There was a moment of absolute stillness in court shortly before 4pm on Wednesday, as Jonathan Aitken, once dubbed the tallest and handsomest man in British politics, bent over to study the documents that had been placed in his hands.
They revealed that the testimony he had recently given on oath had been a lie.
Aitken's determined campaign to 'hang tough' as he put it, and outsmart his journalistic pursuers by ever more inventive stories, had finally foundered.
The former cabinet minister was at last faced with a sheaf of papers he could not explain away.
They were copies of the air tickets and car hire dockets which proved his wife and daughter had never been in Paris on the weekend when, as defence minister, he had dropped everything to go to the Ritz. Yet Aitken had always claimed the purpose of the trip was to see his family.
His story lay in ruins. It was one of the most dramatic moments in recent legal history. Veteran QC George Carman, defending the Guardian and Granada's World in Action, said: 'I've never seen anything like this case in all my years at the Bar.' It all began with a little white lie.
The minister for defence procurement had been staying privately for a weekend at the Paris Ritz at the same time as a number of his Arab friends.
There had apparently been meetings - and in September 1993 one of his jobs was to keep the Saudi royal family sweet on the multi-billion pound defence deal with Britain. One of the guests, Said Ayas, was personal assistant to Prince Mohammed bin Fahd, a son of the king.
The Guardian's confidential source for his stay was the owner of the Ritz and Harrods, Mohamed Al Fayed. Aitken's bill, said Al Fayed, had been paid for by Ayas.
The Guardian sent an exploratory letter to Aitken at the Ministry of Defence asking him to explain the purpose of the meeting and how it related to his job in government. At the same time Ayas was telephoned at his flat near Hyde Park.
Ayas maintained that the weekend had been purely social and that the Aitkens had been taking their daughter Victoria to her new school. He also revealed that he was Victoria's godfather, an admission that triggered off a four-year investigation of monumentally complex proportions.
For Aitken's reply the next day was, as he might have put it, a bit of 'sharp editing.' No, he said, there had been no meetings with any of the named Arabs, including Ayas. He and his wife, Lolicia, were simply taking their daughter to school.
Then he added: 'I had no meetings in Paris or Geneva except for social encounters with my daughters' godparents and other old friends.' That slight misrepresentation in failing to identify Ayas as the godfather could only mean one thing: Aitken had something to hide.
For the next six months Aitken and the then editor of the Guardian, Peter Preston, entered into a exchange of letters that deepened the mystery.
Although the Guardian had acquired a copy of Ayas's bill, showing the addition of Aitken's 8,010 francs, he insisted that Lolicia had paid the whole amount in cash.
By the end of February 1994, the story had become an unwieldy morass of claim and counter-claim. The issue was: had Aitken breached the bible of government conduct - Questions of Procedure for Ministers - and if so, who should inquire and arbitrate? The correspondence was sent to the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robin Butler, and the then prime minister John Major. Aitken was cleared of any wrongdoing - on his own good word - and a few months later he was promoted to the Cabinet as Chief Secretary to the Treasury.
Unbeknown to the Guardian until later in the year, Aitken had escaped censure by embarking on further intrigue. The Ayas bill of more than 117,000 francs had shown a cash payment of 4,257 francs. Aitken had seized on this as evidence that his wife had mistakenly paid only half his bill and he set about covering his tracks.
He obtained from the Ritz president, Frank Klein, a letter saying that a woman of French appearance had paid the 'cash sum of FF4257.' A carefully edited extract of that letter was sent to Butler on March 3 1994 and copied to Peter Preston but the crucial amount had been deleted.
There was a further improbable twist. On March 17, Aitken told Butler he had worked out that a nephew of Ayas who was staying at the hotel, Hodi Abdul Rahman, must have mistakenly paid the other half of his bill. He produced for Butler a cheque reimbursing Abdul Rahman and an exchange of letters with Ayas apparently explaining the confusion.
There the matter rested until October 1994 when Mohamed Al Fayed again stirred the pot. Through an emissary, Brian Hitchens of the Sunday Express, Al Fayed made allegations to John Major about four ministers: Tim Smith, Neil Hamilton, Michael Howard and Aitken.
Butler was again required to investigate - and cleared Howard and Aitken of any blame - but before he had finished, on October 20, the Guardian published its cash-for-questions story, leading to the resignation of Smith and a libel battle with Hamilton.
Two days later Aitken lied to the House of Commons. In reply to a question from Labour's Gordon Brown, he said that at no time had any part of his bill been paid for by Ayas. But a week later he revealed the Abdul Rahman ploy by a selective leak to the Daily Mail.
The intense publicity generated by the cash-for-questions affair generated more information about Aitken's personal and business life. Two former employees of a Berkshire health hydro called Inglewood claimed that Aitken had tried to procure girls for visiting Arabs. Further information from the Ritz suggested that the entire Ayas bill had been paid through a company associated with the Saudi royal family.
On April 10 1995, after three months of collaboration, the Guardian and Granada's World in Action went public. Aitken's response was seismic. In the conference room at Tory Central Office he delivered a broadside against those 'wicked lies.' In a phrase which he has come to regret, he ended on a note of high rhetoric: 'If it has fallen to my destiny 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. I am ready for the fight.' Writs for libel and aggravated damages against the Guardian and Granada followed and further writs were issued when both organisations returned to Aitken's business affairs in December with a story about his involvement with arms companies in the late eighties.
