“WHEN I DIE you will find the words RITZ HOTEL engraved upon my heart.” These are the words of the disgraced government minister Jonathan Aitken. But he might more pertinently have said that the words Hôtel le Bristol would be engraved upon his heart, for it was the Bristol in Villars in Switzerland (pictured above), that revealed his lie about who paid for two crucial nights at the Paris hotel.
Sophie and I were in Villars in the early summer of 1997 not long before we split up (you will recall our denouement in Geneva, which I described in ‘Voltaire and the Dogs of St Bernard’, Chapter Seventeen in High Times at the Hotel Bristol). I thought a day in the Alps might revive our relationship. Gentian and Edelweiss were spreading their magic carpets across the mountains, meadow flowers were being munched by bell-clanking cattle, and I quite expcted Heidi to greet us at the Hôtel le Bristol door. We had no need to book a room, because we were staying just over an hour away with Sophie’s parents, but I hoped to give the hotel rather more than an external examination. Located in the centre of the resort, 1,300 metres above sea level, it was a modern, chalet-style building half a dozen storeys high, and its wooden balconies must have had stunning views, from Lake Geneva to the Matterhorn. But its shutters were firmly shut, its window boxes lifeless and its doors not just locked but padlocked. On enquiry we discovered that the owners had recently been declared bankrupt.
As I looked at the building and its sunny surroundings, I considered for the first time the prospect of actually owning a Bristol of my own, and if Sophie had shared even a quarter of my enthusiasm, I may well have made the jump then and there. Had I done so, I would no doubt have regaled my guests with the story of how this sorry building, unbeknown to me at the time, at that very moment contained what can only be described as the final nail that was about to be hammered into the career of a most dishonest politician.
Jonathan Aitken, the grand nephew of the newspaper baron Lord Beaverbrook and a former war correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, was the Conservative MP for Thanet South, Kent. In 1992 he was appointed Minister of Defence for Procurement in the government of John Major, and two years later he was promoted to Chief Secretary to the Treasury, which made him a Privy Councillor and Rt Hon.
Aitken had links with Saudi businessmen, but it was an Egyptian, Mohamed Al-Fayed, who was to set off the chain of enquiry that led to his demise. Al-Fayed had for a while worked in Saudi Arabia for the arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi whose sister, Samira Kashoggi, became his first wife and mother of his oldest child, Dodi, who was to die in the car crash with Princess Diana. (Half way through the Aitken libel trial proceedings, Khashoggi’s 19-year-old daughter Petrina had DNA tests to show she was actually Aitken’s daughter).
The son of a primary school teacher from Alexandria, Al-Fayed had bought the Paris Ritz in 1979. The Swiss hotelier César Ritz and the French restaurateur Auguste Escoffier founded the hotel in 1898 and made it the most famous in the world. Coco Chanel lived there for thirty years, both the Greek Prime Minister Eleftheros Venizelos and Pamela Churchill Harriman, US Ambassador to France, died here, and Ernest Hemingway claimed to have personally liberated it in 1945. But by the time Al-Fayed arrived, its reputation had slipped, and he therefore set about the restoration of its fabric and prestige, and for this a grateful President François Mitterrand conferred upon him the Légion d’Honneur.
In Britain Al-Fayed’s trophy hunting was less appreciated. His purchase of Harrods department store in 1988 was acrimonious and it involved a Department of Trade enquiry that showed he had lied about the extent of his wealth. As the royal family’s coats of arms that once adorned the corner of the Knightsbridge building, announcing that Harrods was their store of choice, began to be ordered down, Al-Fayed’s frustrations at his failure to be accepted as a respectable member of the upper echelons of British society became ever greater. And when his application for British citizenship was turned down, he decided to take his revenge on the Conservative government, denouncing four Members of Parliament for having accepted cash for favours.
One of these was Jonathan Aitken. Al-Fayed’s charge against him was that in 1993 when he was Minister for Defence Procurement, his bill for two nights at the Ritz had been paid for by a Saudi businessman and arms dealer, Said Ayas, who was adviser to King Fahd’s son, Prince Mohammed.
Investigations by journalists on televisions’s World In Action and the Guardian newspaper followed up the story with Al-Fayed’s help. Finally, in April 1995, the Guardian published a front-page story accusing Aitken of accepting bribes, illegal arms dealing and procuring prostitutes for Saudi businessmen.
