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Topic History of: Kelvin and Hillsborough
Max. showing the last 5 posts - (Last post first)
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WholeTruth |
Summary, what Jonathan Aitken’s bent great-uncle media/Mad-Max told him back in the early-‘60s probably still holds true for the life-&-times/lies-&-crimes of typical Tory-boys like Aitken, “...go out and make-mischief.”
Particularly what may be his own best-epitaph, self-made on Monday evening 10 April 1995 when he launched libel warnings which lead him, er, straight to Jail Do Not Pass ‘Go’ ! " 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. The fight against falsehood and those who peddle it. My fight begins today. Thank you and good afternoon. "
Jonathan Aitken served as a war correspondent during the late-1960s in Vietnam and Biafra, and gained a reputation for risk-taking when he took LSD in 1966 as an experiment for an article in The London Evening Standard and had a bad trip "..this drug needs police, the Home Office and a dictator to stamp it out..." He was also a journalist at Yorkshire Television from 1968 to 1970, presenting the regional news show Calendar. Aitken was the first person to be seen on screen from Yorkshire Television when it started broadcasting.
In 1970 Aitken was acquitted at the Old Bailey for breaching section 2 of the Official Secrets Act 1911, when he photocopied a report about the British government's supply of arms to Nigeria, and sent a copy to The Sunday Telegraph and to Hugh Fraser, a pro-Biafran Tory MP. As a result of the case he was dropped as the Conservative candidate for the Thirsk and Malton parliamentary constituency.
He was elected as MP for Thanet East in the February 1974 General Election; from 1983 he sat for South Thanet. A notably handsome man he managed to offend PM Margaret Thatcher by ending a relationship with her daughter, Carol Thatcher, and suggesting to an Egyptian newspaper that Carol Thatcher "probably thinks Sinai is the plural of Sinus".
He stayed on the backbenches throughout Thatcher's premiership and engaged in a number of activities, including participation in the re-launch of TV-am where he was involved in an incident in which broadcaster Anna Ford threw her wine at him to express her outrage at both his behaviour and the unwelcome consequent transformation of the TV station.
Aitken wrote a highly confidential letter to Thatcher in early 1980, dealing with allegations that the former Director-General of MI5, Sir Roger Hollis, had been a double agent also working for the Soviet Union. This information had come to Aitken from retired CIA spymaster James Angleton. Espionage historian Chapman Pincher obtained a copy of the letter, and used former MI5 officers Peter Wright and Arthur Martin as his main additional secret sources, to write the sensational book Their Trade is Treachery in 1981. This matter raged full of controversy throughout the 1980s, and led to Wright eventually publishing his own bestselling book "Spycatcher" in 1987, despite the government's prolonged and bitter court attempts to stop him in Australia from doing so.
Aitken became Minister of State for Defence Procurement under PM John Major in 1992. He was later accused of violating ministerial rules by allowing an Arab businessman to pay for his stay in the Paris Ritz, Aitken later perjured himself about this and was jailed. Aitken had previously been a director of BMARC, an arms exporter, from 1988 to 1990. In 1995 a Commons motion showed that while a Cabinet minister he had signed a controversial Public Interest Immunity Certificate (PIIC) in September 1992 relating to the Matrix Churchill trial, and that the 'gagged' documents included ones relating to the supply of arms to Iraq by BMARC for a period when he was a director of the company. He became Chief Secretary to the Treasury in 1994, a Cabinet position, but resigned in 1995 following the allegations that he had violated ministerial rules.
He was defeated in the 1997 election. Within a year he had be appointed as a representative for the arms company GEC-Marconi. (part of BAE Systems since November 1999).
On 10 April 1995, The Guardian carried a front-page report on Aitken's dealings with leading Saudis. The story was the result of a long investigation carried out by journalists from the newspaper and from Granada TV's World In Action programme. Aitken had called a press conference at the Conservative Party offices in Smith Square, London, at 5 o'clock that same day denouncing the claims and demanding that the World In Action documentary, which was due to be screened three hours later, withdraw them. He notoriously said: "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. The fight against falsehood and those who peddle it. My fight begins today. Thank you and good afternoon."
The World In Action film, Jonathan of Arabia, went ahead and Aitken carried out his threat to sue. The action collapsed in June 1997 (a month after he had lost his seat in the 1997 General Election) when the Guardian and Granada produced, via their counsel George Carman QC, evidence countering his claim that his wife, Lolicia Aitken, paid for the hotel stay at the Ritz Hotel in Paris. The evidence consisted of airline vouchers and other documents showing that his wife had, in fact, been in Switzerland at the time when she had allegedly been at the Ritz in Paris. The joint Guardian/ Granada investigation indicated an arms deal scam involving Aitken's friend and business partner, the Lebanese businessman Mohammed Said Ayas, a close associate of Prince Mohammed of Saudi Arabia. It was alleged that Aitken had been prepared to have his teenage daughter Victoria lie under oath to support his version of events, had the case continued.
