to," he says. "Twenty years ago I would go out
looking for it, but now I'd rather stay in and watch EastEnders - for God's
sake don't put that in the Guardian." Why not, I ask. Would it damage his
image? He says: "I only watch it because Leslie Grantham is a friend of
mine."

We climb ladders to reach the roof, where Van Hoogstraten intends to plant a
garden. Low-level lighting has been fitted and there is space for a fountain
on the floor below, so that the sound will drift idyllically upwards. From
the edge, you can see endless rolls of countryside. Van Hoogstraten owns a
limited amount of land around the house and has been buying up more as
neighbouring landowners "go bankrupt" or, he says with peculiar relish,
"die".

He points out Framfield 9, the footpath at the margins of his estate where
the Ramblers Association protested last year against his attempts to keep
them out. In January, Rarebargain Ltd, the company under whose name the land
is registered, was fined £1,600 for unlawful obstruction. "Would you have a
lot of Herberts in your garden?" he asked in the Independent on Sunday last
month.

"Herberts wasn't actually my word, it was one of the builder's," he says. "I
said perverts, the dirty mac brigade. Most of them aren't genuine ramblers,
they're just nosy." I ask if the perverts have ever flashed at him
personally. He then gives me a curious, are-you-taking-the-piss kind of look
and turns away to point out a detail in the plasterwork. During the course
of our conversation, he is seen to operate within a limited range of
registers, the most common being a mocking tone redolent of a hard bitten
inspector on a regional crime squad, the least, a sort of whimsy. "The grand
folly of Mr H," he says, indicating the mansion. "What will I do with my
time when it is finished?"

On the way down from the roof, through the "workers' quarters" which Van
Hoogstraten intends to fill with staff from Zimbabwe, he returns to the
subject of peasants, expanding on the "worthless" and "lazy" majority who
make up the council estates of this country. "You are playing up to your
villainous image," I suggest. Van Hoogstraten looks momentarily embarrassed.
"I'm not villainous," he mumbles. I ask if he regards the people who work
for him in these derogatory terms, and he says no, because they work hard
and hard labour is what distinguishes the "riff-raff" from the "elite". I
ask him if being a person of quality is merely a matter of wealth. He says
no, and refers to some of his wealthy neighbours, "old-moneyed bastards"
whom he regards as being as primitive in their idleness as "those rat bags
drawing social security."

Van Hoogstraten didn't come from a wealthy background himself, although
there had been money in the family. His grandfather was a major shareholder
in the British East India Company, but by the time young Nicholas
Hoogstraten (he added the "van" later for effect) was born in Shoreham, East
Sussex, the money had gone. The pretensions hadn't. Van Hoogstraten
remembers his mother telling him to walk the long way home from school to
avoid passing through a council estate. He didn't question it, he says,
because "she was right. They were the dirty kids who smelled bad."

He is mawkish about his school days and likes to recall sitting in an
overcoat during winter and being no worse off for it. His father, a shipping
agent, wanted him to get a job with Customs and Excise, but at 16, he joined
the navy and travelled the world for a year. He made business contacts in
the Bahamas when he returned at the age of 17. With the proceeds gained from
selling his stamp collection - more than £1,000 - he bought some cheap
property. Unlike other sailors of his age, he didn't blow the money on booze
and women. "I was never interested in that," he says with disgust, and
within a couple more years of property dealing, he was incredibly wealthy.
"In relative terms," he says, "I was richer then than I have ever been
since."

If his memory can be relied upon as separate from his wicked persona, he was
perverse from a young age. He was in the Bahamas when President John F
Kennedy was shot, and amidst the public mourning, remembers being pleased.
"I was glad," he says. "He was only in it for the ego trip." He claims
similar feelings on hearing news of Diana's death, while returning from
France on a ferry. "She made us look like fools," he says. "She made a
mockery of the royal family."

