18 August, 2005

DAVID ADAMS

His was the most public of downfalls. A prominent conservative British MP, cabinet minister and even once touted as a possible future Prime Minister, Jonathan Aitken lost everything - his career, his marriage, his money and his reputation - when he was imprisoned for seven months in 1999 on a charge of perjury.

After what he describes as a “spiritual as well as a physical journey”, following his release from prison Aitken studied theology at Oxford University. He now travels the world as an ambassador of prison ministries, bringing the message of Christ’s grace to those who have been jailed and spreading awareness of the plight of prisoners among those outside.

TELLING HIS STORY: Former British MP turned prison reformer Jonathan Aitken in Sydney recently. PICTURE: Ramon Williams   “I give the basic message that no-one is below the reach of the grace of God; whatever earthly punishment you have to go through, God loves to forgive sinners who truly repent. (I tell them) I am now a happy and fulfilled person - you, too, whatever you have done, however miserable you now feel can have that same joy of God’s forgiveness but you need to commit your way to Him, you need to repent...and you too can have a new life and a new start. That’s my basic message.” - Jonathan Aitken on the message he brings to prisoners.

Currently in Australia on behalf of prison ministry groups Prison Fellowship International and Prison Alpha - both of whom he says were important influences in his own spiritual journey - the 62-year-old says many people are surprised when he thanks God for sending him to prison.

“Without that enormous divine kick up the backside, I don’t think I would have changed and I wouldn’t have had as a fulfilled and committed relationship with God and that is the pearl beyond price...” he says.

“I think it was Martin Luther who said that in our pain and our brokenness we come closest to Christ and that certainly happened.”

The former Chief Secretary to the Treasury was jailed in 1999 following the collapse of a trial in which he was suing Britain’s Guardian newspaper and Granada TV for libel over allegations he violated ministerial rules when a junior defence minister (the more serious allegations against him were eventually withdrawn).

Having launched the action by famously declaring that he would “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”, during the trial Aitken was himself caught out in a lie about who paid a Paris hotel bill.

Pleading guilty to charges of perjury, he was sentenced to 18 months jail but was released in January 2000 after seven.

Aitken, who now lives in London, says that while his own prison experience was a tough and painful time, it wasn’t “brutally so”.

“I had some down moments and many sorrowful moments but I didn’t have the trouble that was predicted,” he says.

“I had some threats - particularly some rather vague and noisy ones when I first went to prison, a lot of chanting of how they were going to get me and do terrible things to me - (but) quite quickly I got into the flow of being a member of the prison community and quite quickly I also, by coincidence or 'Godincidence', got into a prison prayer group which made a huge difference.

“I was also very busy reading letters for illiterate prisoners and that helped me to get into the prison community. So I had a prison journey which was humbling and difficult on the one hand, yet was enriching and inspiring on the other.”

It’s his experience of prison that Aitken believes enables him to relate to the many prisoners he now visits around the world.

Aitken says he always begins his conversations with prisoners in the same way.

“I always say ‘I have been where you now are’, so I speak from a position of being an ex-offender to offenders which often does strike a simple bond of communication,” he says.

“I give the basic message that no-one is below the reach of the grace of God; whatever earthly punishment you have to go through, God loves to forgive sinners who truly repent. (I tell them) I am now a happy and fulfilled person - you, too, whatever you have done, however miserable you now feel can have that same joy of God’s forgiveness but you need to commit your way to Him, you need to repent...and you too can have a new life and a new start. That’s my basic message.”

These days a director with Prison Fellowship International, Aitken believes that prison ministry remains at the “Cinderella end” of church ministry.

“Very few churches have a prison ministry dimension and very few churches are willing to enthusiastically welcome ex-prisoners back into their congregations,” he says.

While he doesn’t necessarily believe churches need to create their own ministries to prisoners, Aitken says he hopes that more and more churches will get behind the existing ministries of groups such as Prison Fellowship and Prison Alpha “in a much more serious way”.

