SCANDAL!
An Explosive Exposé of the Affairs, Corruption and Power Struggles of the Rich and Famous
Colin Wilson and Damon Wilson
Acknowledgments
This book was suggested by the late Donald Seaman, and appeared under our joint authorship in 1986 with the title Scandal: An Encyclopaedia. In this new edition, Don’s articles have been replaced by others by myself and my son Damon.
I would here like to acknowledge the help of my friend Paul Foot, in obtaining a copy of The Liar, the biography of Jonathan Aitken, by Luke Harding, David Leigh and David Pallister, and of Claire Armistead of the Guardian for tracking down one of the two remaining copies in a cupboard in her office.
I also want to thank the publishers of Kitty Kelley’s biography of Frank Sinatra, His Way, for permission to quote from it.
Colin Wilson, March 2007
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First published in hardback in 2003 by Virgin Books Ltd
Copyright © Colin Wilson and Damon Wilson 2007
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A version of this book previously appeared as
Scandal! An Encyclopaedia by Colin Wilson and
Donald Seaman, Weinfeld and Nicolson, London 1986
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Introduction
AITKEN, Jonathan: A Politician’s Self-Destruction
ARBUCKLE, ‘Fatty’: A Star’s Disgrace
ARCHER, Jeffrey: The Perjury Scandal
BYRON, Lord George: ‘Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know’
CAROLINE, Queen: The Only British Queen to be Tried for Adultery
CASH-FOR-HONOURS: The Perennial British Government Scandal
CLEVELAND STREET: The ‘Sex-for-Sale’ Telegraph Boys
CLINTON, Bill: The Monica Lewinsky Affair
DIANA, Princess of Wales: The Scandalous Princess
DREYFUS AFFAIR: The Political Scandal that Shook France
ENRON: One of the Biggest Corporate Frauds in History
GESUALDO, Carlo: Composer of Genius and Murderer
HOLLYWOOD: Scandal in the ‘Dream Factory’
JACKSON, Michael: The Paedophilia Accusations
KELLY, David: The Death of a Scientist and the Phantom Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction
KENNEDY, Jack: All the President’s Women
LAW, John: The Louisiana Scandal
MCKINNEY, Joyce: The Case of the Manacled Mormon
MCPHERSON, Almée Semple: The Mystery Kidnapping
MAXWELL, Robert: The Strange Downfall and Death of a ‘Tycoon’
MAYERLING AFFAIR: Double-Suicide in a Hunting Lodge
NOYES, John Humphrey: The Oneida Community
PAEDOPHILE PRIESTS: The Catholic Church Child-Abuse Scandal
POLANSKI, Roman: The Rape Case
PROFUMO AFFAIR: The Minister and the Russian Spy
RUSSELL, Bertrand: Sex Life of a Logical Philosopher
SCOTLAND YARD: The Great Bribery Scandal
SIMPSON, O.J.: The Murder Trial
SINATRA, Frank: Swing When You’re Sinning
THORPE, Jeremy: The Liberal Leader and the Male Model
VOIGT, Wilhelm: ‘The Captain of Kopenick’
WATERGATE: The US Presidential Scandal
WELLS, H.G.: The Love Life of a Literary Don Juan
WILDE, Oscar: ‘One must seek out what is most tragic’
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Copyright
INTRODUCTION BY COLIN WILSON
This book was first suggested to me as a sequel to An Encyclopedia of Modern Murder, and I must admit that my reaction was unenthusiastic. Murder has always interested me because it is one of the extremes of human nature; by comparison, an interest in scandal seems a rather discreditable form of self-indulgence, like a passion for chocolate eclairs. Then I began to think about some of the classic scandals – the Mayerling affair, the Dreyfus case, the Fatty Arbuckle ‘rape’, the Profumo scandal – and saw that I was being narrow-minded. The great scandals afford the same opportunity to study the curious complexities of human nature as the famous criminal cases.
The next problem was to decide precisely what constitutes a scandal. A good starting point seemed to be Henry Fielding’s remark: ‘Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea.’ That is to say, a scandal is any event that ‘lets the cat out of the bag’ and provides material for interesting gossip. That is why the best scandals seem to involve the downfall of some respectable person as a result of sexual or financial misdemeanours. The case of the rector of Stiffkey is probably the archetypal sexual scandal.
As I began to work on the book, I began to see an altogether more interesting common factor. When Ken Lay and his colleagues hid Enron’s financial woes from investors, they must have known that the true scale of the company’s losses would one day have to become public knowledge. So why did they do it? Because they were dual personalities. Lay was a respected and seemingly responsible businessman with access to the most powerful men in the United States, but another part of his personality seems to have had a coward’s inability to admit to and take responsibility for his own failures.
There is an ultimate stupidity about most criminals, even when they happen to be highly intelligent; they are a disturbing example of what William James calls ‘a certain blindness in human beings’. With people involved in scandal, it is not so much blindness as a kind of astigmatism. They want the world to see them as respectable, but there is an element of childish egoism that they somehow feel they ‘deserve’ to indulge. The late Dr Rachel Pinney, a successful psychiatrist, told me that as soon as she found herself alone in someone else’s house, she experienced an immediate compulsion to go and look in the drawers. She admitted that this dated back to childhood, when her parents went out and she was free to explore the ‘forbidden’ places of their bedroom. In The Idiot, there is a scene at a party where all the characters decide to tell one another the most shameful thing they have ever done – proof that Dostoevsky recognized this same ‘split’ as a fundamental part of human nature.
