JONATHAN Aitken’s wife, Lolitzia, was meditating for a week in an isolated Buddhist retreat when her husband rang to break the news of his promotion to the Cabinet. Lolitzia, a Swiss heiress and one of London’s most important society hostesses, was with pilgrims on Holy Island reportedly sleeping in a traditional wooden box designed to keep the body’s energies flowing. This wasn’t how we’d imagined the wife of Jonathan, newly appointed chief secretary to the Treasury, former TV-am big wig, biographer of Nixon and financier. But, speaking for the first time, Lolitzia says she spends up to two months a year looking for her spiritual ‘essence’. How does Jonathan regard these trips? ‘Maybe deep down he thinks I’m a bit cranky. But everyone has the right to be.’ She laughs. ‘I didn’t sleep in a box on Holy Island. I’m worried I’ll seem to be really wacko.’

She is hardly a traditional parliamentary wife. ‘Everybody knows I’m a really thick political wife. It’s a big joke. I don’t understand politics.’ When she’s seated next to the political Great and Good she asks them about their emotional motivations. ‘Tell me more, tell me more,’ she will giggle. Lolitzia began her quest for enlightenment 10 years ago. ‘I started returning from parties feeling something was lacking. I came home and my heart felt empty,’ she says. Initially she went to China and sought out some Chi Chuan spiritual masters. ‘I spent time with them and saw different realities. I saw them melt metal with their fingers.’

Next a friend told her about Charlie Tom, a Red Indian medicine man who lives ‘somewhere’ on a holy mountain in Oregon. Lolitzia flew to the States and simply drove to the mountains. ‘Suddenly I saw some Indians. I just walked up to them and said, ‘Hullo, I’m from London. Do you know Charlie Tom?’ One looked at me, amazed, and said he was Charlie’s cousin.’ She hoots with laughter.

The Indians invited her to an ‘extraordinary’ spiritual purification ceremony. ‘They build a tent of wet blankets, pray around it, put stones on the fire until they become very hot, throw on herbs and water and sing ancient songs. Then you dip in the cold river. I felt terrific afterwards.’ She made the next of her solo trips to see the Dalai Lama in India. ‘I had long chats with him about the essence of mind. He is pure love. He liked me for being funny,’ she says, characteristically exploding with mirth. ‘He likes to giggle. I get credit for being spiritual. But I’m just a great giggler.’

Then she was in the Caribbean when a book about whirling dervishes ‘fell’ on top of her. This led her to Istanbul where, shyly, she asked her hotel manager where she could find dervishes. ‘I whirl myself,’ he said, ‘and you must come.’ Lolitzia grabs her third cigarette, her serenity currently reliant on Marlboro. ‘I watched 10 of them whirl and whirl, bringing in divine energies.’

We’re talking in her Queen Anne terrace home – Churchill’s old house and scene of grand parties – with a dining room that could fit the Cabinet and drawing room the Government. Lolitzia – candid, ebullient but frosty when questions are too intrusive – sits talking on the edge of a table she designed. She speaks with a slightly guttural accent.

SHE’S wearing a girlish floral dress, flat shoes and clip in her hair. She has poise, friendly body language and an open youthful face, which she says radiates spirituality. ‘I’m not into face-lifts. A lot of spiritual practices are beautifying and rejuvenating.’ She’s ‘still attached’ to her vanity and won’t even divulge her age.

So would she put her money where her mouth is and discard worldly possessions? ‘I don’t think that’s necessary,’ she says, sipping the strong coffee brought by her housekeeper. ‘The important thing is that you aren’t attached. I like to think that if things go wrong I could lead a simple life in a little cottage.’

Lolitzia was born in Belgrade, left aged five, and became Swiss. She had a happy childhood but was an only child. (‘I still need to be alone. I can easily go for 10 days in the country without talking to anyone.’) She studied economics, gained a masters from Lausanne university, and was then given an import-export business by her financier father. ‘Soon I started a clothes factory employing 60 people. I made a lot of money by the time I was 23. I was successful and full of ambition.’

And she was social. ‘I was very glamorous, always tarted up in couture, over-made-up and over-jewelled,’ she says. ‘It was terribly important to me to look right and be asked to the right parties, to impress people with how wonderful I was. It was insecurity. All these drives that make us want to be rich and powerful come from that hole in the heart.’

Then she met Jonathan at a friend’s, and they went out to dinner and Annabel’s. On this first date, on the dance floor, Lolitzia said to him: ‘You’re the man I’m going to marry.’ How did she know? ‘I just felt it. I just knew.’ But it took her three years. ‘I frightened him!’ They’ve now been married 16 years.

Jonathan was the Commons Don Juan, linked with women from Lady Antonia Fraser to Lady Charlotte Curzon. ‘Some people use sex to make themselves feel better. Jonathan was a love addict. I think any sort of compulsive behaviour is a cry for help.’ He had an affair with Carol Thatcher while Lolitzia was dating him. ‘I saw it as the battle lost, but not the war.’ At one stage it was reported that Jonathan nearly married Carol. ‘It never occurred to me as a possibility. I knew he would marry me.’

Shortly after Lolitzia married, she nearly died from a blood clot near her heart when pregnant. Then she was bedridden for six months before giving birth to twins – one seriously ill – who were put in an incubator for a month. Later Lolitzia had a third child by Caesarean section. ‘Now I think these problems are tests to make us stronger.’

She continued to be wildly social and had a card index of 1,000 top names in London categorised under diplomats, politicians, writers and so on. For her parties she would select evenly from the sections and send out formal invitations. But her marriage didn’t ‘fix’ her (‘I’d always liked glamorous men because I thought they would make me feel better’) and her lifestyle palled.

‘People get it very wrong when they think ‘if only I was rich I’d be happy’,’ she says. ‘You always need a bigger fix to be happy. Being a socialite became routine for me. That’s when I started looking at the soul.’

It would be too easy to mock her as a spiritual bore and sneeringly dismiss what she does as New Age claptrap, the indulgences of a rich, bored hausfrau. But she’s a sensitive, happy person – enthusiastic, praying for people who are nasty to her, philosophising about love and compassion and simply seeking to fill a void.

But what if the Cabinet new boy emerges as a powerful Tory politician? Won’t she then be a political liability? ‘I think Jonathan fears that sometimes, yes.’ The great giggler breathes in more tranquillity and another Marlboro.