I’LL PROVE I’M NOT AN ABUSER
Broken but arrogant to the end, shrivelling away in his freezing prison cell, how the once almighty ‘PR to the stars’ – and inventor of Fake News – went to his grave working up one last shocking headline:
AS I WAITED in the visiting hall at Littlehey Prison in Cambridgeshire, I did not recognise the gaunt, shuffling figure in jeans and a sweatshirt who made his way towards me. But with me was the inmate’s daughter, Louise, and she introduced us: ‘David,’ she said, ‘meet Dad. Max Clifford.’ Our interview took place on November 14, three-and-a-half years after Clifford began an eight-year sentence for sexually assaulting four girls, the youngest just 15, in the 1970s and 1980s.
He had lost at least 3st and there was little physical trace of the brash and ruddy-faced fitness fanatic who once controlled the destinies of celebrities and Fleet Street editors alike.
What I couldn’t have known was that I was the last journalist that Clifford, 74, would ever meet. Last Sunday morning, three weeks after our interview, he died following a cardiac arrest in hospital, having twice collapsed in his cell the previous week.
Yet though his illness was palpable, he had – as always – a message he wanted to deliver to the public, one that he hoped would make sensational headlines in the newspapers he fed for so long.
‘I’m innocent,’ he insisted. ‘And when my appeal comes up, my lawyers are going to present fresh evidence that will prove it.’
Little by little, in the course of our twohour meeting, Clifford began to relax. His legs were badly swollen and the least exertion made him short of breath. But the ability to turn on the charm – which he used to become Britain’s pre-eminent media manipulator and, arguably, the man who invented ‘fake news’ – had not deserted him.
When he reflected on one of his career’s more notorious headlines, The Sun’s front page claiming comedian Freddie Starr had eaten a hamster, he chuckled at a story that was as sensational as it was untrue.
This, of course, is a man who became rich by peddling lies, half-truths and exaggerations, and sometimes worked equally hard to keep stories that were totally accurate out of the news – such as the affair between Princess Diana and James Hewitt.
A few days before Clifford’s arrest in 2012, he gave an address at the Oxford Union, saying: ‘A lot of the lies that you see in the newspapers, in the magazines, on television, on the radio, are mine.’
No, he admitted to me, it wasn’t actually true that the then-Tory Minister David Mellor made love to his mistress Antonia de Sancha wearing a Chelsea football strip.
Yet Clifford was, he implausibly insisted, a ‘knight in shining armour’ to Ms de Sancha and the many other women whose kiss-and-tell stories he brokered. After all, ‘the flat where she and Mellor met had been bugged by its owner, someone she thought was a friend, and the story was coming out anyway’.
At least he had brokered Ms de Sancha a good deal – though ten years later, in 2002, she described what happened as an ‘out of body experience’ in which she ‘went along with’ a story in which many of the details were fictional.
And Freddie Starr? Clifford said: ‘His manager rang me in a panic, saying The Sun had a story that Freddie had put a woman’s hamster between two slices of bread and tried to eat it. He was hysterical, saying I had got to try to stop it.
‘But when the newspaper contacted me, I said I couldn’t confirm or deny it, but I’d certainly seen Freddie eat some funny things. He was about to start a national tour and the story made it a sell-out.
‘I guess the British public had a sense of humour.’
However, there was nothing remotely funny about the story that resulted in Clifford ending his days in prison.
At his 2014 trial, the evidence against him was overwhelming. The jury heard how he induced young girls to perform sex acts by hinting he could fix their entry into showbusiness and abused them in his Bond Street office or in a distinctive yellow Jaguar.
One victim told how he persuaded her parents to let him drive her around and would then stop in secluded locations where he would force her to submit to his perverted lust. On one occasion, she said, when he was abusing her in the Jag, he told her there was a photographer hidden in the bushes taking pictures – warning that if she told anyone what had happened, they could be published. After the trial, the victim said the trauma had been so great that it had led her to contemplate suicide.
The jury convicted Clifford of sexually assaulting four women, but the judge said he believed a further six who were called as supporting witnesses were also telling the truth. Clifford would also have faced trial for abusing a girl who was only 12 when he attacked her in a Jacuzzi, but the assault took place in Spain, outside the court’s jurisdiction.
During his trial, Clifford seemed to fail to appreciate the seriousness of the charges.
He was even filmed clowning around behind a TV reporter who was presenting a report on the case outside the court. Maybe it was just bravado, but the impression it conveyed was of heartless arrogance.