A few days after the libel case collapsed, World In Action broadcast a special edition, which echoed Aitken's "sword of truth" speech. It was entitled The Dagger of Deceit.
During this time it emerged that when Aitken was being encouraged to resign, he was chairman of the secretive right wing think-tank Le Cercle, alleged by Alan Clark to be funded by the CIA.
Aitken was charged with perjury and perverting the course of justice, and in 1999 was jailed for 18 months of which he served seven. During the preceding libel trial, his wife Lolicia, who later left him, was called as a witness to sign a supportive affidavit to the effect that she had paid his Paris hotel bill, but did not appear. In the end, with the case already in court, investigative work by Guardian reporters into Swiss hotel and British Airways records showed that neither his daughter nor his wife had been in Paris at the time in question. Aitken was unable to cover the legal costs of his libel trial and was declared bankrupt. As part of the bankruptcy, his trustees settled legal actions against the magazine Private Eye, over the various claims it had made that Aitken was a "serial liar".
He also became one of the few people to resign from the Privy Council. Aitken's wife and three daughters -- twins Victoria and Alexandra Aitken and Petrina Khashoggi -- turned up to support him when he was sentenced. Petrina was a previously unacknowledged daughter by Soraya Khashoggi, ex-wife of arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. On DNA testing at the age of 18, she had turned out to be Aitken's, though Khashoggi had previously accepted her as his own.
Claiming to have found 'God', in November 2007, with the approval of senior members of the Shadow Cabinet, Aitken took charge of a task force on prison reform within Iain Duncan Smith's Centre for Social Justice to help formulate Conservative policy. Aitken stated this was not part of a political comeback. Conservative spokesmen pointed out that the task force is independent of the party, even though the organisation is run by Iain Duncan Smith, who is a former Tory leader. The report " Locked Up Potential: A Strategy to Reform our Prisons and Rehabilitate our Prisoners " was published in March 2009. Aitken is now a member of the UKIP Party.
(We say "UKIP if U want to, we're staying wide-awake.")
To date [Sep 2012], Aitken is the only British Cabinet minister ever to have been sent to jail.
Power To THE PEOPLES' WEB Above Which NO ONE Stands ! |
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steveimp |
WholeTruth wrote:
Lest we forget where Kelvin's true loyalties lay.
The disgraced Aitken J. wasn't that good a journo either, and his contemporary, fellow scribbler/honest-novelist/fantasist Jeffrey Archer was another high-ranking 1980s Tory also imprisoned for perjury.
Funnily enough, Aitken was apparently a very good TV journalist, as he helped launch Yorkshire Television in 1968 as part of the Calendar news team. His contemporaries were Austin Mitchell and Twice Nightly Whiteley. |
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steveimp |
JK2006 wrote:
I'm afraid this style of writing gives me a headache and I can't understand it so will only carry normally written posts in future.
If I get the correct drift, it's that lots of media people have ruined lives.
Correct. Agreed.
And that media has committed terrible crimes.
Correct. Agreed.
It's also done some marvellous things.
As far as the Hillsborough tragedy is concerned, I blame the media far less than I condemn others. And I fear concentrating blame on the media will deflect the force of the deserved war against the true villains.
That's what I suspect will happen with Leveson. By allowing an agenda covering areas like taking pictures of royal nipples and snapping celebs in the street, the really dangerous aspects of media behaviour will be concealed.
Clever manipulators deflect attention by pointing in a different direction. Foolish observers assist by falling for the good story. And the real villains slip away. Not noticed. Passing the buck. Muddying the waters.
When in doubt, you can always fall back on RIGHTEOUS INDIGNATION.
A discussion on whether Editors should or should not have known better is a superb way of avoiding looking at the real problem. The corrupt and broken system that is clever enough to avoid correction.
Absolutely bloody spot on.
But why does no one else notice - and then ignore it? I see so many sheep reading their Daily Stars or Suns or Mirrors and believing every word, even the horoscope. |
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steveimp |
The ironic thing JK is that Kelvin has more than likely damaged and hurt more people than they accused you of, yet Kelvin has never been in the dock for it!
If it wasn't Kelvin in charge it would have been someone else putting together the headlines, simply to sell papers and selling papers makes Rupert happy. |
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WholeTruth |
Lest we forget where Kelvin's true loyalties lay.
The disgraced Aitken J. wasn't that good a journo either, and his contemporary, fellow scribbler/honest-novelist/fantasist Jeffrey Archer was another high-ranking 1980s Tory also imprisoned for perjury. |
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