The Lies of the Land

by Adam Macqueen

  Major would subsequently insist that he never meant his ‘basics’ to include sexual morality, but his spin doctors had told journalists at the conference that the speech was a declaration of ‘war on permissiveness’, and he explicitly included ‘traditional teaching’ and ‘respect for the family’ in the list of values he wanted to return to.74 It was certainly Major who accepted the resignation letters from a string of ministers caught with their pants down over the following several years – something that must have caused him an odd bat-squeak of conscience along the way.

  Or perhaps not. After the Currie diaries were published, Clare Latimer was understandably somewhat bitter about being thrust into the headlines when she had done nothing wrong. ‘John did nothing to clear my name, made no public statements about the scandal or my good reputation,’ she recalled. ‘I can see now that had he said, “I am not having an affair with Clare Latimer”, then the question could have been asked, “Well who are you having an affair with?”… He used me to get away with the Edwina affair. He never spoke to me again.’75

  ‘I have done nothing wrong. 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. I am ready for the fight.’

  Jonathan Aitken, press conference, Conservative Central Office, 10 April 1995

  No one listening to Jonathan Aitken that afternoon could have been in any doubt about how vehemently the chief secretary to the Treasury denied the claims in the day’s Guardian. He was ‘shocked and disgusted’ by their ‘outrageous falsehoods’. ‘I have no hesitation in stating categorically that these allegations are wicked lies. I have today issued a writ for defamation against the Guardian, its Editor-in-Chief and the journalist who wrote the story,’ he declared to a crowd that included the journalist in question, David Pallister, feeling decidedly awkward. ‘The total picture of the Guardian’s report is one of deliberate misrepresentations, falsehoods and lies. It is clearly part of the paper’s long campaign of sustained attempts to discredit me.’76

  Next came the peroration, with its magnificently mixed metaphors, sword and shield pressed into oncological service specifically to recall Aitken’s great-uncle Lord Beaverbrook, owner of the Daily Express, every edition of which was mantled by the armed figure of ‘The Crusader’. (Beaverbrook, you might remember from chapter 1, was one of the press barons who had been so ready to lie on behalf of Winston Churchill.) Aitken himself was the author of an admiring biography of Richard Nixon. The clues really were all there.

  Aitken’s speech wasn’t actually aimed at the Guardian at all. His target was ITV, whose World in Action programme was due to repeat and expand upon the paper’s claims at 8:30 that evening. The morning’s newsprint could be dismissed as the partisan ravings of a left-leaning broadsheet with a limited circulation; a prime-time documentary on one of what for most people were still only four TV channels would do a lot more damage. He was determined to scare them out of broadcasting.

  He failed. The producers of the programme even managed to add Aitken’s bravura performance in time to slam the re-edited tape into the output machine at exactly 8:31 p.m. A rewritten voiceover was appended live. The programme’s production company, Granada, were the next to receive writs. This too failed to deter journalists, and more stories about Aitken piled up in the broadsheets and tabloids. Eventually the minister announced that he would be stepping down from the cabinet in order to devote himself to full-time suing: ‘I expect to be heavily engaged in preparing for legal battles with my adversaries in the media…. I need to give my full commitment to fighting my current and possible future libel actions.’77

  What were the claims about Aitken? Well, there were plenty.78 He had worked for decades as a fixer for Prince Muhammad bin Fahd, a son of the King of Saudi Arabia, and been lavishly rewarded by him for arranging deals on luxury cars, a private jet and a string of London properties. Yet Aitken had failed to declare this clearly in the Register of Members’ Interests, even when in 1992 he was appointed as minister for defence procurement. Since the UK conducted an enormous amount of arms trading with the Saudis, his fixing was a blatant conflict of interest. Aitken had also been a director of a company owned by a Lebanese businessman involved in arms deals before going on to oversee such deals for the government, something he again failed to declare, as was legally required, in the official records of other companies he was a director of. He had also been on the board of another arms company which had sold guns to Singapore that ultimately ended up in Iran, a country Britain had barred itself from selling weapons to. He ran his parliamentary office out of the HQ of a company owned by Prince Muhammad’s business manager, Said Ayas, claiming a publicly funded ‘secretarial allowance’ while his administrative staff were on the company payroll. He served as the frontman for the Inglewood health farm in Berkshire, which had been secretly purchased through a Panamanian company by the Saudi royal family. He asked staff there if they would provide prostitutes for wealthy Arab guests. (Aitken was particularly cross about this one, claiming in the witness box that his twelve-year-old son had read it and asked him, ‘What is a pimp, Daddy?’ – even though the Guardian hadn’t used the word.79) For good measure, the Mirror had piled in with claims about Aitken’s own sex life and how he liked to be spanked by dominatrices. But for various reasons, Aitken’s libel trial, which kicked off in June 1997, ended up hinging entirely on who had paid his hotel bill for a weekend in Paris four years previously.

