Jonathan William Patrick Aitken (born 30 August 1942) is a British author, Church of England priest and former Conservative Party politician.
His grandfather, Sir John Maffey (who was created The 1st Baron Rugby in February 1947), 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.
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.
[8] 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".
[11] 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 (Nigerian Civil War) Tory MP.
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 her wine at him to express her outrage at both his behaviour and the unwelcome consequent transformation of the TV station.
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.
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.
[15] 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 (see below).
[18][19] 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: If it falls to me to start a fight to cut out the cancer of bent and twisted journalism in our country with the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of British fair play, so be it.
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.
[21] A few days after the libel case collapsed, World in Action broadcast a special edition, which echoed Aitken's "sword of truth" speech.
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,[22] alleged by Alan Clark to be funded by the CIA.
"[27] 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.
As part of the bankruptcy, his trustees settled legal actions against the magazine Private Eye, over the claims it had made that Aitken was a "serial liar".
"[32] The Guardian might insist that Aitken demonstrate the sincerity of repentance by repaying the whopping legal bill of one-and-half-million pounds he landed on them by his dishonest libel action.
He was allowed to drop the case on promising to pay costs, but then escaped from the liability when he declared himself bankrupt and revealed that most of his apparent assets turn out to be conveniently owned by other people.
[38] Exactly one year after becoming deacon, on 30 June 2019, Aitken was ordained as an Anglican priest in St Mary's Church, Stoke Newington, also by the Bishop of London.
In November 2007, with the approval of senior members of the shadow cabinet, he took charge of a task force on prison reform within Iain Duncan Smith's Centre for Social Justice to help formulate Conservative Party policy.
Conservative spokesmen pointed out that the task force is independent of the party, even though the organisation was run by Iain Duncan Smith.
[49] Yet the title was memorable: it was consciously adopted by Martin Harrison for a survey of the British photojournalism (including Bailey and McCullin) of about the same period.
"[51] Aitken received a Kazakh award for his "huge contribution to making Kazakhstan popular in the world and promoting its global reputation".