It was just after midnight that Aitken, who was at that moment in Switzerland, was faxed the story. The following morning he was on a plane from Geneva to London where, at 5pm at Conservative Party head office in Smith Square, just 75 yards from his elegant house in Lord North Street, he delivered a rousing speech that ended with the words that were to be the petard by which he was hoisted: “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.”
Three hours later the World in Action programme was broadcast, and his litigation against the BBC and Guardian newspapers began.
At his side at the press conference, offering unconditional support, were his daughter Victoria and his wife, Lolicia. Olivera Lolicia Azuchi was born in Belgrade to a Serb businessman who set her up in business in Lausanne where she had attended university and where where Victoria and her twin sister Alexandra were born – a son, William, came six years later. One of Victoria’s godparents was Said Ayas, a personal friend and former neighbour of Lolicia’s.
Preliminaries for the libel trial were protracted and it was more than two years before it reached the High Court. The defendants were finding it hard to make their stories stand up. The accusations that he was pimping for the Saudis were withdrawn, and there was no evidence of specific kick-backs or illicit arms dealing. But the defence had Al-Fayed on its side, and he is not a man not to give up easily. He stubbornly maintained that the bill for Aitken’s stay at the hotel had been paid for by Said Ayas.
Aitken could not produce evidence of having paid the bill himself, and said that it had been paid for in cash by his wife, who had come to the hotel on the morning of his departure. She never used credit cards, he said. The sum involved, 117,000 francs, was not huge, but the whole muddied transaction became critical to the case. As further evidence came to light, Aitken had his spade work cut out and he went deeper and deeper into the hole he had started to dig for himself.
From the Ritz came a record to show that he had telephoned the Hôtel le Bristol in Villars at 10.15am on the Sunday morning of his departure. Victoria Aitken was going to Aiglon College in Villars (mission statement: “Aiglon aims to produce men and women of integrity”) and the call could be assumed to have been to Lolicia. If that was the case, she could not have been at the Ritz in Paris that morning to pay the bill.
With only two days to go before the libel trial began, the defendants were in desperate need of hard evidence. It was time the defence checked out Hotel le Bristol in Villars. Phone calls to the hotel brought the news that Belgian-owned hotel had gone out of business and was now subject to a fraud enquiry. So a Guardian reporter, Owen Bowcott, was booked into the nearby Eurotel Victoria and dispatched to see what he could find. He flew to Geneva and rented a car to drive the 110 kilometres to Villars, which took an hour and twelve minutes. Arriving late in the evening he found Hotel le Bristol shuttered, locked and in darkness.
The following morning, he returned to the hotel where a caretakers introduced him to two accountants who were going though the hotel's books. It took an hour or two of faxes and phone calls to Belgium before he was given permission to search the hotels’s archives.
Taking the lift into the basement, he found cupboards full of papers. His search lasted some 24 hours and revealed all that he wanted to know. Under the name Aitken, the ‘Reservations de Chambres' for 1993 was a docket from the relevant weekend, for ‘Adultes: 2; 1 plus 2’, written across with 'Aiglon College vers 22h 00', and 'Room 234'. Another paper revealed that ‘Aitken, Olivera’ had 'changer prix pour demain pour 1 pax' – the second night she was charged for single occupancy of the double room. And Lolicia had settled the bill with her American Express card.
When the trial started on following Wednesdsay, and the evidence was put before Aitken,
who the previous month had lost his parliamentary seat in the Blair landslide election, claimed that he had phone the Bristol not to speak Lolicia, but to her mother, Nada Azucki. She had, he declared, been staying there with Lolicia who had left earlier that morning to reach Paris. Among all the mountain of evidence Lolicia’s mother had not been mentioned before.
Further investigation by the defence of passsenger lists from Swissair and British Airways soon revealed that Mrs L Aitken and Miss V Aitken had flown from Heathrow to Geneva on Friday September 17, and on Monday 20th Lolicia had flown back to London alone. She had not been to Paris at all.
Aitken’s subsequent trial for perjury brought him an eighteen-month sentence, of which he served seven months. The judge was particularly concerned that Aitken had been prepared to allow his daughter Victoria to lie under oath to support his version of events had the case continued.
But that is not the only alarming aspect of the case. When one stays at a hotel, one expects some discretion from the management, and not to have the details of one’s bill handed over to the media. The whole Aiken affair should stand as a lesson to us all:
If you are up to no good, don’t go to the Ritz. You are much better off at a Bristol – as long as it doesn't go broke.
