division of Slater Walker in 1973-75 and chairman of R. Sanbaar Consultants Ltd from 1976 to at least 1982, and a director of arms exporting firm BMARC from 1988 to 1990. Parliamentary career Aitken initially worked in parliament as private secretary to Conservative MP Selwyn Lloyd in 1964–66. Defeated at Meriden in the West Midlands in 1966 and dropped from standing for Thirsk and Malton (above), he was elected as MP for Thanet East in the February 1974 general election; from 1983 he sat for South Thanet. He managed to offend PM Margaret Thatcher by ending a relationship with her daughter, Carol Thatcher, and suggesting that Thatcher "probably thinks Sinai is the plural of Sinus" to an Egyptian newspaper. He stayed on the backbenches throughout Thatcher's premiership, as well as participating in the re-launch of TV-AM, when broadcaster Anna Ford threw her wine at him to express her outrage at both his behaviour and the unwelcome consequent transformation of the TV station. Opens Hollis affair Aitken wrote a highly confidential letter to Thatcher in early 1980, dealing with allegations that the former Director-General of MI5, Sir Roger Hollis, had been a double agent also working for the Soviet Union. This information had come to Aitken from retired CIA spymaster James Angleton. Espionage historian Chapman Pincher obtained a copy of the letter, and used former MI5 officers Peter Wright and Arthur Martin as his main additional secret sources, to write the sensational book Their Trade is Treachery in 1981. This matter continued being highly controversial throughout the 1980s, and led to Wright eventually publishing his own book Spycatcher in 1987, despite the government's prolonged Australian court attempts to stop him from doing so. Minister of State for Defence Procurement Aitken became Minister of State for Defence Procurement under prime minister John Major in 1992. He was later accused of violating ministerial rules by allowing an Arab businessman to pay for his stay in the Paris Ritz, perjured himself and was jailed (see below). Aitken had previously been a director of BMARC, an arms exporter during 1988–1990. In 1995, a Commons motion showed that while a Cabinet minister he had signed a controversial Public Interest Immunity Certificate (PIIC) in September 1992 relating to the Matrix Churchill trial, and that the "gagged" documents included ones relating to the supply of arms to Iran by BMARC for a period when he was a director