Jonathan Aitken
Jonathan William Patrick Aitken is a British author, Church of England priest and former Conservative Party politician. Beginning his career in journalism, he was elected to Parliament in 1974, and was a member of the cabinet during John Major's premiership from 1994 to 1995. That same year, he was accused by The Guardian of misdeeds conducted under his official government capacity. He sued the newspaper for libel in response, but the case collapsed, and he was subsequently found to have committed perjury during his trial. In 1999, he was sentenced to 18 months in prison, of which he served seven months.
Following his imprisonment, Aitken became a Christian and later became the honorary president of Christian Solidarity Worldwide. He was ordained as an Anglican priest in 2019.
Family
Aitken's parents were Sir William Aitken, a former Conservative MP, and Penelope Aitken, daughter of John Maffey, 1st Baron Rugby.Aitken is a great-nephew of the newspaper magnate and war-time minister, Max Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook. His sister is the actress Maria Aitken and his nephew is the actor Jack Davenport. He is godfather to James Abbott, the son of Labour left-winger Diane Abbott, who had been his voting pair.
In 1979, Aitken married Serbian Lolica Olivera Azucki, a daughter of O. Azucki, living in Zürich, Switzerland; they divorced in 1998. With his first wife, he had twin daughters and one son, Alexandra and Victoria Aitken, and William Aitken respectively.
Aitken married his second wife, Elizabeth Harris, daughter of David Rees-Williams, 1st Baron Ogmore, and former wife of actors Richard Harris and Sir Rex Harrison, in June 2003.
In 1999, DNA testing confirmed that Petrina Khashoggi, putative daughter of billionaire arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, was Aitken's biological child, the result of an affair with Khashoggi's wife Soraya.
The paternity of Aitken himself has similarly been under question. In December 2008, Dutch historian Cees Fasseur said Aitken was the result of a wartime affair between Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands and Penelope Aitken.
Early life
Aitken was born in Dublin, Ireland. His grandfather, Sir John Maffey, was the first official British representative to the newly independent Irish state, being appointed in October 1939, at a time when Anglo-Irish relations were strained but improving. Maffey's official title was "United Kingdom Representative to Éire". Aitken was baptised on 16 October 1942 at St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, an Anglican church, and he was named "Jonathan William Patrick Aitken". The third name, "Patrick", was included at a late stage owing to the unexpected international importance of the occasion –- one of the Irish papers reported "British envoy's grandson is a real Paddy". The Taoiseach, Éamon de Valera, who knew his grandparents, asked to attend the christening and his presence at the baptism was symbolic of improving Anglo-Irish relations. Also attending was Princess Juliana as his godmother.Aitken contracted tuberculosis, and at four years of age was admitted to Cappagh Hospital, Dublin, where he was an inpatient on a TB ward for more than three years, being cared for and educated by Catholic nuns. His father was severely injured as an RAF pilot when his Spitfire was shot down during the Second World War.
Aitken recovered and was discharged from the hospital aged seven. He lived with his parents at Halesworth, Suffolk, and learned to walk properly again within a few months.
Aitken was educated at Orwell Park School and then privately educated at Eton College, and then studied law at Christ Church, Oxford. His career initially followed a similar path to the post-war career of his father, who became a journalist and then the Conservative Member of Parliament for Bury St Edmunds.
Journalism and business
He served as a war correspondent during the 1960s in Vietnam and Biafra, and gained a reputation for risk-taking when he took LSD in 1966 as an experiment for an article in the London Evening Standard and had a bad trip: "this drug needs police, the Home Office and a dictator to stamp it out".He was also a journalist at Yorkshire Television from 1968 to 1970, presenting the regional news show Calendar. Aitken was the first person to be seen on screen from Yorkshire Television when it began broadcasting.
In 1970, Aitken was acquitted at the Old Bailey of charges of breaching section 2 of the Official Secrets Act 1911, when he photocopied a report about the British government's supply of arms to Nigeria, and sent a copy to The Sunday Telegraph and to Hugh Fraser, a pro-Biafran Tory MP. As a result of the case he was dropped as the Conservative candidate for the Thirsk and Malton parliamentary constituency.
Aitken was managing director of the Middle Eastern division of Slater Walker in 1973–75 and chairman of R. Sanbaar Consultants Ltd from 1976 to at least 1982, and a director of arms exporting firm BMARC from 1988 to 1990.
