Pride and Perjury
Jonathan Aitken
HarperCollins £19.99, pp392
Buy it at BOL
God has been speaking to Jonathan Aitken lately, as we read in these truly amazing memoirs of the Tory Cabinet Minister and perjurer. The former jailbird, as he confided to David Frost on television the other day, now believes he is 'doing God's will' .
The instructions Aitken receives from his supernatural voices are fascinating, not only for what they show about the character of the author, but also for the unusual insight provided into the tastes and preferences of the Almighty.
What does God want? He wants to stop Aitken's watch. The deity visits him, walking on Sandwich beach in the dark night of his soul and, there and then, stops his automatic-winding platinum Rolex at precisely 3.50pm. Aitken describes this event as 'inexplicable'. The watch, worth thousands, may have been one of many given to Aitken by the Saudis who provided him with so much loot over the years, although the author does not mention this.
God also dislikes ties. His will is evidently for Aitken to pose nowadays - both on the book jacket and on his promotional TV slots - in a suit with an open-necked shirt. This shows his new carelessness about material things.
God wants the author to smile and dimple and speak winningly, in humble tones: 'Having made the commitment to God, I look forward to following him... with trust, hope and joyful acceptance.' God wants him to learn from Chuck Colson, the former Nixon aide, who went to jail over Watergate and appears on the scene in London full of advice about how to turn a criminal past into a religious career opportunity.
God does also seem to want Aitken to carry on telling the kind of tall stories which got him into such trouble in the first place. He insists in this volume, against all the evidence, that he merely travelled secretly to the Ritz hotel in Paris and lied to his own Prime Minister about it, in order to have a nice chat about government-to-government defence contracts with his business associates - the Saudi princeling, Mohammed, and his Lebanese fixer, Said Ayas.
God also wants Aitken to attempt to mislead his creditors, for not a word of contrition appears here in these spiritual texts for the divorce settlement, dubious liabilities, declaration of bankruptcy and spiriting away of assets, which have so far enabled him not to pay a penny of his £2 million debts.
God wants Aitken to advertise his thoughts of suicide, his religious conversion, his grief, his glory, his tears: 'The young tax barrister in our group whispered into my ear that he was praying hard... I began to cry... letting out not a trickle, but a torrent of tears.' When his watch stopped, 'tears began to trickle down my cheeks'.
But Aitken's theology does seem a bit muddled. As his memoirs plunge stagily on, it turns out that it is not in fact Jonathan who is a bad and evil person so much as those who opposed him. He gets his new chums to have public prayer sessions for the forgiveness of 'the editor of the Guardian and his journalists... Alan Rusbridger, David Leigh, Peter Preston'. He quotes his wife Lolicia's characterisation of us all: 'You poked the dark forces. You were a fool to think you could beat them.'
Aitken even accused me - before his lawyers made him take it out of the manuscript - of practising voodoo against him. Had he studied his Bible more closely, it would have put him straight. The forces of darkness don't practise voodoo and stick pins in dolls - they smile, equivocate and speak in double language.
Aitken may have made a terrible mistake about the nature of his supernatural instructions. On this evidence, it is not God who has taken him over and is speaking through him, but the forked tongue of someone - or something else - altogether. If his religion is a true one, then when that old rogue Aitken snuffs it, he could find himself in hotter water - and in a hotter place - than he had ever imagined.
