Daily Mail, 7 February 2004

We journalists are a cynical lot. So the attempt by the disgraced former MP Jonathan Aitken to stand for Parliament once again in his old constituency of Thanet South provoked predictable belly-laughs and raised eyebrows among the press.

The Tory leader Michael Howard blocked his return, showing he has no intention of risking the Tory party’s fragile recovery from the toxic stain of sleaze of which Mr Aitken’s fall from grace became such a potent symbol. Now Mr Aitken has thrown in the towel and abandoned his attempt.

The former defence minister and Chief Secretary to the Treasury in John Major’s government served nine months in prison for perjury. Having previously resigned his ministerial post to fight charges of accepting Arab hospitality against all the rules, he then lied about having accepted it in a libel case he brought against the Guardian newspaper.

Since he had vowed to fight ‘journalistic lies’ with his ‘sword of truth’, his conviction turned him into an icon of political mendacity. Now, however, at the age of 61 and seven years after his offence was committed, he thought that society should accept he was a reformed character.

To prove it, he has become a devout professional Christian. Having spent two years studying theology following his release from jail, he served as director of four Christian charities and wrote a book, Psalms for People Under Pressure, in which he observed: ‘many people remain, throughout their lives, in a state of denial about their own sinfulness’.

Pull the other one, say the professional cynics, it’s got bells on. Christian penitence? Come off it. What a convenient conversion to piety. Once a con- man, always a con-man. And in any event, how could he have returned to the Commons and the public life he had so polluted?

That seems far too harsh. Just as everyone has capacity for good and evil, so everyone is capable in principle of redeeming themselves through remorse, contrition or a desire to make amends.

In political life, the outstanding example of redemption is John Profumo. Forty years ago, he resigned in disgrace after lying to Parliament over his affair with Christine Keeler. Ever since, he has devoted his life to good works in London’s East End.

Profumo redeemed himself through a life of service to others and patent humility. From this, we infer that he is truly sorry for the wrong he committed. As a result, he is now held in infinitely higher esteem than members of the Parliament from which he was exiled in such disgrace.

Compare and contrast such selfless behaviour with the antics of the aristocrat Lord Brocket, who was jailed for five years after his £4.5 million fraud over the faked theft of over-insured antique Ferraris. Lord Brocket’s demonstration of post-sentence humility and remorse has been to cavort about in the jungle on the demeaning and voyeuristic TV show I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! where grappling with the combined perils of Jordan and assorted creepy-crawlies is likely to renew interest from publishers in his autobiography.

Or take Lord Archer, who was jailed for four years for perjury, two of which he served. Unlike Mr Aitken, Lord Archer was not a model prisoner — he cocked a snook at the system by attending a lunch party thrown by a political friend, for which breach of the rules he was moved to a more secure prison. Since his release he has kept a relatively low profile and raised money for good causes, but suspicions persist that he is merely preparing for yet another self-serving come-back. Last Christmas, he resumed his famous champagne and shepherd’s pie parties, and in the publicity flier for his London marathon entry he names four famous people who are backing him.

Cynicism over Mr Aitken’s motives has been fuelled by the very fact that he wants to return to public life. Mr Profumo, after all, turned his back on it for ever for a life of duty. Of course, the life of an MP involves duty and public service too —but it also brings with it power, influence and status. In other words, Mr Aitken’s application might have been a case of I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Back In There!

The speed of his desire to return also provoked unease. Time is not only a great healer but a great redeemer. The more time that passes after a wrong has been done surely makes us more likely to give the miscreant the benefit of the doubt that he is genuinely sorry for what he once did and has tried to make amends.

This is why people in public life, who may be justly pilloried for behaviour in their private lives which calls their current judgment into question, should not be denounced for misdemeanours committed decades previously.

Mr Profumo proved by his long years of dedicated service that he had learned his lesson. Mr Aitken’s offence, by contrast, is still too fresh in the memory.

Nevertheless, what he says now does seem to reveal a true long night of the soul. In his book, he describes how after ‘defeat, disgrace, divorce, bankruptcy and now jail’ he embarked on a spiritual journey to forge a ‘right relationship with God’ — the ‘amazing’ results of the ‘discipline of prayer’ to which he turned for comfort on his first night in prison.