Parliamentary career
Aitken initially worked in parliament as private secretary to Conservative MP Selwyn Lloyd in 1964–66.Defeated at Meriden in the West Midlands in 1966 and dropped as candidate for Thirsk and Malton, he was elected as MP for Thanet East in the February 1974 general election; from 1983 he sat for South Thanet. He managed to offend PM Margaret Thatcher by ending a relationship with her daughter, Carol Thatcher, and suggesting that Thatcher "probably thinks Sinai is the plural of Sinus" to an Egyptian newspaper. He stayed on the backbenches throughout Thatcher's premiership, as well as participating in the re-launch of TV-AM, when broadcaster Anna Ford threw a glass of wine at him to express her outrage at both his behaviour and the unwelcome consequent transformation of the TV station.
Hollis affair
Aitken wrote a highly confidential letter to Thatcher in early 1980, dealing with allegations that the former Director-General of MI5, Sir Roger Hollis, had been a double agent also working for the Soviet Union. This information had come to Aitken from retired CIA spymaster James Angleton. Espionage historian Chapman Pincher obtained a copy of the letter, and used former MI5 officers Peter Wright and Arthur Martin as his main additional secret sources, to write the sensational book Their Trade is Treachery in 1981. This matter continued to be highly controversial throughout the 1980s, and led to Wright eventually publishing his own book Spycatcher in 1987, despite the government's prolonged Australian court attempts to stop him from doing so.Minister of State for Defence Procurement
Aitken became Minister of State for Defence Procurement under prime minister John Major in 1992. He was later accused of violating ministerial rules by allowing an Arab businessman to pay for his stay in the Paris Ritz, perjured himself and was jailed.Aitken had previously been a director of BMARC, an arms exporter during 1988–1990. In 1995, a Commons motion showed that while a Cabinet minister he had signed a controversial Public Interest Immunity Certificate in September 1992 relating to the Matrix Churchill trial, and that the "gagged" documents included ones relating to the supply of arms to Iran by BMARC for a period when he was a director of the company.
Chief Secretary to the Treasury
He became Chief Secretary to the Treasury in 1994, a Cabinet position, but resigned in 1995 following the allegations that he had violated ministerial rules.He was defeated in the 1997 general election. Within a year he had been appointed as a representative for the defence manufacturer GEC-Marconi.
Libel, arrest and prison
Libel action
On 10 April 1995, The Guardian carried a front-page report on Aitken's dealings with leading Saudis. The story was the result of a long investigation carried out by journalists from the newspaper and from Granada Television's World in Action programme. The Guardian also alleged Aitken, when Minister for Defence Procurement, procured prostitutes for Arab businessmen. Granada's World in Action programme repeated the accusation in a television documentary called Jonathan of Arabia.Aitken had called a press conference at the Conservative Party offices in Smith Square, London, at 5 p.m. that same day denouncing the claims and demanding that the World in Action documentary, which was due to be screened three hours later, withdraw them. He said:
The World in Action film Jonathan of Arabia was transmitted as planned and Aitken carried out his threat to sue. The action collapsed in June 1997 when The Guardian and Granada produced, via their counsel George Carman, evidence countering his claim that his wife, Lolicia Aitken, paid for the hotel stay at the Ritz Hotel in Paris. The evidence consisted of airline vouchers and other documents showing that his wife had, in fact, been in Switzerland at the time when she had allegedly been at the Ritz in Paris. The joint Guardian/Granada investigation indicated an arms deal scam involving Aitken's friend and business partner, the Lebanese businessman Mohammed Said Ayas, a close associate of Prince Mohammed of Saudi Arabia. It was alleged that Aitken had been prepared to have his teenage daughter lie under oath to support his version of events, had the case continued.
A few days after the libel case collapsed, World in Action broadcast a special edition, which echoed Aitken's "sword of truth" speech. It was titled "The Dagger of Deceit".
During this time, it emerged that when Aitken was being encouraged to resign, he was chairman of the secretive right-wing think-tank Le Cercle, alleged by Alan Clark to be funded by the CIA.
Perjury conviction and imprisonment
Aitken was charged with perjury and perverting the course of justice and, after pleading guilty on 8 June 1999 to both offences, was sentenced to jail for 18 months of which he served almost seven months as a custodial sentence. While Aitken was sentenced, Mr Justice Scott Baker said Aitken had breached trust inexcusably. Baker told Aitken: "For nearly four years you wove a web of deceit in which you entangled yourself and from which there was no way out unless you were prepared to come clean and tell the truth. Unfortunately you were not."During the preceding libel trial, his wife Lolicia, who later left him, was called as a witness to sign a supportive affidavit to the effect that she had paid his Paris hotel bill, but did not appear. In the end, with the case already in court, investigative work by The Guardian reporters into Swiss hotel and British Airways records showed that neither his daughter nor his wife had been in Paris at the time in question.