It is here that we can begin to grasp the deeper reasons for the fascination of scandal. Simone de Beauvoir remarked about Albert Camus that he often talked to her of an idea that obsessed him: that one day it had to be possible to write the Truth. ‘The truth, as she saw it, was that in Camus the gap between his life and his writing was wider than in many others,’ says Herbert Lottman, Camus’s biographer. Camus was an incorrigible seducer who found girls irresistible; his marriage dissolved because of this problem and he spent much of his time living in hotels where he could entertain his mistresses more freely. It must have seemed ironic to this man, who knew he was regarded as one of the major intellectual figures of his time, to have to go through the usual trivial patter necessary to get a girl into bed. He knew he was not interested in her personally, that all he wanted was to get her to remove her clothes. Yet he was supposed to be a humanist who taught the importance of personal relationships. In a deeper sense, he undoubtedly believed in compassion and personal relationships. So how could it be possible to tell the exact truth about oneself?
The same point emerges in a story Lottman tells about Sartre and Camus getting drunk and staggering back home in the early hours of the morning. ‘To think,’ said Sartre, ‘that in a few hours I’ll be lecturing in the Sorbonne about the writer’s responsibility.’ He was not suggesting that there was something hypocritical or particularly irresponsible about a ‘serious’ writer being drunk; only noting that the Sartre who stood up to speak to the students and the Sartre who was now weaving his way homeward were not quite the same person.
Now obviously, the simplest and crudest way of ‘not being the same person’ is to be a hypocrite, like Tartuffe. And that is why scandal intrigues us: because it suggests that truth has finally triumphed and the hypocrite stands exposed. But it is never quite as simple as that. Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde were certainly not hypocrites; in fact, they did their best to drop very broad hints about their ‘secret sins’ in their writings. (In the case of Wilde, I have always suspected some masochistic element that unconsciously connived in his own discovery and downfall.) H.G. Wells was not in the least hypocritical about his love life – indeed, he went out of his way to drop broad hints about it in many of his novels. Yet when confronted with a scandal – in the case of the young lady who tried to commit suicide on his carpet – he hastily contacted his friends on the newspapers and made sure nothing appeared in print. He had recognized what becomes very clear in this book: that scandal is a kind of distorting mirror that obscures the truth just as much as it reveals it.
This is because scandal is based on wishful thinking. The public wants to be shocked in order to confirm its own sense of virtue.
Which explains why the universal love of scandal can be so dangerous. Fatty Arbuckle caused the accidental death of a young girl by landing on her with his full weight when she had a distended bladder. The simple explanation was not enough for the American public, and rumours began to circulate that he had raped her with a bottle, that his member was abnormally large, and so on. Arbuckle, being a naive and good-natured soul, totally failed to grasp what was happening, and was convinced that the public would once again take him to its heart if he was allowed the opportunity to make more films. What he failed to understand was that as a star of silent films, he had become a kind of myth. He was the archetypal clown, like Buttons in the pantomime. After the death of Virginia Rappe, he suddenly became a different type of myth – the ravening monster. (All fairy tales of monsters and beasts have sexual overtones. Think of Little Red Riding Hood.) He had become a victim of the psychological distortion mechanism.
Hollywood is, of course, one enormous distorting mirror – which is why the section on Hollywood scandal is the longest in this book. Robert Harrison, the publisher of Hollywood’s most successful scandal magazine, Confidential, explained its success by saying, ‘Americans like to read about things which they are afraid to do themselves.’ But I am inclined to see this as an oversimplification. Would most people really have liked to launch the South Sea Bubble, or sodomize telegraph boys in cheap hotel rooms, or be involved in the bribery of politicians? Obviously not. What interests us is the contrast between myth and reality that becomes apparent when a scandal explodes.
Writers are particularly obsessed by this contrast because every writer sees it as his task to tell his own particular kind of truth. This occupation has its own dangers, as Graham Greene discovered when he reviewed a Shirley Temple film for a magazine in the 1930s and found himself in court on a libel charge. Evidently irritated by the sugary sweetness of the Shirley Temple image, Greene attempted to administer his own corrective by suggesting that her main appeal was to dirty old paedophiles; her studio was so enraged that they sued Greene on the grounds that he had accused them of procuring Miss Temple for immoral purposes. But why did the studio bother to sue the film critic of a small-circulation magazine? The answer must be that they felt that Greene was trying to prick the balloon, destroy the illusion, and their living depended on maintaining illusions.
This, then, is why we all enjoy reading about scandal: because we all enjoy seeing overinflated balloons explode. Yet this, as I have pointed out, is also a kind of illusion. Arbuckle was not really an overinflated balloon, even if he looked like one. Oscar Wilde was not really a monster of perversity. Scandal specializes in half-truths.
