Ian Aitken
Urbane political editor of the Guardian who did not let his Left-wing views intrude into friendships
IAN AITKEN, who has died aged 90, was one of the outstanding Left-wing journalists who found a happy berth on the Daily Express under Lord Beaverbrook (to whom he was not related). He went on to be an esteemed political editor of the Guardian.
Close to Michael Foot both in ideology and habitat – he lived most of his life in Highgate – Aitken started and finished his career on Tribune. Knowing Labour’s high command as he did, Aitken’s judgments on them were always worth reading. In 1973, for example, he opined: “There is no point in beating about the bush. Denis Healey is a thug. A jolly thug, an entertaining and witty thug, even a generous and friendly thug. But a thug for all that, at least in the political sense.”
He had as many friends in the Conservative Party, though they tended to come from its patrician, “wet” elements. Willie Whitelaw was an intimate, Aitken helping write his autobiography. At times he was susceptible to their delusion that they could tame Mrs Thatcher, but he also shared Enoch Powell’s distaste for the way in which Edward Heath whipped his backbenchers to get Britain into Europe.
Aitken brought to his work an urbanity not normally associated with the Left. He was noted at Westminster for his sophisticated, if not formal, mode of dress; was a pillar of the Garrick, and was known affectionately by younger Lobby correspondents, in whose progress he took a keen interest, as “Uncle”.
He was also a fixture in Annie’s Bar, the hideaway at the Commons where politicians and Lobby correspondents meet on neutral ground. In 2006 he reminisced: “In my 30 years in the place,
I have seen many promising newcomers destroy their careers almost before they had properly begun – some of them, I fear, on drinks bought by me.”
One classic moment in Annie’s was at Aitken’s expense. During the Guadeloupe G7 summit in 1979, Aitken lost his glass eye – the result of a bout with cancer a few years before – while swimming off shore. French security men dived for it, but failed to locate it.
On his return Aitken, somewhat to his irritation, was serenaded by Stan Crowther, Labour MP for Rotherham. Adapting Harry Belafonte’s Island in the Sun, Crowther ended his verse: “Please, oh please, do tell to me/ How did my eye land in the sea?”
Aitken was recruited in 1954 as an industrial reporter by Beaverbrook, whom he had reputedly saved from drowning in a boating accident. He soon became a foreign correspondent, based in New York, Washington and Paris.
His most memorable assignment was Fidel Castro’s seizure of power in Cuba in 1959. Aitken was in the hotel pool at the critical moment, but later got an exclusive interview with him.
Weeks later, he was detained by Castro’s secret police while covering the story of a US former RAF pilot who had escaped from a Cuban jail and been recaptured. Asked what he thought of Castro’s revolution, he told them: “I have no doubt it is very nice for Cubans. But this is the first time I have ever been arrested by any regime simply for doing my job.” He was released the next morning.
Ian Levack Aitken was born on September 19 1927, the son of George and Agnes Aitken; his mother had once shaken Stalin’s hand. Educated at King Alfred School, Hampstead, he joined the Fleet Air Arm at the close of the war.
Demobilised in 1948, he continued his studies at Regent Street Polytechnic, Lincoln College, Oxford (reading PPE), and the LSE. His first job, as a factory inspector, led to his joining the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions as a research officer in 1952. The next year he joined Tribune as its industrial reporter.
He moved to the Lobby during Harold Macmillan’s premiership and in 1964 switched from the Express to the Guardian. Aitken’s years as the Guardian’s political editor coincided almost exactly with Margaret Thatcher’s leadership of the Conservative Party. Patrick Cosgrave wrote that after his first meeting with Mrs Thatcher, Aitken “came away utterly convinced both of her sincerity and of her radical drive”.
Aitken gave up the Lobby in 1990 but continued to write for the Guardian, initially as a columnist. He was for three years a contributing editor of the New Statesman and in 1998 began writing again for Tribune. He was not keen on Blairism, was astounded by the Conservatives’ failure to entrust their fortunes to Michael Portillo, and in 1999 observed: “There is something almost majestic about the barminess of the Daily Telegraph.”
In 1984 he received the Gerald Barry Award for Journalism.
Ian Aitken married, in 1956, Dr Catherine Mackie, who died in 2006. He is survived by their two daughters.
Ian Aitken, born September 19 1927, died February 21 2018