  The answer was Said Ayas, on behalf of Prince Muhammad, who was also staying in Paris that weekend and with whom Aitken had a meeting on Saturday, 18 September 1993. Because he was determined to hide the extent of his personal contacts with the Saudi prince – and because he had already failed to declare the hospitality, as he was obliged to do under the ministerial code of conduct – Aitken lied and claimed instead that ‘the hotel bill was paid by my wife, with money given to her by me for this purpose.’80 Since his wife Lolicia had not actually been anywhere near Paris on the weekend in question, he was then forced to pile lie upon lie, until the whole teetering tower of falsehood came crashing down at the trial, taking his entire career with it.

  First Aitken was obliged to pretend that Lolicia had arrived at the Ritz from dropping off their daughter Victoria at her Swiss boarding school on the Sunday morning, two days after he had himself checked in. He was helped by a letter he managed to get from the Ritz management saying the cashier remembered the bill being paid by ‘a brunette lady of European aspect’.81 (This was not quite as much help as he might have liked, given that Lolicia was blonde.) Then it emerged that this payment only accounted for half the bill, obliging Aitken to come up with another cock and bull story. He claimed that Ayas’s nephew, who had also been staying at the hotel, had accidentally paid for the other half – you know, the sort of thing that happens all the time in top hotels – but he had sent him a cheque to cover the cost once he realized the mistake. Ayas helped out by claiming to have personally witnessed Lolicia paying the bill, and threatening to sue the Guardian if they suggested he had picked it up himself. Unfortunately for Aitken, Ayas then fell out with Prince Muhammad, who accused him of stealing £25 million, and was unable to testify at the libel trial because he was under house arrest back in Saudi Arabia.

  Still, Aitken carried on stacking up the lies. The Guardian’s barrister George Carman challenged him with Ritz phone records showing a call from his room to a Swiss hotel where Lolicia had been staying at 10:15 a.m. on the Sunday, despite his claim that she had joined him in Paris ‘late to mid-morning’ that same day. He smoothly lied that his wife was on the road at the time and he was on the phone with his mother-in-law. Since he hadn’t mentioned anything about his mother-in-law being in Switzerland before this point, he got his seventeen-year-old daughter Victoria to sign a witness statement claiming that ‘my mother was not there but my grandmother was there’, and, for good measure, detailing how ‘on
Thursday 16th September my mother and I drove to Dover where we caught the ferry to Calais and the train to Paris.’82 He had drafted every word of it.

  It was only when the trial was well under way – and things were not looking good for the Guardian – that the paper’s team managed to turn up some killer evidence: British Airways ticket records which showed Lolicia and Victoria flying directly from Heathrow to Geneva on the Friday, and Lolicia returning on the same route alone. They also had a car hire receipt that showed Lolicia dropping off a vehicle at Geneva airport at 6:25 p.m. on the Sunday.83 By her husband’s sworn account, she was meant to be some five hundred miles away in Paris at the time.

  Carman had the pleasure of passing these newly sworn witness statements up to the judge and suggesting ‘it might be very important for your Lordship to read it immediately.’ Having done so, Justice Oliver Popplewell murmured to Aitken’s legal team: ‘no doubt you will want to consider the position overnight.’84

  Aitken had thought he had covered his tracks: he had refused to hand over records for the family’s American Express cards, which would have given away Lolicia’s movements, and checked with a friend who was a senior director at BA, who assured him the company would have long since destroyed records of passengers from 1993. When the statement from the airline arrived, his ‘heart sank, my head pounded, my confidence exploded into tiny pieces like flying shrapnel. I knew at once that I had lost the libel case and that with it I had lost my whole world.’85 And how.

  Aitken had already lost his parliamentary seat in the Labour landslide of 1997; now he was forced to abandon his libel case and pay legal bills for both sides amounting to several million pounds. He declared bankruptcy as a result. Lolicia announced she was leaving him. He was forced to step down from the Privy Council. Victoria was arrested over her false witness statement, which her father described as his ‘worst and most shameful mistake’.86 Although she was not charged, he was, and on 19 January 1999 he pleaded guilty to perjury and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. He was jailed for eighteen months.

  The collapse of his house of cards is detailed in Pride and Perjury, the tear-jerking, self-serving memoir Aitken published after he was released and had got God in a big way. He blames his appalling behaviour on ‘something troubling me in that interior province of life which religious people call “the soul” or “the spiritual dimension.” ’ While he was happy to hold his hands up to what was actually proved in court – ‘telling a lie about the relatively unimportant matter of who paid my £900 Ritz Hotel bill seemed to me to be a necessary small one in self-defence against much greater falsehoods’ – he continued to deny all the other accusations that were at issue in the trial. The only reason he was meeting Prince Muhammad that weekend was apparently to discuss ‘one or two defence and security issues which were on my agenda as Defence Minister’. He fails to explain why, in that case, he tried so desperately to keep it a secret rather than inviting officials along to take minutes.87

  Nor, while wallowing soppily in the redemptive love of his children – he even quotes a school essay in which his son describes him as ‘inspirational’ – does Aitken find space in its 369 pages to record that he had also attempted to exploit his other daughter, Alexandra, in the trial. He had claimed that the World in Action crew had ‘stampeded’ them both outside the family home and made her cry – only for the recording of the incident to be shown in court, revealing Alexandra wasn’t even there.88

  5

  SINS OF SPIN

  We tend to think of political spin as the invention of New Labour, something that arrived in Downing Street on 2 May 1997 along with the crowd – carefully compiled from the most photogenic workers at Labour HQ and their families – that waved Union Jacks behind Tony Blair as ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ played. (The original plan had been to have Labour Party banners, but it was overruled by civil servants.) But the idea that spin is the invention of New Labour is itself nothing but spin.