This is why the range of this book is so wide and why some of its ‘cases’ – for example H.G. Wells and Bertrand Russell – do not, strictly speaking, qualify as scandals. Scandal lies in the nature of a human being rather than in the chain of events that caused a public commotion. Some scandals, when examined objectively, dwindle to microscopic proportions, and we realize that this is because they were never really scandals in the first place. This applies especially to political scandals, which are usually inflated out of all proportion by journalists and opposition politicians. When I was in Washington in 1966, I had dinner at the house of a Georgetown hostess who had been a close friend of President Kennedy. When I asked whether it was true that Kennedy had been a notorious womanizer, everyone looked shocked and reproachful and I was assured that there was absolutely no truth in the story. By the time the revelations of Judith Exner – and other of the president’s exmistresses – began to appear, no one really cared any more. A recent paperback on Kennedy prints on its cover the story that when Jackie Kennedy came back from a journey, she found a pair of panties under the president’s pillow; she tossed them at Kennedy with the comment, ‘You’d better return these – they’re not my size.’ If Kennedy’s opponents had got hold of that story in the early 1960s, it would have been blown up into a major scandal; Kennedy would have been branded a lecherous beast, a faithless husband, a danger to national security. Twenty years or so later, the same story provokes admiring chuckles; it proves that Kennedy was masculine and virile and willing to take risks – in fact, precisely the kind of man who ought to be president.
It seems even more puzzling that in spite of endless scandals about his alleged mistresses, Bill Clinton was then elected president for a second term, and that the Monica Lewinsky scandal, in which he was proved to have a taste for oral sex, apparently had no impact whatever on his popularity, and it seems highly probable that, if he had been allowed to stand for a third term, he would have been elected again.
Why should that have been so? The reason, I would suggest, is obvious: that Clinton was such an easygoing charmer that most people liked him – which is also why those who tried to bring him down, like Ken Starr and Linda Tripp, garnered so much unpopularity and so little public support. And that, in retrospect, seems to be why Kennedy’s sexual exploits were never revealed by some ‘investigative journalist’ – everybody liked him. And to make a maximum impact, the central character in a scandal must be disliked – or at least, regarded as a figure of unimpeachable reputation.
This is why the Jeffrey Archer story provided the British press with so many acres of moralizing editorials. Archer’s rise to best-sellerdom and the House of Lords is certainly a remarkable success story. But the seeds of Archer’s downfall lay in his love of publicity. He could not resist boasting about his own achievement and emphasizing that he was a millionaire. And there can be no doubt that the association of his name with that of Margaret Thatcher did him no good, since – whatever her real political achievements – she was seen as a headmistressy authority figure, whose ultimate downfall pleased as many Conservatives as Socialists.
This is why, when Archer was accused of paying a prostitute to leave the country in 1986, many people smiled grimly. Few – including myself – had the slightest doubt that he was guilty. So when he was not only acquitted – due in part to the asinine remarks of the judge about Mary Archer’s ‘elegance’ and ‘fragrance’ – but also awarded staggering damages, most people seemed to feel that he had been far luckier than he deserved, and it was about time fate showed its impartiality by cutting him down to size. Under those circumstances, to stand as candidate for the mayor of London showed extraordinary tactlessness. Which explains why it caused such widespread satisfaction when, in 2000, he was found guilty of trying to pervert the course of justice, and sent to prison.
We could, of course, choose to look at all this from Archer’s point of view. The original libel case came about because of a deliberate ‘sting’ by the News of the World, who persuaded the prostitute in question to telephone him and explain that she was being persecuted by the press. So when he found himself on the front page of the News of the World, Archer undoubtedly felt that he had been treated unfairly. His chances of winning the case were only 50/50 – particularly when a reputable journalist, Adam Raphael, testifed in court that Archer had told him that he had met Monica Coughlan – thereby contradicting Archer’s own story. If it had not been for the judge’s obvious bias in favour of Mary Archer and against the newspapers concerned, he probably would have lost.
It is easy to see why Archer felt justified in asking a friend to change the date on which he was supposed to have dined with him. This evidence was not, in fact, required in court. But when Archer received his enormous damages, he probably muttered, ‘Serves ’em bloody well right.’ And in altering a little of the evidence in his own favour, he was simply trying to serve them right.
It seems highly probable that the Archer case had an influence on the subsequent downfall of Jonathan Aitken. Aitken’s remarks in Parliament about ‘the cancer of bent and twisted journalism’ have a ring of bitter sincerity. He had seen what happened to his colleague Jeffrey Archer, and must have been delighted to see the News of the World get its comeuppance. And he set out to give the press yet another black eye.
His mistake, we can now see, lay in overconfidence, and in not paying heed to the warning of the editor of the Guardian that he had proof that Aitken had not paid his own bill at the Ritz. Did it matter who had paid his bill? Probably not. Aitken’s mistake lay in deciding to make an issue of it.
There is one more important point to be made. In the course of writing my half of this book, it became increasingly clear to me that most of the people involved in scandals have the same problem: an extremely powerful sex drive. A glance down the Contents page will demonstrate that most of the people in it are extremely highly sexed. This is natural, because they belong to what zoologists call ‘the dominant five per cent’, and most dominant people are highly interested in sex. But we may also observe that most of these people also possessed a high degree of recklessness, and that it was their recklessness and lack of judgement that qualifies them for inclusion in Scandal! – an observation that adds a moral dimension to what would otherwise be a mere collection of gossip.
