I have a whole shelf of books on old frauds... this is by far the most enjoyable
You never know who you’ll end up sitting next to. In March 1991, President George H. W. Bush was attending a small lunch party in Washington. By chance, Robert Maxwell had wangled a place next to him. From the other end of the table, their host looked on in horror as Maxwell spent the entire meal sounding off about world affairs. The President was unable to get a word in edgeways. After a while, he just sat there, nodding.
The minute Maxwell paused for breath, Bush stood up and explained that he had to be somewhere else. As he left the building, the President was seen mouthing to an aide: ‘Who WAS that guy?’
Thirty years on, it’s still a question worth asking.
Eight months after that Washington lunch party, a vast corpse was spotted floating in the sea, 20 miles from the Canary Islands. Maxwell was lying on his back with his legs wide apart, man-spreading to the last.
Who WAS that guy? Over the next few days, the great and the good lined up to praise him. For Margaret Thatcher, no one would ever replace his ‘energy, vision and resolve’. Neil Kinnock said that everyone would miss his ‘ infectious vitality’. President Gorbachev ‘ deeply grieved’. Maxwell’s own newspaper, the Daily Mirror, devoted 15 pages – ‘his death removed a colossus from the scene’ – to praising his achievements. At his funeral, t he I sraeli President, Chaim Herzog, declared: ‘Kings and barons besieged his doorstep. He was a figure of almost mythological stature.’
In under a month, they were all eating their words. The colossus was a fraud, the visionary a conman, his empire a l i e. Confronted by debts of more than £1 billion, Maxwell had, it turned out, stolen £350 mill i on f r om Mirror pension f unds and £79 million from the pension funds of his other companies.
‘Four weeks earlier I had spent several days going from TV station to TV station telling everyone what a great man Maxwell had been,’ Charlie Wilson, the family’s hapless spokesman, told the author of this mesmerising biography. ‘Now I had to do the whole tour all over again saying what a swine and a disgrace he was.’ So, who WAS that guy? He was born Jan (possibly Ludvik) Hoch in a village in Czechoslovakia. His parents shared a two- room wooden shack with nine children: the younger ones slept in cots suspended f r om t he cei l i ng. His father would beat them black and blue; once, when the young Jan vomited in the street, he grabbed him by his hair and rubbed his face in it. At the earliest opportunity, in 1939, with war looming, Jan set off to Budapest ‘to go and fight’. Most of his family, including his parents and four of his siblings, were to perish in Auschwitz. He arrived in Liverpool in July 1940, unable to speak a word of English. His plummy, stagey accent can be traced back to the way he had learnt English by imitating Winston Churchill’s speeches, even though he couldn’t understand them. To the end of his days, he never quite mastered the English idiom. ‘They have locked the stable horse after the door had bolted,’ he would say. By the age of 23, he had changed his name four times – Jan Hoch to Leslie Jones to Ivan du Maurier to Captain Stone to Robert Maxwell. Throughout his life, he seems to have had no fixed identity, and no centre. But he always liked taking risks, and he emerged from the war with a Military Cross. Comrades noted a ruthless edge to his bullishness: as the war came to an end, he would routinely shoot German civilians
and enemy soldiers who were in the process of surrendering. Years later, he told one of his editors of the time he and his soldiers had surrounded an enemy farmhouse. He had shouted in German: ‘Come out with your hands up. You are completely surrounded.’
‘They came out and I shot them all with my sub-machine-gun. I thought my boys would be pleased, but all they said was, “That’s not fair, sir, those lads had surrendered.” Can you understand such an attitude?’
Working for British intelligence in post-war Germany, he came across a warehouse full of scientific journals, and realised that he had stumbled on a goldmine. Somehow securing worldwide distribution rights, he soon established a publishing empire.
But nothing was ever enough: he always wanted more. By the end of the 1950s, he was a multi-millionaire businessman, but this was insufficient. ‘I’ve decided to become Prime Minister,’ he announced. Adopted as Labour candidate for Buckingham, he would be chauffeur- driven from London in his Rolls-Royce, then switch it for an old Rover on the constituency border.
