- guardian.co.uk, Monday March 27 2000 01.33 BST
Jonathan Aitken denied yesterday that any "hidden agenda" of corrupt arms deals lay behind his lie over who paid his bill at the Paris Ritz.
The former cabinet minister, freed in January after six months in prison for perjury and perverting the course of justice, said: "There's no bigger story behind what was a disgraceful but very simple story of concealing a lie about a hotel bill. A very small and ... probably unnecessary lie ballooned into an achilles heel which was my downfall."
It had also been the downfall of his 1997 libel action against the Guardian, he said in a BBC Breakfast with Frost interview.
He was asked about a suggestion in a Guardian book that he had what David Frost called "a sort of three-pronged attack going" in which, as a minister, he pushed arms deals from which his Saudi Arabian friend, Said Ayas, would get a percentage. He replied: "It defininitely wasn't anything dramatic like that.
"I was fighting a libel case on many fronts. The principal front was the allegation of pimping. The second front was the allegation that I'd been a corrupt arms dealer.
"But in the middle of all this was a lie about the Ritz. However wrong it now seems, I felt I had to present, as it were, a seamless garment. I'm afraid it's the old adage - oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive."
Replying to another question, he said: " The allegation, I think, has always been that secretly I was a corrupt pocketer of arms deals commissions. That is totally and absolutely untrue. I've never made a penny in any direct or indirect way from that source." Agreeing he had received a registered director's fee from a British company involved in arms, he said: "I don't see anything wrong."
Of the lie about the bill, he said (as author of a book on the downfall of Richard Nixon): "The actual offence was small. It was the cover-up... I should have learned from Nixon's mistake." Mr Aitken was on the programme because he is promoting a book giving his side of the affair.