AITKEN, JONATHAN
A POLITICIAN’S SELF-DESTRUCTION
ONE OF THE most spectacular courtroom dramas of the 1990s ended in the downfall of the Conservative Cabinet Minister Jonathan Aitken, who had taken a libel action against the Guardian newspaper and Independent Television’s programme, World in Action. Before he began his action, Aitken made a speech in Parliament in which he declared: ‘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!’
In fact, as Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger remarked after the trial: ‘It was Aitken who was impaled on the sword of truth.’
Aitken had been an extraordinarily successful Conservative politician, who had made himself a fortune working as a ‘fixer’ for oil-rich Arabs – and in particular, for Prince Mohammed bin Fahd, the son of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia.
It might be said that the man who was ultimately responsible for Aitken’s fall from grace was his great-uncle Max Aitken, better known as Lord Beaverbrook, millionaire proprietor of the Daily Express and minister in Churchill’s wartime government. When Aitken was 21, in 1964, his great uncle told him that he had been making his will, and went on: ‘I’ve been thinking about you. You’re a very bright boy with a very bright future. In some ways you’re the best of the bunch. I’m going to pay you the greatest compliment – I’m not going to give you a single cent.’ Instead, he handed him £150: ‘Now here’s your fare back to Oxford.’
Aitken understood what he meant. His great-uncle was saying: ‘I’ve made my own way in the world and I believe that’s the way it should be done. If I give you too much help, it would only make you lazy.’
In fact, the young Aitken had a great deal going for him. Born on 30 August 1942, Jonathan William Patrick Aitken was the son of a Conservative Member of Parliament, Sir William Traven Aitken, and Lady Penelope Aitken, daughter of the 1st Baron of Rugby. His maternal grandfather was Lord Rugby, a distinguished colonial civil servant, who taught Jonathan Latin, French and poetry. Jonathan had started life badly, with tuberculosis of the lungs that spread to his bones. He spent three years in a plaster cast. In due course, he was sent to Eton. There, as the President of the Political Society, he acquired his skill in debating and in the judicious use of the English language. Unfortunately, the ritual beatings administered by prefects – whose ranks he eventually joined – also gave him a taste for flogging and being flogged.
At Christ Church College, Oxford, he read law. Although his father had quarrelled with Lord Beaverbrook, Aitken wrote to his great-uncle asking if he could come and see him, and Beaverbrook was impressed. As a result, Aitken came to know the Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, and became a part-time speechwriter to Selwyn Lloyd, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. And so, while still at Oxford, he got his foot on the bottom rung of the political ladder.
When Selwyn Lloyd was sacked by Macmillan in the famous ‘Night of the Long Knives’, Aitken went with Lloyd to Spain, helping him through a near-breakdown. As a result, he was appointed Lloyd’s private secretary. He was soon mixing with all the senior Tories. When Selwyn Lloyd became Leader of the House, Aitken’s prospects were greatly enhanced. Nevertheless, he turned down a suggestion by Randolph Churchill that he should contest a safe Tory seat at the age of twenty.
Aitken’s father died in 1964, the same year as Lord Beaverbrook. Aitken was left only £5,000 and business interests in Canada (the original home of Lord Beaverbrook).
He joined the Evening Standard, which belonged to the Express Group, and proved to be a naturally brilliant journalist. He had already co-authored a travel book on America called A Short Walk on the Campus; now he went on to write a book called Young Meteors, about the up-and-coming younger generation, in which he singled out Roy Hattersley, and even mentioned David Frost and the Beatles. He also wrote a chapter about prostitution with some emphasis on sado-masochism. At his book launch, he met a girl named Jenny Fabian, who was also an author. She returned to his flat, where he asked her if she would like to be whipped with an electric cable, then tied her hands to the bedposts with a cord from his maroon silk dressing-gown. But then, Aitken found it easy to get women, having the looks of a matinée idol, and his sex life was interesting and varied.
He became a presenter for Yorkshire TV and, in that capacity, travelled to Nigeria to report on the civil war. It was because of this visit that he became embroiled in an affair that led to his first appearance in court, and caused him to lose the nomination for a Conservative safe seat in Yorkshire.
In December 1969, Aitken went to dinner with Major-General Henry Templar Alexander, the father of a girl Aitken had escorted to a dance. Alexander had served in Nigeria as a military observer, and was a supporter of the Federal forces who were fighting the rebel Biafrans. Alexander showed the young Conservative contender a document which revealed that Harold Wilson’s Labour government was supplying arms to the Nigerian Federal forces. It was by a British official in the High Commission in Lagos, Colonel Robert Scott. Aitken photocopied this, sent it to his political mentor, Hugh Fraser, then sold the report to the Sunday Telegraph. The result was an article with the headline: SECRET BIAFRAN WAR PLAN REVEALED: MUDDLE, CORRUPTION, WASTE.
The consequence of this revelation was that Colonel Scott was expelled. Alexander also found himself in trouble. Aitken lost no time in shifting the blame for the leak to Hugh Fraser, but the major-general had recorded the conversation in which Aitken explained that he was not to blame, and Aitken found himself in court for breaching the Official Secrets Act. Fortunately for Aitken, the judge, Mr Justice Caulfield, disliked both the Labour government and the Official Secrets Act and Aitken was acquitted.
But the trial cost him his ‘safe seat’. The affair made him a lifelong opponent of the Official Secrets Act.
