‘Rev Jono’ punched in prison (but he turns other cheek)

WHILE the Queen carried out her weekly audience with the Prime Minister by phone this week, she met the Bishop of Hereford face-to-face at Buckingham Palace on Tuesday — shortly after he ended his two-week self-isolation following a holiday in Venice. The new bishop, Richard

Jackson, who styles himself Rick the Vic, went into quarantine at the Bishop’s Palace in Hereford with wife Deborah. ‘I am delighted that this meeting was able to happen,’ the bishop told me of his royal audience. It was one of HM’s last audiences before moving to Windsor Castle yesterday.

FORMER Cabinet Minister Jonathan Aitken famously emerged unscathed from a sevenmonth stretch inside for perjury and perverting the course of justice. But those halcyon days are over.

For I can disclose that, 20 years after his release, he has been subjected to an assault while visiting HMP Pentonville in his new role as an unpaid prison chaplain. However, as befitting a man of the cloth, the Reverend Jonathan was able to turn the other cheek. The incident occurred last week during Aitken’s regular meeting with those consigned to the prison’s Segregation Unit. ‘The Seg Unit is kind of where the bad boys are kept,’ Aitken tells me. ‘It’s for those who’ve punched somebody — or worse. ‘I’m doing pastoral work in the unit, which is always quite challenging.’ It proved particularly so on this occasion. ‘I was punched,’ explains Aitken, who was known as ‘Jono’ to inmates during his time inside. But Aitken, 77, insists that, by the usual uncompromising standards of prison, it was ‘a very mild punch indeed’ by an inmate who had become ‘emotional’.

Aitken mentioned the incident in the sermon he delivered in St Edmundsbury Cathedral on Sunday at the Suffolk Justice Service, where many of the 350strong congregation were judges, magistrates or police officers. ‘I said that it was nothing that a graduate of Orwell Park School’s boxing ring couldn’t take care of,’ explains Aitken, recalling his pugilistic tutelage at the Suffolk prep school he attended. ‘I remembered how to duck.’

Aitken points out that the ‘minor incident’ he experienced is symptomatic of the fact that, as the Prisons Inspectorate reported last week, violent attacks on staff at Pentonville rose by 30 per cent during last year alone.

Now he has the chance to take his message to an even larger audience — in the heart of Whitehall. He’s just become the Honorary Chaplain to Christians In Government.

‘It’s been going since 1872 and every single department of government has a Christians In Government branch, but it’s never had a chaplain before,’ reflects Aitken.

He was commissioned into his role by Andrew Parker — ‘the head of MI5, no less, who’s a very strong Christian’.