Elected in 1964, he soon became known as ‘the biggest gasbag in the Commons’. Colleagues failed to share his own high opinion of himself. The only parliamentary office he ever held was the chairmanship of the House of Commons catering sub-committee. Overnight, he turned loss to profit, as promised, but it helped that he juggled the books. To ease the debts, he sold off the parliamentary wine cellar at a fraction of its value to an anonymous buyer; in the meantime, his own wine collection miraculously improved.
When his parliamentary career came to an end in 1970, he put all his energy back into his businesses. He always maintained that accountancy was not a science but an art.
He yearned to be a press baron, and became increasingly obsessed by the infinitely more successful figure of Rupert Murdoch, who beat him to the ownership of four newspapers: first, the News of the World, then The Sun, then The Times, then Today.
‘I never spoke about him, but he couldn’t stop talking about me,’ Murdoch tells the author. ‘Whatever we did, he wanted to do it too. Also, I could see that he was ruining everything he touched. He was a total buffoon really.’
Eventually, Maxwell managed to buy the Mirror, largely because no one else wanted it. He promised it would gain a million readers in his first year. Instead, it lost a million. Perhaps they were put off by the way he placed himself centre-stage in its news coverage: in the first six months of his ownership, his face popped up in its pages more than a hundred times. He also liked to promote his own foreign business interests in the paper. ‘Burma: A Country We Have Ignored For Far Too Long,’ ran one headline.
His mendacity knew no bounds. Having launched a £1,000,000 Spot The Ball competition, he told his editor ‘Make sure this doesn’t cost me a million’ and ordered the judges to find the squares that no one had chosen, and then pick them as the winning squares.
I have a shelf full of books about frauds, but this one is by far the most enjoyable. By turns self-righteous and revolting, Maxwell makes the perfect villain. If, as President Herzog suggested at his funeral, he was like a figure from mythology, then it was surely a myth about greed.
At Maxwell family Christmases, he would cut a 40 lb turkey in half, giving half to his family, and keeping half for himself. His wife had to put a padlock on the larder door, but he was strong enough to break it. ‘He broke in the other day,’ she told a friend. ‘He ate a pound of cheese, a jar of peanut butter, two jars of caviar, a loaf of bread and a whole chicken in one go.’
He once ordered a Chinese takeaway for 14, though it was just for him and one other person. His manners were correspondingly gross. He would eat food off other people’s plates when they weren’t looking. If he didn’t like the food his butler brought him, he would simply throw it on the floor.
Peter Jay, who had once been dubbed ‘the cleverest man in Britain’, laboured as Maxwell’s ‘chief of staff’ for two years. ‘It seemed to me that there was something not so much amoral about him as pre- moral,’ he tells John Preston. ‘It was as if he was literally uncivilised, like some great woolly mammoth stalking through a primeval forest wholly unaware of things like good and evil.’
In his chauffeur-driven car, when he finished reading a newspaper he would simply toss it out of the window. His habits grew more disgusting with the crumbling of his empire. Alone in his London penthouse, he employed towels as toilet paper, tossing them on the floor for his servants to clear up.
Confronted by such grotesque images, Preston remains wonderfully astute and clear-headed. ‘It is tempting to regard this as an extreme example of his lack of consideration for others. Yet there are other ways of seeing it too: as a reversion to the helplessness of babyhood; or the behaviour of someone who has abandoned any pretence of being civilised and giving in to self-disgust.’
Maxwell’s end remains a mystery. Did he jump, or fall, or was he pushed? Preston rules out murder – why go to the bother of killing someone at sea when it’s so much easier on land?
His wife Betty said he would never have committed suicide, but the evidence does not support her. It seems unlikely to have been an accident. Why lock your cabin door from the outside, and remove the key, if you are planning to go back in? It looks as though he wanted the crew to think he was still there.
An autopsy suggested that Maxwell had clung to the side of the boat until his muscles could bear it no longer. ‘Perhaps Maxwell, the inveterate risk-taker, was somehow dicing with death,’ suggests his canny biographer.
He once ordered a Chinese takeaway for 14, though it was just for him and one other person