Aitken completed his betrayal of Hugh Fraser by having an affair with his wife, Lady Antonia Fraser. In their book The Liar: The Fall of Jonathan Aitken, Luke Harding, David Leigh, a TV producer, and David Pallister, a Guardian journalist, mention that Aitken’s other conquests included Lady Charlotte Curzon, the daughter of Earl Howe, Elizabeth Harrison, former wife of actors Richard Harris and Rex Harrison, Arianna Stassinopoulos, Germaine Greer, Soraya Khashoggi, the ex-wife of the millionaire arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, and (at the same time) Soraya’s maid.
Aitken finally became a Conservative Member of Parliament at the age of 32, in 1974.
However, Mrs Thatcher failed to warm to Aitken, perhaps prejudiced by Aitken’s remark to a Cairo newspaper that ‘I wouldn’t say she’s open-minded on the Middle East so much as empty-headed. She probably thinks Sinai is the plural of sinus.’ This was picked up by Private Eye, and the MP Airey Neave told Aitken to apologize.
He further alienated Mrs Thatcher by having a romance with her daughter Carol, who was ten years his junior. She went with him to knock on doors during his political campaign, as did his secretary Valerie Scott, with whom he was having an affair. Mrs Thatcher later referred to Aitken as ‘the man who made Carol cry’.
His political advancement blocked, Aitken went into business and started a company to manage Unit Trusts. With his cousin, Tim Aitken, he formed a financial-services group, Aitken Hume. He soon ousted his cousin as chairman, and Tim Aitken was to tell friends that he had got ‘a knife between his shoulder blades’.
Aitken was also associated with the immensely successful firm Slater-Walker, which was to collapse in 1974 as an indirect result of the Arab oil crisis.
The previous year, Aitken had attended a lunch in Paris and met a Saudi prince who loved everything British: Mohammed bin Fahd, son of the Crown Prince Fahd – the latter would become king in 1975 when his father, King Faisal, was assassinated. Mohammed and Aitken liked one another, with the consequence that Mohammed invited Aitken to call on him if he happened to come to Riyadh.
Mohammed’s financial advisor and ‘fixer’ was a charming and good-looking young man called Said Ayas, who would play a major part in Aitken’s rise – and fall.
If you were a Saudi prince – or a close friend of a Saudi prince – it was easy to become very wealthy. Saudi Arabia’s wealth was based on oil, which had begun to flow in 1933. With its immense wealth, the country needed new towns, universities, railways, air transport, industrial machinery, a telephone system, and all the other appurtenances of modern civilization. The Western companies that were called upon to supply these goods and services could make such enormous profits that they were perfectly happy to pay large bribes to anyone who could persuade the Saudis to accept their tender. (Bribery was endemic in the Middle East.) Prince Mohammed was the chief of these ‘fixers’ and reckoned on making an income of $60 million per year in commissions. Ayas’s income also ran to millions annually.
Jonathan Aitken made contact with the Saudis at about the time of the Yom Kippur war of October 1973, when Egypt and Syria united against Israel, and which ended in an Israeli victory. But as Israel expanded its territory the Arabs began to use the ‘oil weapon’, and it was their threat to cut off Western supplies of oil that led the West to intervene and bring the war to an end. In fact, Colonel Gaddafi of Libya had already begun to raise oil prices shortly after his takeover in 1971.
In 1973, in the euphoria of the original successes of Egypt and Syria in the Yom Kippur war, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) doubled the oil prices, and then doubled them again that December. So Aitken came along when Saudi Arabia was literally awash with new wealth.
It was at the end of 1974 that Aitken flew to Riyadh and called at Said Ayas’s house for dinner. Six months later, he discovered the way to Ayas’s heart. Ayas’s brother, Mimo, wanted to go to Cambridge, but only had an American degree that was not recognized by the university. Aitken pulled strings, and soon Mimo had been accepted at Downing College. It was the foundation of Aitken’s friendship with Ayas – and of Aitken’s fortune. Ayas introduced him to a rich Palestinian entrepreneur named Ramzi Sanbar who had made his fortune in the Saudi construction business. When the war between Muslim and Christian militias drove him out of Lebanon in 1975, Sanbar moved to London.
Soon, Aitken was installed in Sanbar’s magnificent office in Park Lane. The authors of The Liar write: ‘Sitting in a wood-panelled ground floor office, with his feet up on a mahogany desk, Aitken must have felt a cut above his parliamentary colleagues, making do with cramped offices in the Gothic labyrinth of the House of Commons.’ There was a price, however, to this Faustian arrangement. From now on, Valerie Scott recalls, this junior Conservative back-bencher was obliged to do ‘whatever made the Arabs happy’.
Aitken became Chairman of the British-Saudi Parliamentary Group in the Commons, which gave him access to free travel to Riyadh. He was to remark: ‘I wish I had some interests to declare in this area, so fantastic are those opportunities.’ Aitken soon had plenty of interests to declare – although, oddly enough, they were never declared in the newly drafted Register of MPs’ Interests.
Aitken was given a magnificent blue Jaguar by his new employers; he admonished Valerie Scott not to tell anyone the prince had given him the car, adding that he was particularly anxious that his constituents (whom he described as ‘peasants’) should not find out. The authors of The Liar mention that ‘gifts of expensive cars from princes to hangers-on were routine in those heady days. A joke going the rounds in Riyadh was that princely Cadillacs were dumped when the ashtrays were full.’