During preparation of the case, the defendants' lawyers came across the first dramatic piece of evidence in the autumn of 1996. Out of the Ritz archives came the bill for Prince Mohammed bin Fahd. He had been staying there in the early part of September. Then on March 10 this year, when Aitken's 205-page witness statement arrived, he admitted that Ayas's bill had been paid by the prince's personal treasurer.
In addition, discovery from the Cabinet Office revealed the most astonishing fact. In October 1994 when Aitken was being investigated by Butler, he wrote to the chief whip Richard Ryder confirming that he had had a conversation in Paris with Prince Mohammed.
The defendants had another crucial document. A record of Aitken's telephone calls from the Ritz showed that at 10.15 on the Sunday morning, September 19 1993, he had telephoned the Hotel Bristol in the Swiss village of Villars, where Victoria was going to school. The call, it was assumed, could only have been to Lolicia. If that was right, then she could not have returned to Paris that morning to pay his bill.
Aitken realised the dilemma and in the course of his evidence he suddenly introduced his mother-in-law into the Hotel Bristol that morning.
Lolicia's Yugoslav-born mother Nada Azucki, who lived in Switzerland, had come to spend the night at the hotel, sharing the room with Lolicia, Aitken claimed. She remained in the hotel room, while Lolicia left early and come back to Paris.
So the Sunday morning phone call was to his mother-in-law, Aitken told the court. It was an unlikely tale but the defendants could not disprove it. The Hotel Bristol had closed down since 1993.
It was Guardian reporter Owen Bowcott who found the crucial clue. While Aitken was still testifying, Bowcott flew to Switzerland and drove to to the shuttered and abandoned Hotel Bristol in Villars.
It was in the hands of receivers. But the caretaker told him there were boxes of old records in the basement. Bowcott waded through them for three days. Then he struck gold. He faxed back to the lawyers in London four-year-old print-outs of the guest-lists, reservation dockets and bill payments for that weekend.
There was Lolicia's bill. She had taken a double room, which her daughter Victoria had shared the previous night. But on the crucial night in question, Lolicia's urge to get value for money had proved her undoing. The hotel dockets revealed that she had obtained a 80SF reduction on the room rate 'because of single occupancy'.
There had been no mother-in-law staying in the room. Aitken's story about the phone call was false.
The documents were rushed back to London, and Aitken was confronted with them in the witness box.
His position looked rocky. Faced with a critical conflict of evidence, Aitken's reckless gambler's streak came to the fore.
He obtained and served dramatically on the defence a signed statement from his 17-year-old daughter, Victoria, apparently confirming his story.
She appeared by his side in the courtroom on Wednesday morning and his solicitor, Richard Sykes, assured the press that the next day in the witness box, like Ascot, was to be Ladies' Day. Daughter and wife together would present testimony that the Hotel Bristol paperwork was somehow a mistake.
Meanwhile, Aitken's lies had been crumbling on another front. There was no record that Aitken or his wife had ever actually settled his Paris bill. But Aitken claimed this was because she had paid in cash - her 'acute dyslexia', he said, prevented her using credit cards.
Valerie Scott, Aitken's former secretary, who had first given the interview to World in Action which led to the libel action, was consulted. 'Dyslexia!' she scoffed: 'I used to follow Lolicia around shops while she wrote cheques and signed credit cards galore!' The defence made determined, but unsuccessful, efforts to subpoena Lolicia to find out if she really had no credit cards. Aitken's lawyers admitted only that she had signing rights on her husband's Barclaycard.
Now, the treasure-trove of old bills Bowcott had unearthed from the Alpine hotel basement destroyed that false story. For Lolicia's bill had been paid by her American Express card, the existence of which had been previously unknown. The defendants issued a subpoena to the American Express company.
After prolonged searches, they handed over Lolicia's statement for September 1993. It revealed a dramatic fact. Lolicia had not only stayed at the Hotel Bristol. She had also used her Amex card to hire a Volkswagen Golf. The Amex bill recorded the location 'Amkunsthalle, Geneva' - the airport arrivals hall.
This meant Lolicia had arrived in Geneva at an airport. The previous week Aitken had given sworn testimony to the judge that his wife and daughter had first arrived in Paris by ferry and train, and then gone on from Paris to Geneva by the TGV express train.
For the first time, the defence team began to seriously examine a new possibility. The more they thought about it, the more unlikely it seemed that Aitken's wife and daughter had any good reason to go to Paris at all.
What if they had simply flown direct from London to Geneva? The lawyers started to make inquiries of the airlines about flights on the relevant days. They drew a blank with Swissair - all their records were out of reach of a British subpoena.
But British Airways were able to co-operate. For days, lawyers searched through the microfilm of old passenger coupons.
At the same time, pursuit of the Budget Rent-a-Car documentation in Switzerland was also proving difficult. The company had changed hands and the Swiss could not be ordered to help - they could only be asked to do searches as a favour, in employees' spare time.
Just before 4pm on Wednesday, a white sealed package was delivered to Court 10 from Geraldine Proudler, the Guardian's solicitor.
Carman opened the envelope and handed one copy to the judge, and one to Charles Gray, Aitken's QC. It contained copies of the coupons for Lolicia and Victoria's direct flight from London to Geneva on the morning of Friday September 17 1993.
It also contained the Budget car hire dockets showing she had picked up her Golf at the airport, and not returned it until 6.35pm on Sunday the 19th - the day Lolicia was supposed to be in Paris, paying her husband's hotel bill.
