AND ANOTHER THING
The newspaper editor, the police and the dyslexic teenage girl
PAUL JOHNSON
The great forensic miracle of our age is the improvement of public order in New York City, which strikes me more forcibly every time I go there. New York is now a comparatively safe place in which to live and enjoy oneself. The huge improvement is not a consequence of sociological devel- opments or any similar nonsense. It is due entirely to decisive leadership from a deter- mined mayor and a police chief who stands no nonsense from criminals. You may ask: why can't we have the same thing in Lon- don? A good question. Here is another. At a time when the Metropolitan Police have Countless unsolved crimes on their books, and more and more people are pointing to the contrast between safe New York and dangerous London, why are the police spending tens of thousands of man-hours and God knows how much public money on hounding a broken politician and his strick- en family?
Where is the public interest involved in the police investigation of Jonathan Aitken, his wife and teenage daughter for conspira- cy? The only reason the police are doing it is because they were asked to do so by Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian, in a moment of vindictive triumph when Mr Aitken was forced to withdraw his libel action last year. No other complaint was received. It may be said: but was not all this Aitken's own fault, since it was he who involved his wife and child in the case? He did, and long and bitterly has he repented doing so. Contrary to the Guardian's relentless propaganda, unthinkingly echoed in other newspapers in a spirit of profes- sional solidarity, Mr Aitken is not a cold- hearted, calculating criminal, but a warm, spontaneous and decent man, who is still in love with his estranged wife and is devoted to his daughter Victoria, as countless actions of his testify. But in 1997 he was a man under unbear- able pressure. Few people can understand how lonely it is for a single individual like Mr Aitken, who has never been conspicu- ously wealthy, to take on a powerful news- Paper like the Guardian, with its attendant lackey the Observer, vast resources in jour- nalistic manpower, the backing of the immensely wealthy Scott Trust and not least the active assistance of a billionaire who employs a sizeable army of ex-police- men and 'security experts' to do his bid- ding.
Despite all this, Mr Aitken had won most of the substantive points, and the Guardian had withdrawn various serious charges against him, when his case collapsed over the comparatively minor matter of the Ritz hotel bill, a copy of which the Guardian had obtained by forgery. Mr Aitken's motives in practising deception over this bill have never been explained. I now believe they were honourable and will shortly be made public by others. Mohamed Fayed's huge intelligence service had put the Guardian people on to evidence which eventually exposed the deceit in the last stages of a stressful case, in which Mr Aitken, during many hours in the witness box, had success- fully defended himself against the persis- tent assaults of the wily George Carman QC. Then came the blow. In an obvious state of alarm in the Aitken legal camp, Victoria was rushed over from Germany at the last minute and asked to sign a witness statement. Mr Aitken has often said how much he regrets this foolish move he made in a state of panic.
Mr Rusbridger's request that Victoria be drawn into the criminal justice system was not made in a state of panic. It was calcu- lated. First, let us look more closely at the child. Victoria was born on 14 June 1980, the younger of identical twins. Unlike her twin, she suffered a series of dramatic med- ical crises in her early weeks. She grew up a delicate and severely dyslexic child, though by all accounts an enchanting one. But she has many handicaps to contend with, including poor reading and spelling, and a notably bad memory. Despite ceaseless attempts by her parents to get her the best treatment and to send her to the most suit- able schools, her education has been dislo- cated: she went to six different schools between the ages of five and 12. She was 13 at the time of the events she was asked to recall nearly four years later, and for all kinds of complex reasons she seems to have made and signed her witness statement in good faith. She had not even read about the case in the newspapers. All she knew was that her father was up against it. She wanted to 'help daddy'. It seems to me that if she was a conspirator, she was a most ignorant one. One might have thought that Mr Rusbridger, who has two young daugh- ters himself, would have drawn the line at involving such a hapless girl in a criminal accusation, but he was determined to cross this moral Rubicon.
The way the Aitken family see it, Victo- ria is a key element in the vendetta against him. The case that he committed perjury, despite all the efforts of the police, is not conclusive by any means. But the collateral conspiracy charge would involve putting Victoria in the witness box as an accused person. To spare her this, Mr Aitken may decide to plead guilty to the perjury charge, on the understanding that the conspiracy charge will be dropped. This is the dilemma in which Mr Aitken finds himself.
Mr Rusbridger's recent behaviour is interesting. Aware that public opinion is moving against him over the persecution of Mr Aitken and Victoria, he is now anxious to minimise his own involvement in the prosecution. On 17 April he published an article in the Times insisting that his letter to Sir Paul Condon, head of the Metropoli- tan Police, was 'short' and tentative, and that 'since writing the initial letter I have made no contact with the police or the Crown Prosecution Service'. In fact Mr Rusbridger wrote not only to Sir Paul but to the Director of Public Prosecutions, and what he now says is contradicted by the official Guardian account. These letters were not polite requests about whether an offence had been committed, but formal allegations of 'the clearest evidence of a well laid and carefully co-ordinated con- spiracy to pervert the course of justice' against Mr Aitken and Victoria. Moreover, having requested the proceedings, the Guardian instructed its solicitors to meet Scotland Yard officers and hand over files of documents. The collaboration between the Guardian and the police has continued. At least one Guardian journalist has been instructed to provide evidence and give interviews to the police about Victoria. So the pressure is kept up.
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