When the prince and his entourage came to Britain – which happened several times a year for a fortnight at a time – Aitken was there to do his bidding.
His white Rolls-Royce, upholstered in blue velvet, would pull up on the cobbled forecourt [of the Sanbar office]. A retinue of followers would throng into the rather sombre office. It was always a moment of high excitement for Sanbar’s staff. The office butler had laid on sandwiches and the prince’s favourite chocolate gateau from a local patisserie. At the end of each visit Said Ayas would get out the envelopes. Sometimes it was £250; if the prince was especially generous it might be £1,000 – the equivalent of three months’ wages. The envelopes were handed out to everybody – the receptionist, butler and secretaries.
Aitken’s envelope was assumed to contain very large sums indeed.
He worked for it. He learned Arabic, went along with the prince to various casinos – although gambling bored him – and came running whenever Mohammed beckoned.
Typical of Mohammed’s activity was a deal he brokered with the Dutch electronics firm, Philips. They were invited to place a bid to modernize the Saudi telephone system. The sum they quoted was £3.5 billion. The Saudi’s own consultants estimated that it could be done for a little over half a billion. Other electronics firms – particularly in the US – protested, so that King Fahd felt obliged to put the contract out to the lowest bidder. Philips thereupon sent in a revised bid for £1.7 billion, and were given the contract in December 1977. Prince Mohammed’s commission was $300 million, while Said Ayas collected $50 million. Presumably Ramzi Sanbar and his advisor Jonathan Aitken also collected commission.
In the summer of 1977, Aitken helped Prince Mohammed buy a jet plane. It was a Boeing 747 Jumbo which even had a fountain. It was Aitken who introduced Mohammed to Sir Kenneth Heath, the Chairman of Rolls-Royce, at the Paris air show. The plane cost £3.5 million – little more than small change to Mohammed. Pilots were supplied by British Caledonian and Aitken recruited some of the air-hostesses.
In the following year, Aitken’s power increased when the prince dispensed with the services of Ramzi Sanbar, and got Aitken to buy a new office only fifty yards away from the old one in Mayfair. Aitken became managing director of the firm, which was called Al Bilad. Said Ayas was a director. Aitken purchased Rolls-Royces and Bentleys for the prince, and shipped them out to Arabia. The prince came to own a fleet of ninety.
But the chief business of Al Bilad UK was to act as the middleman for UK business contracts with Saudi Arabia. Its commission fees, charged to the British supplier, were 15 per cent. The authors of The Liar quote a businessman who met Aitken: ‘a working man can quickly spot a spiv a million miles away. He was incredibly rude to people who worked for him and obsequious to the Arabs. He was like their messenger boy.’
Aitken had by then acquired himself a wife, Serbian born Lolicia Azucki, who later admitted that she had quite determinedly set out to marry him. At first her campaign was unsuccessful – Aitken would even refuse to take her telephone calls – but when she nursed him through typhoid at the end of 1977, he decided that, after all, he needed a wife.
In 1980, Aitken’s contact with the Saudis enabled him to move into a four-storey Georgian town house in Connaught Square. It cost £183,000. A year later, they bought a Westminster house at 8, Lord North Street, close to the House of Commons and Conservative Central Office. In 1987, he was to buy the White House in Sandwich, in his Kent constituency, overlooking the Royal St George’s golf course, which cost £500,000.
A sudden crisis in Britain’s relations with Saudi Arabia brought new opportunities. Commercial television presented a drama, based on real life, involving the execution of a Saudi princess and her lover for adultery. The princess was executed by being shot in the back of the head. Officially, she was declared to have died in a swimming pool accident. The programme was broadcast in March 1980, and the Saudis were infuriated. The British Foreign Office apologized fulsomely through Lord Carrington, but Aitken benefited by the incident when the Saudis decided that they should try to acquire some influence by buying an interest in the British media. Aitken was part of a consortium that won the franchise for Breakfast TV. Peter Jay, the Chairman of TV-am, later declared: ‘I was given the impression [the money] came from cutting down a Beaverbrook forest in Canada.’
In fact, the Arab stake in TV-am contravened rules which prevented non-Europeans from controlling British TV stations. The answer was not to let it become known. When TV-am’s ratings plummeted, Peter Jay was ousted in favour of Jonathan Aitken – who was also quickly ousted by the Independent Broadcasting Authority because, as a Conservative MP, he could not be regarded as politically impartial. It was a cartoon character called Roland Rat who rescued TV-am’s ratings.
Aitken’s cousin, Tim, who had apparently failed to learn from the ‘knife between the shoulder blades’ administered when he was ousted from the Chairmanship of Aitken Hume, had also joined the board of TV-am, but was once again dismissed. His place was taken by the Syrian entrepreneur Wafic Said.
Seven years later, Tim Aitken would tell the Observer newspaper about the Saudi financial backing organized by his cousin.
Mrs Thatcher’s downfall came in 1990. John Major stepped into her shoes, and in 1992, Aitken was made Minister of State for Defence Procurement.
