Disgraced former Tory cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken will be in York on Tuesday for the opening night of this year's York Festival of Ideas to talk about secrets, politics and prison. He spoke to STEPHEN LEWIS DEFEAT, disgrace, divorce, bankrupty and jail - Jonathan Aitken's been through the lot.

Did it change him?

"That's a pretty good Royal Flush," he says. "If you don't change as a result of those experiences you would be pretty insensitive."

Those experiences, as he calls them, were the result of his disastrous libel action against the Guardian and World In Action over allegations they made against him following a stay at the Ritz Hotel in Paris in 1993.

Aitken, at the time a Tory Government minister, had allowed aides of the Saudi royal family to pay his hotel bill. He falsely claimed his then-wife Lolicia had paid.

In 1995, he resigned his cabinet post as Chief Secretary to the Treasury so he could concentrate on fighting his libel case. Standing in Conservative Central Office, he portrayed himself as a crusader for truth. "If it falls to me to start a fight to cut out the cancer of bent and twisted journalism in our country with the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of British fair play, so be it," he declared.

They were words that were to come back to haunt him. In June 1997 his libel case sensationally collapsed. He was charged with perjury and perverting the course of justice and, after pleading guilty to both offences, was jailed for 18 months in 1999.

It was an extraordinary fall from grace for a man who had himself once been a journalist: a war correspondent in Vietnam and Biafra who, he says, 'saw bullets fly'. He likes to talk about how in 1969 (when he had been adopted as the prospective Tory parliamentary candidate for the safe seat of Thirsk and Malton) he took on the might of the British establishment and won in a test case over attempts to prosecute journalists for breaches of the Official Secrets Act. Aitken as the defender of journalistic freedom.

So how did he come to fall so far? And when he looks back today at the man who made that 'sword of truth' speech, what does he think of him?

"I think 'who was that prat'," he admits, speaking by telephone from London. Then he can't resist trying to mount at least a token defence of that old Aitken. "Where our battles begin isn't necessarily where they end," he says, suggesting he'd been drawn gradually into a sequence of events he couldn't seem to free himself from.

He insists to this day that he won part of his libel case, and that certain claims about him were withdrawn. "Nobody remembers that." But he then says he has no complaints about his jail sentence - or about the press in general. "I have some perspective on what it is like to be the quarry. But I think it was Enoch Powell who said 'politicians who don't like the Press are like sea captains who don't like the sea...'"

Today, the 72-year-old is an author, broadcaster, lecturer, campaigner for prison reform - and committed Christian. "Adversity is often a gateway to a deeper faith," he says.

This weekend, true to that spirit, he will be preaching the Sunday service to prisoners at Wormwood Scrubs. "I do that several times a year."

But on Tuesday he will be coming north to York to take part in the city's Festival of Ideas.

His talk, at the Tempest Anderson Hall on Tuesday evening, is entitled 'Secrets from Journalism, Politics and Prison'."I have some interesting history in this field," he says with dry humour.

He certainly has some interesting anecdotes about his seven months in prison - including the time some fellow inmates allegedly tried to put rohypnol in his coffee so they could strip him, put him in bed with another man and take compromising photos of him so they could say 'Aitken is gay'.

On the whole, however, prison life, while not easy, wasn't quite as bad as he expected, he says. "I found it possible to get along with other members of the prison community.

"That happened almost by accident in that I found a trade in prison - writing and reading letters to those who had poor literacy skills. Every single night of my sentence a queue would form outside my cell of young prisoners who wanted a letter - sometimes about the most intimate subjects - written or read."

There is something quite moving about that. But then in prison, he says, all men - former Tory cabinet ministers included - are equal.

BLOB Jonathan Aitken: Secrets from Journalism, Politics and Prison. York Festival of Ideas, Tempest Anderson Hall, Tuesday June 9, 7.15pm. Tickets free from yorkfestivalofideas.com/tickets or 01904 322622.