What seems really peruasive, however, is the apparent honesty with which he faces up to his faults, not only insisting that he has no-one but himself to blame but avoiding any glib assertions that he has now learnt all the lessons that he needed to learn.

On the contrary, he displays a disarming willingness to face up to the most difficult questions. Thus he recognises a ‘real danger that he may simply have replaced political pride with spiritual pride’. He still admits to ‘all kinds of minor failures and dishonesties of character - and maybe some major ones’. And he says he would even apologise to the Guardian journalist he accused before his trial of ‘the cancer of bent and twisted journalism’.

The result of that was a warm leader in the Guardian yesterday hailing his ‘remorse, regret, contrition and repentance’. The paper that used Mr Aitken to pin the devastating label of sleaze on the last Tory administration was urging his return to the parliamentary fold. No wonder Mr Howard declined the proposal.

And maybe Mr Aitken’s conversion is indeed merely a ruse to replace sin by spin. After all, he is still neither saint nor ascetic; he honeymooned with his second wife in the Bahamas. And in addition to his own perjury, this is a man who had tried to get his own daughter to commit perjury by giving him a false alibi — an act he now says was his ‘most shameful mistake’.

But true conversions in prison do happen. Anyone who has seen the remarkable Innerchange programme in American jails, a tough-minded regime which turns hard-faced, irreligious criminals into law abiding, professing Christians, can testify to the yearning among the most unlikely people to change their lives for the better from within.

Moreover, the initiative to apply for his old seat was taken not by Mr Aitken but by the local party. Two hundred activists signed a petition asking Conservative Central Office to allow him to enter the selection process. They said they had faith in him not just because he had been a good MP but because they had forgiven him, since he had done his punishment and paid his debt to society.

Punishment is indeed an important element of redemption. Saying sorry isn’t enough. Retribution is vital to our innate sense of fairness. If an offender does not pay his dues, society cannot forgive him and welcome him back. This is why it sticks in the craw that Martin McGuinness and other former IRA members are now running Northern Ireland’s administration, or that Irish terrorists were let out of jail before serving their sentence.

There is similar unease over the proposal by the governor of Holloway prison that Maxine Carr should be released even earlier than the automatic half-sentence remission to which she is entitled.

Given that these early release rules apply to all prisoners, it would surely be invidious to treat her differently. After all, despite popular feeling she was convicted only of the relatively minor offence of perverting the course of justice after the Soham murders.

Nevertheless, giving any prisoner automatic early release simply because the jails are too full makes a mockery of justice and cuts short the process of redemption that one hopes accompanies a sentence that is commensurate with the crime.

Of course, punishment does not necessarily produce redemption. Some criminals never admit to their crimes, let alone repent of them. Redemption has to be earned, and the more serious the crime, the steeper the barrier to redemption. The late Lord Longford thought the Moors murderer Myra Hindley was truly penitent and so should have been released. Apart from scepticism that she was leading the good lord up the garden path, people could not accept this because they thought the dues she had to pay to society were just too heavy.

Sometimes, the most that can be hoped for is that an offender makes a start on that journey. But some crimes are so monstrous that redemption is difficult to countenance. It’s hard to imagine Hitler or Stalin, had they been jailed for crimes against humanity, feeling remorse for their appalling deeds.

Nevertheless, we all want to see evidence of human goodness because it tells us that we can all redeem ourselves if we do wrong. The prospect of redemption gives us hope for the human condition. But it has to be earned.

Primo Levi, the Italian chemist who survived Auschwitz to write some of the most inspirational books about hope in the face of unspeakable evil, said he would not forgive any of the perpetrators of the Holocaust unless they showed ‘with deeds, not words’ that they were aware of the crimes that had been committed. In that event, ‘an enemy who sees the error of his ways ceases to be an enemy’.

Mr Aitken has said that in his previous life, he would have been cynical about someone like himself. Despite Mr Howard’s ban, it is hard not to contrast Mr Aitken’s humility with the collection of chancers, liars, hypocrites and self-serving egotists already gracing the Parliamentary benches. If Mr Aitken had returned, maybe his remorse would have been catching.

Posted by melanie at February 7, 2004