Parliamentary access In September 2020, it was revealed that the former Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, awarded Aitken a parliamentary pass despite the House of Commons claiming that former MPs who had been sentenced to a period of imprisonment of one year or more were ineligible. In September 2020 Aitken had held a pass continuously since at least December 2015. Works The Young Meteors In his early book The Young Meteors (London: Secker & Warburg, 1967; New York: Atheneum, 1967), Aitken profiled the brightest lights among the younger generation in Britain, and particularly London, with a hint in the title that many of these were likely to burn and crash. Hunter Davies, one of the people profiled, has pointed out that such lists of the promising were then common in The Sunday Times, but unusual as books. Much later, Craig Taylor in 2003 observed that those profiled who were still burning brightly included Michael Caine, David Bailey, Twiggy, David Frost and Don McCullin. Taylor found it humdrum, but: the book is worth re-examining these many years later for one reason. Aitken, it has been shown over time, is a figure we can always learn something from, a kind of walking, well-groomed Grimm's fairy tale. . . . In [this book] he intuits the popularity and importance of unquantifiable lists of who is hot, young and going places. Aitken himself in 2003 had a low opinion of the book: "In terms of style, it was certainly the worst book I've ever written". Yet the title was memorable: it was consciously adopted by Martin Harrison for a survey of the British photojournalism (including Bailey and McCullin) of about the same period. Nazarbayev and the Making of Kazakhstan: From Communism to Capitalism In 2009 Aitken published a biography of Nursultan Nazarbayev, the President of Kazakhstan, with the subject's cooperation. The Diplomat observed that the publisher’s note "describes Nazarbayev as a 'widely admired' leader, which is an interesting descriptor for a political leader who has never won an election deemed free or fair." Aitken received a Kazakh award for his "huge contribution to making Kazakhstan popular in the world and promoting its global reputation". The book sold only 466 copies and was widely panned by critics, The Guardian noting that the book "relies, for supporting evidence, on the good opinions of his [Nazarbayev's] friends (or of those too cowed to utter