Toby Young
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Take Jonathan Aitken. Like Pryce, he was found guilty of perverting the course of justice, a conviction that ended his political career. However, after serving a grand total of seven months, he relaunched himself as a professional upper-middle-class ex-jailbird, writing not one but two books about the experience. He now makes regular media appearances to talk about such subjects as finding serenity in the Slough of Despond, particularly when another MP is publicly disgraced. No shortage of work, then.
I actually met Aitken when we both appeared on a reality show, a frequent source of employment for posh ex-cons. Lord Brocket, who served two and a half years for insurance fraud in 1996, made it to the final four on series three of I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. With good behaviour, Vicky Pryce will be out in time to appear in series 13 this December. I have absolutely no doubt she’ll be asked to do it, and she might well be tempted by the six-figure sum. Not bad for three weeks’ work.
Of course, not every old lag embraces the role as enthusiastically as Aitken and Brocket. It probably helps that they’re ex-public schoolboys and therefore didn’t find the experience of being in jail too much of a shock. As Evelyn Waugh writes in Decline and Fall: ‘Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is only the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums… who find prison so soul-destroying.’
But even if Vicky Pryce has a tough time in prison, she’ll be pleasantly surprised by all the attention she receives as a result of her conviction. Far from being socially ostracised, she’ll be fêted by her friends and neighbours like never before. Tom Wolfe makes this point in Bonfire of the Vanities. The central character Sherman McCoy is considered a bit of a bore by his wife’s fashionable Park Avenue set, but that all changes when he’s arrested for hit-and-run. Shortly after the scandal breaks in the press, McCoy goes to a dinner party at his wife’s insistence and assumes he’ll be shunned by the other guests. In fact, they hang on his every word.
‘It’s perverse, isn’t it?’ he tells his wife afterwards. ‘Two weeks ago … these same people froze me out. Now I’m smeared — smeared! — across every newspaper and they can’t get enough of me.’
These days, the notoriety of being a defendant in a high-profile court case trumps the ignominy of being found guilty and sent to jail. Indeed, because the prison sentence adds to the notoriety, it’s actually a benefit rather than a cost. I’ve no doubt Pryce intends to write a book about the whole affair, come what may. Even Rosie Johnston, the Oxford student jailed for possession of heroin in 1986, wrote a book about her ordeal. Pryce now has a much better ending than she would have had if she’d received a suspended sentence — and she’s that much more famous. As a result, her agent will be able to sell the book for twice the amount.
It’s one of the great ironies of our publicity-crazed age that being sent to prison is actually less calamitous for members of the ruling class than it is for those at the bottom of our society. Precisely because Pryce’s fall from grace is so great — because it’s such a ‘tragedy’, to use the cliché favoured by the broadsheet press — it’s actually not disastrous at all. On the contrary, it’s a cracking good yarn and I have no doubt that a clever and industrious woman like Vicky Pryce will make an absolute mint out of it.
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