A QUARTER of a century ago this newspaper published a front-page open letter to Margaret Thatcher to launch one of its biggest ever campaigns.

The then Yorkshire Evening Press appealed to the Tory prime minister to intervene after Swiss firm Nestlé lodged a bid for York confectioners Rowntree.

A minimum first step would be a referral of the bid to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission, we said.

Rowntree employees and the people of York threw themselves behind the campaign.

By May 13 13,500 readers had returned coupons demanding that Nestlé and another Swiss bidder, Suchard, keep their “Hands Off Rowntree” and the newspaper then hired a fleet of coaches to bus about 1,500 workers and supporters to London for a mass rally at the Houses of Parliament.

The fight even went to Europe, with the then West German government and the French monopolies commission investigating the bids, worried that any takeover would lead to the Swiss having an unfair share of their own sweets market.

The British Government refused to intervene and the Rowntree board eventually accepted a bid of £2.55 billion from Nestlé.

Over the following 25 years Nestlé invested hundreds of millions of pounds in the York site, while also shedding many hundreds of jobs, including 645 during a restructuring about seven years ago. The manufacturing of major brands such as Smarties was also moved abroad.

For the past five years The Press has been involved in a second campaign – this time seeking to obtain secret Government documents outlining Cabinet discussions about the Nestlé bid.

The newspaper has been arguing under the Freedom of Information Act that people should be allowed to read the record of how the Government of the day acted over a “greatly significant episode in York’s history”.

However, the Cabinet Office has fiercely resisted the request, arguing that disclosure would have a “chilling” effect on current Ministers in their future discussions on similar issues, potentially inhibiting them from putting forward their views.

The Press won a major victory last autumn when a tribunal dismissed a Cabinet Office appeal against an Information Commissioner’s Office ruling that five Ministerial papers should be made public.

But the Cabinet Office subsequently won permission to appeal against the ruling, claiming there were “errors of law”, and another hearing is now scheduled for this summer.