Nemesis of the golden boy who cut too many corners

There were a few eyebrows raised among Jonathan Aitken's friends when he announced his plans to marry Lolicia Azucki.

The handsome young MP had built up a reputation for a string of liaisons with well-known women including Antonia Fraser, Soraya Khashoggi, Germaine Greer and Carol Thatcher. Was he, they mused, really ready to settle down?

In the event, the marriage lasted 18 years, produced a son and twin daughters before crashing spectacularly on the day Mr Aitken signalled his humiliating High Court libel surrender and began a lonely journey which may see him face charges of perjury.

Mr Aitken had been tipped as a future Tory leader when he finally married in 1979. Yet Margaret Thatcher left him on the back-benches for 18 years, leaving him to look on helplessly as people of inferior ability overtook him into ministerial jobs. One view was that he offended the then Prime Minister by not proposing marriage to her daughter.

However, Mrs Thatcher was hardly likely to offer preferment to a young back-bencher who told a Cairo newspaper: "I wouldn't say she is open-minded on the Middle East so much as empty-headed. She probably thinks Sinai is the plural of sinus."

Ignored by Mrs Thatcher, Mr Aitken pursued his interests in the Arab world with increasing vigour.

As a young executive with Slater-Walker, he met Prince Mohammed, the son of the Saudi King, with Said Ayas in Paris. The three were to build up strong business links over the years.

Mr Aitken became a director of Al Bilad, a company owned by Prince Mohammed, giving him access to Saudi money. In l981 he signed a deal with the Saudis on behalf of Aitken Telecommunications Holdings Limited, of which he was a director, to obtain pounds 2.1m.

The money was put into the fledgling breakfast television station TV- am, where ATHL had a stake. But he failed to tell fellow directors of the Saudi involvement and admitted in court to a "lack of candour" with the Independent Broadcasting Authority, whose rules he may have broken.

His wealth of contacts and knowledge of the defence industry did not go unnoticed by John Major who made the talented Aitken his defence procurement minister soon after he became Prime Minister. Two years later he became chief secretary to the treasury.

Mr Aitken described in court how he was introduced to his future wife while a backbench MP by the mother of Said Ayas, a friend and Saudi business contact who was also an assistant to Prince Mohammed, the son of the Saudi King.

He recalled: "She used to tease me about my bachelor status and girlfriends who seemed to be part of the moving scene, and told me to settle down and get married. One day she rang up and said `I will bring a wonderful girl who would be a perfect wife for you and I would like you to meet her'.

"I didn't believe in matchmaking but lo and behold after what seemed like an eternal courtship it worked. I married her in l979 and Mrs Ayas and her family were very much part of this event."

Yugoslav-born Lolicia seemed to have set her cap on him from the beginning. On their first date, Mr Aitken took her dancing at Annabel's. He recalled: "As we stepped on to the dance floor, after an acquaintance of 15 minutes, she said: `I'd like you to know that you're the man I am going to marry'. I said: `don't be ridiculous', but she has this antenna." The wedding was at St Margaret's, Westminster, in November l979.

Friends and relations say outwardly Mr and Mrs Aitken seemed contented. Lolicia is an economist by profession and she was given an import-export business by her father, and also had a clothing factory.

But there were cracks under the surface. Two years ago, Mr Aitken admitted in a Sunday newspaper that he had a two-year affair with a woman called Paula Strudwick which started only a few months after his marriage. He did not know at the time she was a prostitute and had specialised in sado- masochism.

The couple led increasingly separate lives. Mrs Aitken said once: "Everybody knows I am a really thick political wife. It's a big joke. I don't understand politics." When her husband became Chief Secretary, she was at a Buddhist retreat.