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LadyEllen -> jailed Tory minister lands cushy job (11/12/2007 3:52:12 AM)
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Jonathan Aitkin resigned his position as a minister in the last Conservative government to fight a legal case. He was later jailed for his perjury during that case, for 18 months in 1999. This was just one of a series of instances involving Conservative MPs and ministers whose "sleaze" helped lead to the landslide for Blair in 1997.
Mr Aitkin is to be appointed to a taskforce on prison reform today in the Centre For Social Justice, headed by former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith (a serving Conservative MP). The Centre advises the Conservative party and is supposedly separate from the party.
Now, given that Mr Aitken has direct experience of the penal system, his appointment appears sensible and useful. At the same time though, I wonder why it is that he, having served only ten months in prison, is necessarily the ideal person for such a job? And taken against a backdrop in which any prison sentence in this country is a virtually automatic bar to any employment whatever thereafter (let alone to an employment carrying an above average salary) - I am left wondering whether in fact for all the change the Tories have promised they have made, we are still dealing with the "old boys network" and the sense of social privilege that was ever the case with that party?
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