Van Hoogstraten's relationship with authority is riddled with
contradictions. He says he hated Diana because she was thick, but when you
point out that the rest of the royal family are pretty thick too, he says
gloopily, "they are all we've got, so we have to respect them." He says he
favours dictatorship as the best form of government, but complains that some
of the officials he has dealt with in Mugabe's Zimbabwe are impossible
because "the power has gone to their heads." (Mugabe himself is the most
modest man he has ever met, he says, and he is friends with Ian Smith, who
apart from the small matter of his hysterical racism, he finds charming).
Margaret Thatcher is the only leader he has ever admired, because she made
him feel "proud to be English".

He prides himself on being cultured; one whole floor of his house is
reserved for his art collection. I ask him whether he agrees that art
appreciation depends on an ability to empathise with another's viewpoint and
he nods vigorously. And yet, empathy does not seem to be one of his stronger
points. "That's different," he says. "In business you have to be hard." He
believes that the only way to be hard is to work for a living and won't be
leaving his fortune to his five children, who he doesn't want to grow soft
through spoiling.

He harbours an admiration for gangsters, who he hung around with in the 60s
to consolidate his image as the toughest landlord of the south coast,
spending four years in jail for hiring thugs to throw a grenade through
somebody's window. "It seems a bit distasteful to me now," he says, "but
back then when I was young . . . these weren't anarchists, they were
businessmen, respectable people."

And he has tycoon Tiny Rowland to thank for giving him the confidence to
become the man he is today. "He said to me once, 'I am old enough and rich
enough to do what I like and say what I like and you're nearly at that
stage'." Is it just a persona, then, all this hatred? "If you want to be
rich, it doesn't hurt to have the kind of reputation I do," he says and
pinches his mouth into something that might once have been a smile.

Van the man

Born: Nicholas Marcel Hoogstraten in 1946 in Shoreham, East Sussex, to a
shipping agent father and housewife mother. Two sisters.

Education: A Jesuit school near Worthing.Left at 16 to join the navy.

Career: Bought his first properties in the Bahamas and with the profits from
selling them bought six properties, with sitting tenants, in London's
Notting Hill. By the age of 22, he had 350 properties in Sussex alone. He
exploited the 1980s housing boom by acquiring more than 2,000 properties. By
the 1990s he had sold 90%.

Family: Five children, four sons and one daughter, by three different
mothers. He divides his time between Sussex and Zimbabwe, where he has an
estimated £32m in business interests, including farms and mines.

Criminal record: In the 60s he was sentenced to four years in Wormwood
Scrubs for paying a gang to mount a hand grenade attack on a former business
associate. The judge described him as a "sort of self-imagined devil who
thinks that he is an emissary of Beelzebub". In May, he was fined £1,500 for
contempt of court after threatening opposing counsel, Graham Campbel: "You
dirty bastard... in due course you are going to have it."

-----

On his Zimbabwe links:


British multi-millionaire bankrolls Mugabe party

Paymaster: Nicholas Hoogstraten says leader does a good job

Zimbabwe: special report

David Pallister
Friday April 21, 2000
The Guardian

The old Marxist Robert Mugabe may be losing friends around the world at an
alarming rate but he still has one unusual and influential capitalist
supporter in Uckfield, East Sussex.

Nicholas Hoogstraten, 54, the controversial property multi-millionaire who
regards ramblers as the scum of the earth and his tenants and women with
even more contempt, has emerged as a long-standing financial backer of
Zimbabwe's ruling Zanu-PF.

Mr Hoogstraten, who is building a £30m Renaissance-style palace with a
mausoleum to preserve his remains, confirmed yesterday that he had funded Mr
Mugabe and his party since the early 1960s when he acquired land in the
country. He now owns nine farms covering 1m acres and a huge cattle company
but, he says, only one of his nominee managers is white.

In an interview with the Guardian, Mr Hoogstraten is in no doubt where
Zimbabwe's current problems stem from. Using his characteristically forceful
language, he said: "This has all been stirred up by white disenfranchised
trash who still think it's Rhodesia. I have some good white friends in
Zimbabwe but those Rhodies, as we call them, are disgusting people. They
want to ruin the country. They treat the blacks worse than blacks are
treated in America. I've had no problem with indigenising my properties."

Mr Hoogstraten revealed that he continues to provide funds for Zanu-PF
candidates. Over the years, he said, he must have contributed hundreds of
thousands of pounds.