Why did he behave in such a way when facing the most appalling charges? Clifford said: ‘I’d had weeks of being called the most revolting, heinous things. To be honest, I was just letting off steam.’
Discussing the case, he became animated – for a few fleeting moments he was again the puffedup powerful public relations fixer who engineered more newspaper headlines than anyone else.
‘I deny all the charges,’ he said. ‘I find the allegations repulsive. I’ve stood up to bullies all my life and the suggestion I would force myself on anyone is revolting and alien in the extreme.’
So why had the charges stuck? Clifford shrugged. ‘I’ve upset a lot of people in the establishment, and in the media establishment. So, maybe you can understand…’ He tailed off.
As to why the allegations were made in the first place, he added: ‘You have to understand, this happened in the wake of the Jimmy Savile revelations. The climate was
‘I’m innocent – we’ve got fresh evidence to prove it’ He failed to appreciate the seriousness of it all
one where the police were saying that if anyone came forward with allegations of this kind, they would be believed.’
But how can we believe a man who became rich feeding wild fantasies to the voracious red-top press? Even while protesting his innocence, he seemed bizarrely preoccupied with the newspaper stories that had been written about him around the time of the trial.
His appraisal of the hostile coverage his case inevitably attracted seemed skewed – The Sun, he said, had been especially critical of him because he had successfully sued its owner Rupert Murdoch’s company for hacking his phone, and was eventually offered a £1million settlement. ‘I know I’ve upset him, and that’s uncomfortable,’ Clifford said.
It is now largely forgotten that Clifford handled non-celebrity scoops involving the criminal justice system, such as the use by the Metropolitan Police of undercover officers to infiltrate lawful protest groups, and – with what now looks like extraordinary irony – became an advocate of prison reform, helping to publicise the harsh conditions of many of our jails.
At that time, of course, he did not imagine he would spend the end of his life experiencing prison firsthand. Last week, after his death, I posted a tweet revealing something he told me – that for six weeks there had often been no hot water or heating on his wing, where most of the inmates were aged over 70 and the oldest was in his mid-90s.
‘I think we get the worst conditions,’ he said, ‘because we’re elderly and they know we’re not going to revolt. I see men in their 80s and 90s watching TV in their overcoats and it breaks my heart.’
Few who believe Clifford was guilty of the crimes that sent him to his cold and lonely death in prison will have much sympathy.
Several people who read my tweet made the same, mordant joke: ‘Well at least he’s somewhere warm now.’ And indeed, yesterday, a Ministry of Justice spokesman denied that Littlehey had been without hot water or heating ‘continuously’ for several weeks – though an authoritative Prison Service source confirmed there had been ‘sporadic issues’.
In jail, Clifford’s celebrity status did not help him get medical care. He suffered his first heart attack in August, after which his other symptoms started to worsen.
Doctors suspected he had cardiac amyloidosis, a treatable condition in which the heart malfunctions because of a build-up of protein deposits. He never received that treatment – and the diagnosis was only confirmed at his autopsy last week. Originally, his appeal had been fixed for June, then postponed until October and finally put off until next year.
Daughter Louise told me: ‘There’s no point in regret now. The doctor who conducted the autopsy said he must have been as strong as an ox to keep going as long as he did.’
Louise is, naturally, convinced of her father’s innocence and has been given reason to hope by Clifford’s legal team.
Sources I spoke to after our meeting in Littlehey said the fresh evidence Clifford’s lawyers plan to submit at his appeal is ‘credible’ and ‘compelling’, adding that he would not be the first famous person to face false allegations – even if some of the charges against him were true.
In essence, his appeal will rest on evidence that casts doubt on details of his victims’ accounts.
For example, one woman said she was assaulted in Clifford’s Jag in a sports ground car park. New witnesses say this cannot have happened because the ground was always locked when not in use. If a vehicle had somehow got in – let alone one as distinctive as Clifford’s – the full-time caretaker would immediately have investigated.
Another victim’s allegations are undermined, it is claimed, because it can be proven Clifford was not in the same country as her on the day of the claimed attack.
It will be for the court to determine whether this evidence renders his convictions unsafe: a final, explosive story to top his biggest scoops.
What is certain is that Clifford went to his grave determined to land the big exclusive.
And what would be truly sensational is that, in death, as he so shamelessly and relentlessly failed to do in life, it turned out that Max Clifford was actually telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
A final explosive story to top his biggest scoops