Parliament Website

Mr Tiny Rowland And The Observer

EDM number 546 in 1989-90, proposed by DN Campbell-Savours on 15/02/1990.

That this House takes note of a widely circulated letter of 6th February 1990 to Mr John Wood, Director of the Serious Fraud Office, from Mr Tiny Rowland, director of Lonrho and Chairman of The Observer; sees that Mr Rowland's five year obsession over his sale of an essentially controlling interest in House of Fraser continues unabated; draws attention to Mr Rowland's description of the Department of Trade and Industry's inspectors in the affair as 'experienced and impeccable' and 'impeccably qualified to avoid legal quagmires'; wonders whether these can be the same inspectors accused by Mr Rowland, in a letter of 28th October 1987, of bias and of conducting a 'perversion of the inquiry'; recalls that in his letter of 16th November 1987 he accused the same gentlemen of negligence and said that one, Sir Henry Brooke, should be disqualified for being part of a conspiracy; further recalls repetition of these allegations by Mr Rowland in writing on 20th November, 25th November and 8th December 1987; is driven to conclude that Mr Rowland is either alarmingly inconsistent or forgetful; believes that neither attribute is desirable in the controller of a national newspaper; finds it easier, as a result, to understand the sad decline of the paper during his stewardship; and calls upon Mr Tiny Rowland to divest himself of control of The Observer.

This motion has been signed by a total of 4 MPs.

MPDateConstituencyPartyType
Dale Campbell-Savours15/02/1990WorkingtonProposed
Max Madden19/02/1990Bradford WestSigned
Terry Lewis20/02/1990WorsleySigned
Keith Bradley21/02/1990Manchester, WithingtonSigned

Download raw data as csv or xml.