In fact, Mrs Thatcher had signed an arms deal with Saudi Arabia in 1986. It was worth £1.5 billion a year to the Ministry of Defence. For a Tornado Fighter-Bomber which cost £20 million to build, the Saudis were charged £35 million. The manufacturers then paid 26 per cent of the price in ‘commission’. Helicopters, mine-sweepers and other arms sold to the Saudis were subject to a similar arrangement. Associates of Aitken did very well out of the deals. Wafic Said was able to afford a £9 million apartment in London, a town house in Regent’s Park, a Paris apartment, a villa in Marbella, a ski-lodge in Switzerland, and a flat in Monaco.
Although Aitken did not know it, the seeds of his downfall were sown in 1979 when an Alexandria-born entrepreneur named Mohammed al Fayed bought the run-down Ritz Hotel in Paris and set out to turn it into a home-from-home for the very rich. Jacques Chirac, then Mayor of Paris, presented al Fayed with the freedom of the city. But in London, this colourful Egyptian businessman was regarded with rather less favour by the British establishment.
According to the unauthorized biography by Tom Bower, al Fayed started out selling Coca-Cola on the streets of his home town of Alexandria, got a job with arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi and married his sister, then, in the 1960s, persuaded the dictator Papa Doc Duvalier of Haiti to put money into various capital projects, from which the dictator failed to gain the expected returns.
In the 1970s, al Fayed and his brother met the remarkable businessman Tiny Rowland, who had made his fortune in Africa, and who was the head of a firm called Lonrho. For a while, the al Fayeds were on the board of Lonrho. But al Fayed disapproved of Rowland’s methods, and there was a parting. In 1985, during a cash crisis, Rowland asked Mohammed al Fayed to buy some of his shares in the House of Fraser Group (which owned Harrods), which Rowland was hoping to take over. What followed was considered by Rowland to be a piece of appalling treachery – it was al Fayed who took over the House of Fraser. And the government, which had opposed Rowland’s bid (Rowland had been the target of Mr Heath’s comment about ‘the unacceptable face of capitalism’), supported al Fayed and enabled him to take over the House of Fraser. Rowland was so furious that he spent the rest of his life trying to destroy al Fayed. Although he failed, and al Fayed was the eventual winner of their extremely public battle, the loquacious Egyptian did himself no good by saying uncomplimentary things about the British establishment. He was particularly incensed by a Department of Trade and Industry inspectors’ report into his takeover of the House of Fraser which declared that al Fayed had lied about his origins.
In June 1993, al Fayed invited Peter Preston, the editor of the Guardian, to come and meet him in his office above Harrods. The Guardian had published a story about secret donations to the Conservative Party before the 1992 General Election, which led to the threat of a libel action. Al Fayed, who claimed indignantly that the government ‘had shat on him’, made accusations about Margaret Thatcher, her son, Mark, and business dealings with the Arabs. At the same time, he mentioned that he had been paying two Members of Parliament, Neil Hamilton and Tim Smith, to ask questions in Parliament that would help Fayed in his battle with Tiny Rowland.
As a result of that meeting, two Guardian reporters began investigating the matter of party funding.
But Fayed had come upon another story that he thought might interest the Guardian. And he told Preston about it on 16 October 1993. On the weekend of 17 September, Fayed had seen Jonathan Aitken in the Ritz Hotel in Paris together with Said Ayas, while Wafic Said was also in the hotel. According to Fayed, this amounted to seeing the Attorney General dining with Al Capone.
Moreover, said al Fayed, Aitken had not paid his own bill for that weekend. It had been debited to Ayas. And to prove his point, Fayed showed Preston a copy of the bill. It was for 8,010 French francs which, at approximately 8 francs to the pound sterling, was about £1,000. Since Aitken had not declared the benefits that came to him via Prince Mohammed in the MPs’ Register of Interests, he was in breach of the Rules for Ministers.
Preston was not deeply interested. A mere thousand pounds seemed a fairly minor matter. After all, Aitken was known to be a millionaire. Nevertheless, David Pallister, a Guardian journalist who was an expert on Saudi affairs, wrote to Aitken about his weekend at the Ritz, and asked ‘how it relates to your job in Government?’
Aitken’s reply stated that the purpose of his visit to Paris that weekend had nothing whatsoever to do with Said Ayas, or Wafic Said. He was there, he said, to meet his wife and seventeen-year-old daughter, who were going to her new school in Switzerland that weekend. According to Aitken, he had had no ‘social encounters’ that weekend except with the godparents of his daughter Victoria.
Pallister happened to know that Said Ayas was Victoria Aitken’s godfather. So Aitken’s letter might be regarded as a deliberate evasion.
At this point, the affair certainly showed no sign of the storm that was brewing. Aitken had had his bill paid by his daughter’s godfather, and he might have made a thousand excuses that would have satisfied Pallister’s curiosity. Perhaps Ayas had accepted Aitken’s hospitality in London, and was simply returning the favour. Or perhaps Aitken had simply left his credit card behind. Such excuses would have ended the affair there and then.
However, Preston happened to know Aitken personally, and since he had reporters investigating possible Tory financial irregularities, he asked if Aitken would like to explain himself more fully.
Aitken replied breezily that he felt that Preston had put two and two together and made about seven, and that the dinner in Paris was simply ‘a casually arranged family affair’. It was nothing whatever to do with business.
But in that case, why had Ayas paid Aitken’s bill?