His money, and his friendship with Mr Mugabe, he believes, will ensure that
his properties are not the subject of attacks by the war veterans.

A millionaire by the time he was 20, Mr Hoogstraten first bought some
parcels of land for £40,000 in 1963. On a visit to the then Southern
Rhodesia he met Tiny Rowland of Lonhro. They agreed that it made sense to
back the emerging black nationalist groups, with Rowland siding with Joshua
Nkomo and Mr Hoogstraten backing Mr Mugabe. Accurately he predicted that Mr
Mugabe would come out on top as the leader of the biggest tribe, but like a
canny businessman he did a bit of betting on both sides.

"I gave Zanu-PF five thousand here and five thousand there, a lot of money
in those days. I also used to pay for Nkomo's hotel bills when he was in
London but I stopped that when his side brought down a civilian airliner."

He later fell out with Rowland. In 1998 he explained that he had sold his 5%
stake in Lonhro "because it's a ragbag of investments run by a bunch of
incompetents".

In 10 days he flies to Harare. "It's a decent civilised ex-colonial
country," he said. "It's a paradise compared with places like Nigeria.

"Mugabe has done a tremendous job keeping the country together and I'm
appalled and disgusted at the way the media has treated him."

He dismisses reports of government corruption with a shrug. "It's no more
than 10%. In Nigeria it's 90%. I used to own the tin mines there until I
flooded them in the early 1980s."

Ever since he began his business career with a valuable stamp collection
from his father, Mr Hoogstraten has courted controversy. He now owns large
chunks of freehold in Brighton and homes in Cannes, Monte Carlo, Maryland
and Florida. In a recent interview he described women as "chattels", and
admitted to having a mistress in each of his houses. He also has an
extensive collection of memorabilia from the slave trade.

Mr Hoogstraten's unconventional approach to business was demonstrated in the
mid-1960s when he fell out with his partner, threw a grenade at his house,
and ended up in prison. He made it into the Guinness Book of Records by
having the highest disclosed UK personal tax demand in 1981: £5.3m.

More recently he was locked in combat with the Ramblers Association after he
blocked a footpath across his estate. The "great unwashed", as he called
them, won.

-----

On his recent conviction for manslaughter:

Monday, 22 July, 2002, 10:03 GMT 11:03 UK
Van Hoogstraten: How the net closed in
By Jane Peel
BBC Home Affairs correspondent

One of Britain's richest men - notorious landlord Nicholas Van Hoogstraten -
has been found guilty of the manslaughter of a former business associate.

During the trial at the Old Bailey, the court heard that on 2 July 1999,
Mohammed Raja was at home in Sutton in Surrey.

He answered the door to two men, dressed as gardeners. They were wearing
floppy hats and carrying a garden fork and a bag. In the bag was a
single-barrelled sawn-off shotgun.

The men stabbed Mr Raja five times and shot him in the face at close range.

Early on, the police had a suspect, thanks to Mr Raja's two grandsons Waheed
and Rizvan Raja.

They were upstairs in the house at the time and rushed to help their
grandfather when they heard his shouts.

Both told the Old Bailey jury they had heard him shout in Punjabi: "These
are Hoogstraten's men. They've hit me, they've hit me".

Mr van Hoogstraten had done business with Mr Raja - lending him money to buy
properties.

Mr Raja was suing his former associate for fraud.

Van Hoogstraten had a reputation for dealing harshly with those he disliked.

Naked

In television documentaries, he had openly spoken of his scorn for certain
groups in society.

The tenants who lived in his properties were a particular sore.

"Tenants are filth, by their very nature," he said. "What kind of person is
a tenant? A person with no self-respect.

"I don't look after tenants. Why should I look after tenants? One looks
after the building, looks after one's asset."

Van Hoogstraten also had ways of dealing with ramblers - the "great
unwashed" as he called them.

In 1985 he began building the grandly-named Hamilton Palace in Sussex.

It was a country house with a frontage larger than Buckingham Palace and was
intended to house his £200m art collection.

The last thing he wanted was members of the public walking across his
estate, so he blocked off a public footpath.