  It was spin fifty years earlier when a young Harold Wilson started waving around a pipe to make himself look older, and then realized that if he made a bit of theatre out of lighting it, that would give him extra time to find a way out of answering difficult questions. It was spin in the seventies when Gordon Reece ordered Margaret Thatcher to ditch the pearls and pussy bows and undergo elocution lessons to make her seem more human (just imagine what she must have been like before). It was spin when Boris Johnson started deliberately buying clothes that don’t fit and ruffling up his hair before he went in front of TV cameras. And it was spin when David Cameron refused, very rudely, to honour the dress code at a friend’s wedding, just in case photographers snapped him wearing a morning suit and looking like the posh boy he was desperately pretending not to be.

  Of course, spin is not merely about the presentation of people: it is about how to sell a story, how to assemble (or dissemble) information to put forward the version of events that you want people to believe is true. It is about polishing up policies, dazzling with statistics, finding a case study that fits your needs – and ensuring that your version of reality is robust enough to hold together for the ever-diminishing period before the media get bored and move on. If you’re lucky, it works. If you’re unlucky, your efforts become the story. If you’re really unlucky, the reporters refuse to move on at all – Alastair Campbell, the ultimate spin doctor, was often claimed to have a ‘golden rule’ that if a scandal was strung out over more than a week, the figure at the centre of it was doomed. Like many other things attributed to him, he now says he never uttered such words.

  And if you’re incredibly unlucky, people remember your disastrous efforts decades later, long after whatever policy it was you were trying to push has faded from memory.

  * * * * *

  ‘Eight years ago in a respectable street in Wolverhampton a house was sold to a Negro. Now only one white, a woman old-age pensioner, lives there. This is her story.’

  Enoch Powell, speech, Birmingham, 20 April 1968

  ‘I am going to make a speech,’ Enoch Powell, then shadow secretary of state for defence, told his friend Clem Jones as he asked Clem and his wife, Marjorie, to babysit his two daughters that Saturday. ‘It is going to go up and fizz like a rocket.’1

  He wasn’t wrong. Powell’s talk to members of the Conservative Political Centre at the Midland Hotel, Birmingham, was notorious. It was known as the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, though that was actually a misquotation. What Powell, a classical scholar, said was that when he considered the future results of immigration from Commonwealth nations, he was ‘filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”.’2 But then Powell got it wrong too. He was quoting from Book VI of the Aeneid, specifically the sybil’s prophecy about Aeneas’s return to Italy, and the sybil wasn’t a Roman at all. Until the last minute Powell had planned to deliver the quote in the original Latin, but he realized ‘that’s pedantic.’3

  The classical allusions may have been fairly unusual, but much of the rest of the speech – which Conservative leader Edward Heath denounced as ‘racialist in tone and liable to exacerbate racial tension’ as he sacked Powell from the shadow cabinet the following day – is tediously familiar.4 Having quoted the prophecy of ‘a middle-aged, quite ordinary working man’ in his constituency who complained that ‘in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man’, the MP delivered his argument – still beloved by people who never stop talking about immigration – that people were being prevented from talking about immigration. ‘I can already hear the chorus of execration,’ Powell whined. ‘How dare I say such a horrible thing? How dare I stir up trouble and inflame feelings by repeating such a conversation? The answer is that I do not have the right not to do so…. What he is saying, thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking’.5

  For the longest section of his infamous speech, however, Powell concentrated on just one of his purported hundreds of thousan
ds. His subject was another constituent, a pensioner who, he claimed, was now the only white resident of her Wolverhampton street, where she rented out rooms to lodgers:

  With growing fear, she saw one house after another taken over. The quiet street became a place of noise and confusion. Regretfully, her white tenants moved out…. Immigrant families have tried to rent rooms in her house, but she always refused…. She went to apply for a rate reduction and was seen by a young girl…. When she said the only people she could get were Negroes, the girl said, ‘Racial prejudice won’t get you anywhere in this country.’ So she went home.6

  Lest anyone be in any doubt, Powell was arguing vehemently in favour of the old lady’s right to be a racist. Proposed anti-discrimination laws, he told the crowd, ‘mean that the immigrant and his descendants should be elevated into a privileged or special class’. Such legislation would ‘give the stranger, the disgruntled and the agent provocateur the power to pillory them for their private actions.’ You wouldn’t even be allowed to practise bigotry in your own business!

  He continued with his constituent’s story:

  She is becoming afraid to go out. Windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through her letter box. When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies. They cannot speak English, but one word they know. ‘Racialist,’ they chant. When the new Race Relations Bill is passed, this woman is convinced she will go to prison. And is she so wrong? I begin to wonder.7