Aitken ‘moved’ by support for return
Disgraced former MP Jonathan Aitken has hinted at a return to parliament after receiving a petition from peers in support of him running in local elections.
Mr Aitken was jailed for 18 months for perjury after lying in a libel case involving the Guardian newspaper and Granada Television in 1999, but is now preparing a return to politics.
He has applied to become the Conservative candidate for South Thanet, which is now held by Labour but used to be his constituency, and has been backed by a petition signed by 200 local Tory supporters.
The former cabinet minister wrote in the Spectator magazine that he had been ‘moved’, ‘amazed’ and ‘humbled’ by the petition, and insisted that it was an entirely ‘grassroots’ campaign that had not been started by him.
Mr Aitken went on to say that, as far as he was concerned, he had been suitably rehabilitated after his jail sentence and saw no reason why his ‘reawakened desire to serve in Parliament’ should be prevented from reaching fruition.
“My offence of perjury took place seven years ago,” he said.
“I am coming close to formal rehabilitation, which happens to me informally, in many circumstances, all the time. So perhaps the judgment of the Thanet petitioners that political rehabilitation can work now is not so unreasonable.”