'Arrogant and evil'

"Ramblers, they're the scum of the earth," he said.

The jury in his trial were not told that van Hoogstraten had a criminal
record for violence.

In his early twenties he was jailed for four years for a hand grenade attack
on the home of a business associate.

The judge then called him an "arrogant and evil young man and a bully".

Mr Raja had become a thorn in van Hoogstraten's side.

He recruited Robert Knapp - a man with a long record for armed robbery - to
threaten him. Knapp, in turn, hired David Croke.

But they went too far and killed the businessman. They were found guilty of
his murder on Friday.

The two men left too many clues. Eventually, they led the police to them and
their paymaster.

Van Hoogstraten's ex-girlfriend had been due to give evidence against him,
but retracted her statement on the day she was due in court.

A second witness, a Lebanese businessman, Michel Hamdam, told police van
Hoogstraten had asked him if he knew anyone who could get rid of Mr Raja.

Just before the trial began, Mr Hamdam left the country.

Even though what remained of the evidence against him was circumstantial, it
was enough to persuade the jury van Hoogstraten was guilty of manslaughter.

-----

In a recent edition of Private Eye Paul Foot drew a very interesting
connection which, if investigated properly as it should be, could shed even
more light on the state-orchestrated efforts to smother leakage of stories
concerning security service skullduggery against Harold Wilson and various
illegal activities going on in Northern Ireland with the connivance and full
involvement of certain branches of the secret state. Just now the evidence
is circumstantial, although the reference above to Hoogstraten's appearance
in the Guinness Book of Records is at least one direct link with editor
McWhirter who, as the leading light of the "Freedom Association" and former
conspirator with George Kennedy Young and other crypto-fascist cranks, is
certainly most interested in denigrating the very idea of taxation used to
finance anything other than policing and defence.

As we know things have changed a lot over the last 30 years. From having
been a pariah with the McWhirter crowd, people like Peter Hain are now at
the very centre of state decision-making, whilst those they supplanted (the
Thatcher gang headed up by Airey Neave, "Lord" Harris of High Cross and the
Monday Club racists like Young) are now either dead or dying. Remaining
sympathisers have either found new pastures in which to graze (e.g. David
Hart at Boeing), or are wistfully reading their Daily Telegraphs and
reminiscing of the good old days with fellow reactionaries in gentleman's
clubs and the like. Hoogstraten, however, was foolish enough to keep his
head well above the parapet and to get involved with some not-so-clandestine
arms networks linked to pariah states (like Zimbabwe) which will only have
contributed to his downfall.

More to follow, hopefully.


Private Eye

No. 1067, 15-28 November 2002

In The Back:
Follow-ups

*NICHOLAS HOOGSTRATEN: A big sigh of relief echoed round the home counties
when the fascist millionaire and thug Nicholas Hoogstraten was convicted and
jailed for ten years for his role in the killing by others of a business
associate.

Several people in West Sussex have contacted the Eye with their complaints
to local police about Hoogstraten's activities and the surprising failure of
West Sussex police to do anything about them. They point out that
Hoogstraten's conviction followed an investigation by the Metropolitan
[London] police, not the West Sussex plods.

One interesting reference to Hoogstraten appeared in a case with which Eye
readers are familiar. In 1980 the body of local antique dealer Jonathan
Lewis was found dead in the river Arun. His best friend, Colin Wallace, Arun
district council press officer and former army information officer in
Northern Ireland, was eventually charged with his murder and convicted of
manslaughter in 1981.

Wallace consistently denied any involvement in Lewis's death. One feature of
the trial was the evidence of Amanda Metcalfe who said she had seen Lewis on
the night he died in an Arundel pub called the Golden Goose with a man (not
Wallace) she had not seen before. She was very certain about the date, and
the judge observed that if she was right about the sighting Wallace could
not be convicted.

Among the undisclosed messages received by police after Lewis's death was
publicised was an anonymous one stating that Lewis, who had a warehouse in
Hove, worked occasionally for Hoogstraten. Wallace's conviction was quashed
in 1996 and the investigation into Lewis's death was not reopened.