Pride and Perjury: The Rise and Fall of a Political Giant Book

The road from ex-minister to ex-con may have only taken five years, but for Jonathan Aitken it was a Damascene experience. The high-flying, debonair Tory Member of Parliament, tipped for glory in a rapidly disintegrating party, lied under oath during a libel case against The Guardian newspaper over accusations of corruption, pimping and arms dealing with Saudi princes, and most ignobly, got his daughter Victoria to sign a false witness statement. His very public demise and humiliation should be enough to arouse sympathy from the hardest heart, but what led a man of his privilege and ability into such an unedifying moral mess is harder to fathom. His writing is determinedly articulate and fluid, despite a guarded tone that renders the political memoirs solid but unspectacular, beyond sharp words for Michael Heseltine and entertaining vignettes of Margaret Thatcher's extraordinary rampaging ego. He relates at length his experiences of the Middle East, his political successes and family affairs (including the discovery of a daughter he had never known about), but understandably the majority of the book is given over to the legal and factual wrangling that preceded his prison stretch, in which he maintains an uneasy stance of belligerence and hand-wringing. The binding agent throughout is his redemptive religious zealousness, which seems sincere, but on occasion cloyingly sticks in the throat with its insistence. Aitken the man, like Aitken the politician, seems perpetually in need of an audience and approval, be it from family and colleagues when rehearsing speeches, or from Him Upstairs. For the moment he has retreated into himself, and while this intriguingly uneven account may not close that particular chapter, it prepares the way for the next in what has become an unenviably eventful life. --David VincentRead More