A real-life story worthy of a John le Carré novel
What is the point of BBC Four? The channel is being wound down to the point of irrelevance. Occasionally there will be a gem, such as last year’s Art of Persia, but mostly it has become a repeats channel – UK Gold with pretensions. This week you’ll find re-runs of Yes, Minister, Reggie Perrin, All Creatures Great and Small and The Joy of Painting. Great shows, but not what BBC Four should be about. Even the one thing that justifies being described as “archive” material – old episodes of Top of the Pops, which have been a mainstay of my Friday night viewing – have run out of steam now that they’ve reached 1990, a truly terrible year for music unless you still hold a candle for Jason Donovan.
One of the last good things on the channel is Storyville, the strand that showcases top class documentaries either co-produced by the BBC or bought in from elsewhere. The Hunt for Gaddafi’s Billions was not one of its best, dragged down by a leaden voice-over and a strictly chronological retelling (I know shows that dart back and forth in time can be annoying, but there is a happy medium). The story and the characters, though, were worthy of a John le Carré novel.
Arms dealers, shady politicians,
mercenaries and secret meetings in underground car parks – all were here. I’m not sure why any of these people agreed to be filmed for a documentary; Misha Wessel and Thomas Blom, the Dutch journalists conducting the investigation, are clearly persuasive.
The film focused on the “ultimate treasure hunt” for the billions Gaddafi was said to have smuggled out of Libya shortly before his death in 2011. Reports placed the money in South Africa, a country that had been supportive of Gaddafi since the days of Nelson Mandela. One team on its trail – with eyes on a 10 per cent commission – included a “colourful arms dealer” called Johan Erasmus and a Tunisian businessman named Erik Goaied whose relationship to all this remained opaque until late in the film. Goaied wore the haunted expression of a man who was in very, very deep.
But they were in a race against Taha Buishi, an “asset recovery agent” appointed by the new Libyan regime. It wasn’t long before Buishi vanished, only to re-emerge months later with an account of being kidnapped. Another player was shot dead by Serbian hit men. It was that kind of story – the kind you’ve seen played out in fiction but rarely in real life. The only sympathetic figure was Tito Maleka, veteran ANC head of security, who seemed to have some principles. He was the only one.
Every Fleet Street journalist had Max Clifford on speed dial. The tabloids were in his pocket, of course, but he dealt with the rest of us on a regular basis. He was Britain’s most famous publicist, and if you were covering the stories that the nation was talking about, from Sven Goran Eriksson’s surprisingly busy romantic affairs to Jade Goody’s death, you spoke to Clifford – who was always courteous and professional. His avuncular manner made him a frequent guest on the news and chat shows. It was quite the PR job, the one he did on himself.
Yet there were plenty of people close enough to Clifford to know what lay behind the public image. The editors to whom he would boast about his horrible sexual exploits; the reporters who watched him empty a Jiffy bag of photographs onto the table in front of them, showing that he had secretly taken compromising photographs of his own acquaintances in flagrante. “It was Max saying, ‘I am untouchable,’” one reporter told Max Clifford: The Fall of a Tabloid King (Channel 4).
He was untouchable for many years. No red-top newspaper was going to bite the hand that fed them David Beckham and Rebecca Loos, or David Mellor in his Chelsea strip. That last detail was made up, but will follow Mellor for the rest of his days. Clifford readily admitted to peddling barefaced lies. Nobody seemed to mind.
Creepily, Clifford had spilt many details of his proclivities – sex parties, voyeurism, coercing young women into having sex with his friends under false pretences – to his biographer, Angela Levin. She appeared here as a disapproving aunt, to say that listening back to the tapes made her blood run cold. And yet she didn’t run for the hills when he said this stuff. The film contained no bombshells, but through talking heads such as Levin it illustrated the ways in which powerful men are allowed to get away with terrible things.
Clifford was eventually exposed as a predator by victims who bravely went to police, and sentenced to eight years in prison for sex offences. It was a dramatic fall, but really he’d been hiding in plain sight.
The Hunt for Gaddafi’s Billions ★★★★ Max Clifford: The Fall of a Tabloid King ★★★