Disgraced Aitken in key new Tory role

My God, one could almost convince oneself that the Tories believe that prison is for rehabilitation as opposed to punishment.

Jonathan Aitken, the disgraced former Tory cabinet minister who was jailed for perjury, will be rehabilitated into the political frontline tomorrow when he takes charge of a task force on prison reform that will help formulate Conservative policy.

In one of the most spectacular comebacks in recent British political history, which meets with the approval of senior members of the shadow cabinet, Aitken is to chair a high-powered group of criminal justice experts that will examine the crisis in Britain's prisons.

Readers from the US will be unaware of the Aitken case. Suffice to say there were questions raised over who paid the bill at the Paris Ritz in 1993, with journalists suggesting that it had been paid by Aitken's former business partner, Said Ayas, on behalf of Prince Mohammed, a son of the Saudi king.

Aitken, for reasons no-one has ever been able to fathom, claimed the bill was paid by his wife who he said was holidaying with him and his daughter in Paris that weekend. He sued the Guardian newspaper armed, he claimed, by 'the simple sword of truth' and the Guardian won when it was proven that Aitken's wife and daughter were actually not in Paris at all.

What caused most of the outrage at the time was that Aitken had his sixteen year old daughter sign a witness statement which was totally false and, had she herself taken to the stand, she too may have been guilty of perjury.

Mr Justice Scott Baker ordered him to serve at least nine months of an 18-month sentence for 'calculated perjury' and the 'gross and inexcusable breach of trust' in asking his daughter Victoria, then 16, to sign a false witness statement.

At the time Aitken was one of the most pompous of Thatcher's Tory MP's, guilty - as he himself put it - of 'vaulting pride and passion'.

Years later I saw him in a cinema in the Fulham Road and was struck by the change in him. He actually looked humbled.

'I found my prison experience a painful one, but also an eye-opening one and an enriching one and, at the end of the day, a positive one. There are so many things are good about our prisons. It is a decent system, badly run because of enormous pressures. But most prison officers and prison governors are in my experience - there is the occasional bad apple - good people struggling to do a good job under huge pressures. I want to start from a position of qualified admiration for what they do already.'

I personally think Aitken is the perfect person to do a study into prison reform and wish him all the very best in his new role.

I only hope that, if the Tories can recognise that one of their own deserves a new chance, that they can extend that generosity to the majority of people who find themselves in prison, and further recognise that prison should exist to reform behaviour rather than simply to punish.

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Tags: Jonathan Aitken, disgraced former Tory cabinet minister, prison reform