Media Matters
Stephen Glover
How many people under 45 know anything about the media tycoon Robert Maxwell?
They can hardly avoid articles about his daughter Ghislaine – awaiting trial in New York for the alleged sex trafficking of underage girls – but are probably largely ignorant about the man once known to Private Eye readers as ‘Captain Bob’ and ‘the bouncing Czech’ – a reference to the country of his birth.
Yet for a brief period between 1984 and his unexplained death in 1991, Maxwell was one of the two leading newspaper proprietors in Britain, the other being Rupert Murdoch. It is hard to convey how dominant these two rivals were. In the mid-1980s, Murdoch’s Sun sold around four million copies a day, and Maxwell’s Daily Mirror just over three million.
Assuming an average of three readers per copy, there were some 21 million readers of the two red-tops – nearly half the adult population of the country.
The two moguls were in most respects unalike. For one thing, Maxwell was a crook, whereas Murdoch was not. And while Murdoch was a brilliant newspaperman, Maxwell was a successful businessman who knew a lot about publishing but little about national newspapers.
Having been beaten by Murdoch in races to acquire the News of the World and the Sun, Maxwell in 1984 managed to buy the Labour-supporting Mirror and its sister titles. Under his watch, as he bullied and fell out with various editors and writers, the Mirror steadily lost circulation, while the Sun widened its lead.
But this did not curtail Maxwell’s wild newspaper ambitions. In February 1987, he launched the London Daily News to compete with the Evening Standard. That paper’s owner, the then Lord Rothermere, produced a cut-price spoiler called the Evening News, which many readers confused with the new title. Maxwell’s paper closed after six months.
In 1990, he launched the European (which admittedly survived his death by seven years) and the following year he acquired the debt-laden, loss-making New York Daily News. By this time he was to all intents and purposes bankrupt, and had been raiding the Mirror Group pension fund to keep afloat.
Maxwell even built up a covert shareholding in the Independent, which I helped to found in 1986, though he was thwarted because the maximum single stake in the paper was ten per cent.
After Sebastian Faulks wrote a not entirely friendly profile of him in the
Independent on Sunday, Maxwell rang me as its editor to complain.
In fact, he was extravagantly courteous. When I asked him why he was buying shares in the paper’s parent company, he replied that it was ‘because you chaps are doing such a good job down there. But if you wish me to desist, you only have to tell me, and the show will move on from the Palace to the Alhambra.’
I didn’t believe him. He disappeared off his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, named after his beloved daughter, a year later.
Another difference between Murdoch and Maxwell is that while the Left loathed and excoriated the former, they tolerated the latter. Maxwell had been a Labour MP between 1964 and 1970. After he became the Mirror’s proprietor, the party under Neil Kinnock sought his support, though Maxwell successfully sued Private Eye after it suggested he had paid Kinnock’s travel expenses in the hope of being recommended for a peerage.
Maxwell had friends in the Labour Party, such as the MP Geoffrey Robinson. His chief of staff in the late 1980s was the ex- Times economics editor and erstwhile British Ambassador to Washington Peter Jay, who happened to be son-inlaw of former Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan.
Readers may remember that Alastair Campbell – then the Mirror’s political editor, later Tony Blair’s spin doctor – thumped Guardian journalist Michael White for cracking a joke about ‘Captain Bob, bob … bob, bob, bob’ on the day of Maxwell’s drowning. This suggests that Campbell was fond of the old brute, as were many on the Left.
John Preston, biographer of another rogue, Jeremy Thorpe, is in February bringing out a book about Maxwell – Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell.
Meanwhile, we await the verdict of the court on Ghislaine. Perhaps both events will help to bring back into public consciousness a bent media mogul who briefly dominated the national landscape.
Whatever else can be said about Robert Maxwell, he was a rotten newspaperman.
The other day I came across this rather shocking passage in D R Thorpe’s splendid biography of Anthony Eden:
‘With the collapse of the [Suez] invasion, it became open season for Eden’s critics. At the Lord Mayor’s Banquet, his speech was received with applause, but the BBC engineers, forewarned that the largely Establishment audience would be sympathetic, cut the link as soon as he had completed the advance text, so that it appeared to the radio audience that his message had been received in stony silence.’
Some things never change.