The former Conservative minister, Mr Neil Hamilton yesterday angrily denounced the police decision to arrest him and his wife Christine over an alleged rape as a "public scandal". Mr Hamilton said it was now clear that claims made by a young woman that they had committed a serious sexual assault had been a "complete tissue of lies and fabrications".
"The mystery is that the police have taken them seriously enough to arrest two totally innocent people before they have heard their side of the story," he said from outside his south London flat.
With his wife by his side, he also complained that the law meant the woman had been able to make her allegations behind the shield of anonymity while they had had their names "plastered" over the press.
Mr Hamilton said they would now be seeking to establish how details of their arrest on Friday were made known to journalists and promised "further repercussions" during the course of the week.
"Another public scandal which ought to be addressed is that the person who has made these allegations shelters behind anonymity, whereas we, the victims, have our names and faces plastered all over the newspapers all over this country, along with the most grotesque and disgusting allegations," Mr Hamilton said. "That's a great injustice which must be righted."
The Hamiltons, who were last night returning to their home in Cheshire, were held for five hours on Friday at Barkingside Police Station in east London after voluntarily submitting themselves for interview. They were released on police bail after being questioned over claims that they had performed indecent acts on the young woman while she was being raped by another man.
However the woman, a 28-year-old college lecturer and mother of two, was criticized in the press yesterday by her former husband as a fantasist who had falsely "cried rape" before. "I wasn't at all surprised when I read about this alleged incident with the Hamiltons. She always lived in a sexual fantasy land," he told the Mail on Sunday.
A number of newspapers also named a 60-year-old man who was said to have been questioned by police in connection with the incident. He told the Sunday Mirror that while he knew the woman, who he met through an Internet chatroom, he had never had sex with her. He also denied knowing the Hamiltons. "I have never met Neil Hamilton and Christine Hamilton. I have never even seen them. And I have certainly never worked for them as a chauffeur as has been suggested."
The woman's mother, however, said the Hamiltons had been at the flat in Ilford when attempts were made to persuade her daughter to take part in group sex. "She tried to resist but then they were all over her. She is only very slight. She says that they came at her like crazy people," she said.
Meanwhile, it emerged that Mr and Mrs Hamilton told police they were hosting a dinner party at their flat in Battersea on May 5th - the night the alleged rape took place.
Details of the couple's alibi were disclosed in transcripts of their interviews with detectives published yesterday after they apparently made their copies of the tapes available to a newspaper.
When he was questioned by detectives about the woman's allegations, Mr Hamilton blamed the involvement of the publicist, Mr Max Clifford. "It is wholly false and the girl is either hallucinating or it is part of a malicious fabrication and, given Mr Clifford is involved, I suspect the latter," he said.