Now, although Preston had seen a copy of this bill in al Fayed’s office, al Fayed had refused to give it to him. But al Fayed was helpful about how the Guardian could obtain a copy. They merely had to fax a letter on Aitken’s House of Commons notepaper asking if a copy of the bill could be sent to the fax number at the top of the letter – which was actually the Guardian’s fax. Forty-eight hours later, the copy of the bill arrived. The ruse was not quite honest, of course, but then, its sole purpose was to keep al Fayed’s name out of the story.
So now, on 11 January 1994, Preston wrote again to Aitken, saying that paying a bill for a thousand pounds had been ‘an extraordinary act of generosity’ on the part of Ayas, and asking him to explain it.
Aitken then made his fatal mistake. In his reply, he stated that Preston had been misinformed: ‘Mr Ayas did not pay my hotel bill . . . the hotel bill was paid by my wife, with money given to her by me for this purpose some hours after I’d left Paris.’
Aitken had now committed himself to a lie, which he would eventually be forced to defend in court.
The truth was that Lolicia Aitken had not even been in Paris that weekend. She had gone to Switzerland to take her daughter, Victoria, to finishing school there, and had then flown straight back to Heathrow. In committing himself to a lie, Aitken was playing with fire.
Preston replied: ‘I’m afraid I cannot easily accept your assurances about the Ritz bill . . .’ The Guardian was in a position to prove that Aitken had not paid his hotel bill. Moreover, Aitken’s assurance that his wife had paid the bill was rather mysterious in view of the fact that the bill showed that Aitken had been occupying a single room that weekend and, therefore, presumably, his wife was not there.
Soon, Aitken was phoning the Guardian to claim that he had now found his Ritz bill and had located ‘an independent French witness’ who confirmed that his wife Lolicia had paid it. Mr Ayas, he said, had now received a letter from the Ritz Hotel confirming that he did not pay the bill, and that Mrs Aitken did.
Since Aitken had invited Preston to refer the matter to Sir Robin Butler, the Cabinet Secretary, Preston sent the correspondence between himself and Aitken to Butler. Sir Robin asked Aitken whether he had paid his hotel bill, and Aitken assured him that he had. Thereupon, Butler wrote to Preston saying that Aitken had paid his own bill and so no breach of ministerial guidelines had taken place. Preston’s response was to send the correspondence on to the Prime Minister, John Major.
The stakes increased in July 1994 when John Major appointed Aitken a minister, Chief Secretary to the Treasury. He could now call himself ‘Right Honourable’.
In September 1994, al Fayed complicated the issue when he lost his temper after losing a case in the European Court of Human Rights. He had attempted to have the report by the Department of Trade and Industry into his Harrods takeover declared in breach of the Convention. Furious at what he saw as yet another betrayal by the British Government (who were also preventing him becoming a British citizen), al Fayed asked Preston to come and see him again. He was quite determined to cause the Government any embarrassment he could. This meant admitting that he had paid money to Neil Hamilton and Tim Smith to raise questions in Parliament.
When the Guardian printed this story, Tim Smith promptly resigned, and Hamilton was, in effect, sacked, insisting on his innocence.
Shortly thereafter, the Guardian printed an article about the Aitken affair, and the result was that the Shadow Chancellor, Gordon Brown, asked in Parliament whether any part of Aitken’s bill had been paid by Mr Ayas. Aitken answered: ‘I would very much welcome a chance to answer the question, not least because it is the first chance to clear myself of the scurrilous allegations that have been made.’ And since the allegations against him now included the charge that he had lied to the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robin Butler, he flourished a letter in which Sir Robin Butler declared that he did not regard Aitken as having lied to him. ‘I hope that the House . . . will accept both my assurance and the Cabinet Secretary’s assurance and put an end to the hysterical episode of sleaze journalism by the Guardian.’
Aitken had now lied to the House of Commons.
The story about the Guardian’s fake letter to the Ritz had now also come out, having been leaked by the Downing Street Press Office. The Tories were furious, and demanded Preston’s head. One Member of Parliament, Roger Gale, described Preston as ‘the whore from hell’.
At the end of 1994, exhausted and depressed by the struggle, Preston resigned as editor, and Alan Rusbridger took over the post.
But as far as Aitken was concerned, the enemies were multiplying. The Independent Television programme World in Action had become interested in the affair, particularly in the fact that Aitken was taking part in the sale of arms to the Saudis at the time when he was Defence Procurement Minister. Its producer, David Leigh, had built up a reputation for fearlessness, and now decided to start digging into Aitken’s background.
The first thing he discovered was Aitken’s enthusiasm for being whipped. This seemed to be widely known in London society. As to Aitken’s dealings with the Saudis, David Pallister of the Guardian was the ideal ally.
Another interesting scandal that Leigh uncovered had to do with a ‘Health Hydro’, named Inglewood, that Aitken had run in the 1970s. Apparently many rich Arabs had taken advantage of its facilities, and had been supplied with call girls.
The result was a television programme called ‘Jonathan of Arabia’, which went out on the evening of 10 April 1995. And it was on that day, a few hours before the programme, that Aitken stood up in the House of Commons and made the speech which included his fighting declaration about the ‘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’. It was at this point that he seems to have decided that he had no alternative than to sue the Guardian and World in Action for libel.
Guardian