Jonathan Aitken and the Big Yellow Stupid

Being thoughts on a couple of books read over the weekend.

1. Pride & Perjury, Jonathan Aitken
I remember once seeing Aitken interviewed by Jeremy Paxman, the latter displaying the intellectual cut and thrust that makes him so feared by interviewees.

JP: so, you lied in court about the payment of the hotel bill and you roped your wife and sister into the perjury?
JA: that’s right.
JP: but that’s despicable. Why did you do it?
JA: because I was proud and stupid.
JP: but it’s a disgraceful thing to do. Why did you do it?
JA: because I was proud and stupid.
JP: but it’s disgusting. Why did you do it?
JA: because I was ...

You get the point.

A couple of years ago, Aitken gave a talk in Abingdon about his life after the perjury trial and his time in jail. Pride & Perjury is about his life before and I’m finding it even more interesting.

He’s a hard man to find stuff in common with. Friends with Middle Eastern nobility (plus Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon); son at Eton; daughter at a Swiss finishing school; described in his own words as not particularly rich, average income £100,000, personal value of £2-3 million ... but by the standards of Tory oligarchs, I suppose he wasn’t that rich, and let’s face it, arms dealers and pimps for Saudi royalty do not scrape by on 100 grand a year even by 1990s prices.

And yet, that is what a series of attacks from the Guardian and Granada accused him of being, with (as it becomes clear) not the slightest justification or evidence. Unsurprisingly he took them to court for libel, and even though the run-up to the trial took years and cost hundreds of thousand of pounds just on the preliminaries, the defendants never had a chance. Because they had lied, and that’s it.

And unfortunately, so had Aitken, on the matter of who paid his bill for a two-day stay at the Paris Ritz (prop. M. Fayed, well known friend of the British establishment, which really didn’t help) in 1993. He was there to catch up with an old friend, not for business, but the old friend was a Saudi prince and his people paid the bill. It was a breach of ministerial etiquette that shouldn’t have happened, but compared to the alleged infractions of creaming off arms deals commissions and procuring prostitutes for rich clients, it was small beer. So Aitken reasoned it was the least of his problems, and lied about it for simplicity's sake, and it spiralled out of control so he got his wife to lie about it, and got his daughter to sign a statement saying it was true. (She was 16; she was 12 at the time it happened and wouldn’t have remembered it anyway, so she just trusted that what he wrote was correct.)

That one little lie ruined his career and brought him to bankruptcy. And quite right too. His wife subsequently left him, but as she had already agreed to give false testimony herself she couldn't really claim the moral high ground.

It just seems a shame that the Guardian/Granada partnership didn’t also get a couple of torpedoes up the fundament in the same way. God knows they deserved it. The Guardian isn’t a rag and there must be decent people working there (even if that’s the kind of statistical assertion that means I can also say ‘there must be decent people working at the Daily Mail’). Why did they do it?

My guess is, for exactly the same reasons as Aitken told his lie. Pride and a distorted hobby horse fixation. Reading the archived Guardian articles on the web is a bit like reading proofs that the Apollo landings never happened, JFK was done in by the CIA, the Queen is a lizard, Princess Diana was Elvis’s lovechild. You can’t prove straight off that they’re rubbish ... but there’s the same overreaching grand tone, broad statements, inferences that almost but not quite follow from the facts, that makes you suspicious. It smells odd, it smacks of obsession. This is why, contrary to all instinct, I’m actually more inclined to believe Aitken’s account of events: it’s simple, it’s straightforward, it tastes normal and it cites his references.

It would be interesting to read the account of the trial from the Guardian’s point of view – more specifically, from the point of view of saner heads within the organisation who came to realise how indefensible were their lies and how totally screwed they were ... until the miracle happened and Aitken got busted first.

There’s definitely a sermon in there somewhere.

2. I, Jack, Patricia Finney
I love books that play metaphysical games with the very nature of being a book to give an extra dimension to the reading. At the end of New World Order, an alternate history novel about two parallel worlds coming together, I included an author’s note saying what really happened in our world ... and in the parallel one.

But that’s nothing to I, Jack. Jack is a labrador – boundy, thick, and devoted to his pack (i.e. the human family that owns him) to the point of imbecility. His entire life revolves around pack and food, with a little sex when the neighbours’ dog goes on heat. What makes it work is that the story is told as a labrador would tell it. It’s not like, say, 101 Dalmatians, where the dogs are basically four-legged humans. Sometimes Jack is HAPPY DOG. Sometimes he is sad dog, but never for long because his entire train of thought can be completely derailed by OH HI PACKLEADER RESPECT LOVE CAN WE GO WALKIES NOW? Sometimes the text waves up and down on the page or goes round in little circles to reflect Jack’s exuberantly boundy mood. Sometimes other typographical features creep in as well, like love hearts when he's feeling especially devotional or when he - ahem - spoils the neighbour's dog's impeccable pedigree.

In short, you can believe this is a book written by a labrador – and just to add an extra layer, there are dry, acerbic footnotes from the family cats giving their own views of the Big Yellow Stupid, as they call him. These are of course written from a cat’s point of view, with their withering contempt for all other lifeforms, their list of things they intend to kill when they have enough data on their weaknesses (vehicles, lawnmowers ...) and their grading of everything according to its edibility. The one thing on which the cats and Jack are united is a desire to find out where the Pack Lady goes hunting because she keeps coming home with all this wonderful food. And they think it’s iniquitous that he gets fed first in the morning.

You can’t do this too often. I gather there’s a couple of Jack sequels but I probably won’t read them. Once is enough, but it’s great fun while it lasts.