“At the moment it’s quite an area of neglect by many churches,” he says. Aitken believes that while this may be partly due to the stigma attached to prisoners, for many Christians their failure to support ministry to prisoners was simply due to the fact that they didn’t know how to do it. He says one of the main reasons he had come to Australia was to try and redress this by raising the profile of prison ministry groups.

Aitken says that while he would have called himself a Christian prior to going into jail, “I now know that I was not really a Christian”.

“I was a half-Christian which is about as useful as being half-pregnant. I was a Sunday Christian, I did the right thing with my lips on several Sundays a year in church but didn’t go away and lead a committed, Christian life with my heart and behaviour. So I failed pretty badly in that area.”

Aitken says that his coming to Christ was “much more of a process than a sudden flash of light on the road to Damascus”.

“In fact my journey was a rather painful one - stumbling, falling, sinning, backsliding, doubting - and yet, despite all those negatives, there was the enormous positive (that) somewhere inside me was a faith that grew and strengthened...

"I can’t point to a moment of precise commitment and conversion. It was rather like somebody who’s going across Europe in a train during the night - they don’t actually know the exact moment when they’ve crossed a frontier but they do know when they’ve definitely arrived in the new country of a real and committed, trusting and believing faith. And I knew that had happened to me, I would say, sometime in 1997 or early in 1998 - a good year before I had to go to prison.”

While Aitken didn’t have a relationship with Prison Fellowship prior to going to jail himself, he did know its founder Charles Colson - a man once described as US president Richard Nixon’s “hatchet man” who had himself been jailed for seven months for his role in the Watergate affair and who is now one of America’s most respected Christian voices. They had met while Aitken was writing a biography of Nixon and had become friends - a friendship which was strengthened when Colson "came alongside" Aitken following his downfall.

Aitken says that while Colson “is a much bigger and greater man than me”, their career paths did have remarkable similarities.

“We’re probably the only two people in the world you can easily identify who have had high political power, been fairly ruthless in the way we exercised it and breaking rules and laws in the process, who got caught out and went to jail and who, on the way to jail, had a conversion experience of really becoming committed to Jesus Christ and then coming out of jail and saying we want to serve the Lord doing something in the field of prison ministry. So there are certainly remarkable similarities.”

Aitken’s story is a truly a remarkable one and, as one would expect of a former Fleet Street journalist (he started his career as a journalist in the Sixties, serving as a war correspondent in Vietnam, Biafra and the Middle East before entering the British Parliament in 1974), the tale to date has already been penned in a two volume autobiography.

Already released in the UK, the two books - Pride & Perjury (which covers his journey from cabinet minister to the time of his entering jail) and Porridge & Passion (which covers his time in prison, his subsequent time at theological college and his current role in supporting prison ministries) - are due to be released in Australia later this year. Aitken’s biography of Charles Colson - Charles W. Colson: A life Redeemed - was also published in the US recently and is due to be released in the UK soon.

Aitken says he has received a mixed reaction from former parliamentary colleagues and friends since commencing work with the prison ministries. While there has been some cynicism, Aitken says many old friends have remained “rock solid”.

He relates the story of his wedding day to his second wife, Elizabeth Harris, which took place in June, 2003.

“It was a rather big and well-reported wedding, partly because of me and partly because my wife Elizabeth had formerly been married to two famous film stars - Rex Harrison and Richard Harris, both of whom are now dead. So there was a lot of media interest in this wedding and the media were fascinated to report that exactly the same number of ex-cabinet ministers turned up to the wedding party as ex-prisoners turned up to the wedding party. It was an interesting social occasion but it also symbolised that I was making some new and interesting friendships but that my old and interesting friendships were steady too.”

Aitken isn’t sure what his future will be (he relates a joke he recently heard in a sermon - “Question: What makes God laugh? Answer: People who have plans”). But for now, while noting that “redemption is God’s business and He alone knows whether he has redeemed us”, Aitken says he feels as though he has been “fully forgiven and fully redeemed”.

“I’m at peace in a way that I never was before, I’m happy in a way that I never was before and I’m living a much more fulfilled life than ever before,” he says. “So yes I feel I am the beneficiary of God’s grace and redemption.