by John Preston
But while employees were occasionally caught trying to leave the Palace of Westminster with joints of beef, even legs of lamb, hidden under their coats, the vast majority of thefts went unnoticed. Despite being heavily subsidized by the Treasury, the ‘Refreshment Department’, as it was known, had lost £33,000 in the previous tax year – more than £400,000 in today’s money. It also had a £61,000 overdraft. ‘No one was exactly queuing for the job,’ Richard Marsh, the Minister of Power, admitted.
Maxwell, however, leaped at the offer. Immediately after being appointed, he announced that the department would make a £20,000 profit in 1968. As soon as they heard this, MPs gleefully predicted his downfall. But within weeks Maxwell had sacked large numbers of staff, slashed the number of items on the menu and banished tablecloths as a pointless expense. More drastically still, he proposed introducing vending machines into the most historic building in England.
Shell-shocked MPs struggled to adjust to this blizzard of changes. No one was more incensed than Sir William van Straubenzee, a rotund, red-faced man with tufted sideburns who represented the impregnably safe Conservative seat of Wokingham. He was so annoyed that he took the unusual step of raising the subject during a Commons debate:
Van Straubenzee: ‘Why have avocado pears disappeared from the menu?’
Maxwell: ‘Avocado pears have been available at the buffet in the Members’ Dining Room for the last three weeks.’
Van Straubenzee: ‘What about cold lamb cutlets?’
Maxwell: ‘Cold lamb cutlets can be provided if the kitchens are given twenty-four hours’ notice.’
But van Straubenzee hadn’t finished yet; there was something else he was even more incensed about: ‘Why is oeuf en gelée not available in the Members’ Dining Room?’ he demanded.
Patiently, Maxwell explained that it was no longer practical. ‘The average daily consumption of oeufs en gelée during the summer was approximately twelve a day,’ he said, most of which, he suspected privately, had been eaten by van Straubenzee himself.
Others found the upheavals almost as unsettling. In his diary, Richard Crossman described how that afternoon he’d gone to buy a cup of tea in the tea room. Instead of his usual little jug of milk, he had been handed a paper sachet. ‘I discovered that instructions have been given by the fellow who runs the Catering Department to serve powdered milk in tea. We’d already had foreign cheese forbidden in our own restaurant, but powdered milk was going a long way. I asked Bob [Maxwell] how he could allow this to happen and he explained, “I’ve given a chap a commission of £200 a year for any savings he got, and he made a saving of £100 a week on powdered milk.” “Well, you can’t make that saving,” I said. “Off with it this afternoon”, and I’m glad to say it went.’
Despite his misgivings, Crossman found his attitude slowly changing. ‘What a miraculous man that fellow is,’ he wrote of Maxwell. ‘However much people hate him, laugh at him, boo him and call him a vulgarian, he really does get things done.’ In his diary entry for Tuesday, 12 December 1967, Crossman confined himself to a single sentence: ‘The Catering Sub-Committee under Bob Maxwell is making a profit.’
Against all the odds, Maxwell had triumphed. Even so, this was hardly what he had in mind when he became an MP. More than ever, he yearned to make an impact. To be noticed. The opportunity finally came when five female typists in Surbiton, trying to do their bit for the economy, decided to work an extra half-hour a day for no money. Harold Wilson was so impressed that he invited the women to lunch at the Commons. This was the beginning of what became known as the ‘I’m Backing Britain’ campaign.
As soon as he heard about it, Maxwell decided to start something similar: a ‘Buy British’ campaign. Although various bigwigs were roped in to lend their support, the campaign quickly ran into trouble. There were accusations that it was jingoistic and would jeopardize Britain’s plans to join the European Common Market. It didn’t help that the ‘Buy British’ T-shirts turned out to have been made in Portugal.
On 7 February 1968, Maxwell arranged for full-page announcements to appear in The Times and the Daily Telegraph headed ‘100 Uncranky Suggestions of Ways to Help Your Country – and Yourself’. Far from being uncranky, several of these suggestions struck people as actively deranged, especially one calling on children to give up their free school milk.
Two days later an editorial in the Telegraph offered its own suggestion: ‘Mr Maxwell’s campaign should be laughed into the oblivion it deserves before it does real harm.’ The Observer was even harsher, writing, ‘The mysterious Captain Robert Maxwell has at last achieved his ambition . . . with his totally misguided campaign and his string of TV appearances. Looking like an impossibly successful stall holder in Petticoat Lane, he has contrived to emerge as a National Figure.’
Within a few days, ‘Backing Britain’ was quietly dropped. At the same time, people began to wonder if Maxwell really had pulled off such a miracle with the Refreshment Department. An article in the Sunday Times claimed that it wasn’t just food that had been cooked in the Palace of Westminster’s kitchens – so had the books. Apparently Maxwell had used an unusual and possibly unique form of bookkeeping. As well as including the Treasury subsidy within the profits, he had omitted to mention several significant expenditures. When the accounts were submitted to the Exchequer, the £20,000 profit was revised downwards – to just £1,787. After they had been audited, this figure was revised again – to a £3,400 loss.
Furious that his business methods had been questioned, Maxwell threatened to sue the paper and complained to Parliament’s Committee of Privileges – the body which investigates allegations of misconduct against MPs. The Editor of the Sunday Times, Harold Evans, was summoned to appear before the Committee to repeat the paper’s claims.
‘When I came out of the Committee of Privileges, Maxwell was sitting on a bench waiting,’ Evans remembers. ‘I expected him to start shouting at me, but instead he couldn’t have been more jolly. He even said, “Well done!” as if I’d just done something he approved of. It was very strange.’
Harold Evans wouldn’t be the only one to be wrong-footed by Maxwell’s unpredictability. ‘He seemed to have two modes: either he would thump the table and bellow at you, or else he would turn seductive and pretend to be your friend. As I think he intended it to be, this was extremely disconcerting. You never knew which Maxwell you were going to get. But it also left me wondering what lay behind all that bustling belligerence.’
When the Committee of Privileges delivered their verdict, they sat squarely on the fence: the Sunday Times article, they decided, was not unfair to Maxwell, nor did it prove he had been guilty of any misconduct. This was a long way from being a full exoneration, but as far as Maxwell was concerned it left him without a stain on his character. ‘I note that this senior committee of the House of Commons has unanimously decided that my conduct was entirely proper,’ he told The Times. At the same time he decided not to pursue his lawsuit.
None the less, questions about Maxwell’s conduct rumbled on. It wasn’t just the way he had blatantly massaged the figures and assumed he could get away with it. There was also his sensitivity to criticism – unexpected in someone with such a thick hide. Then there were the rumours about the wine cellar. According to House of Commons gossip, Maxwell had secretly balanced the Refreshment Department books by selling off much of the Palace of Westminster’s wine cellar – reputed to be one of the best in Europe – to an anonymous buyer for a fraction of its market value.
As the buyer was never identified, the mystery remained unsolved. Within months, it had slipped everyone’s minds. But, in years to come, few guests who dined at Headington Hill Hall went away without remarking on the outstandingly good wines that had been served with their meal.
8.
Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pudding
One morning in early 1963, Rupert Murdoch was sitting in his office in Sydney when the telephone rang. ‘I got this strange phone call from an investment banker
I knew,’ Murdoch recalls. ‘He said, “I’m calling from Sydney airport. I’m here with Captain Robert Maxwell and he would love to see you.”’
The name meant nothing to Murdoch, so he looked him up and found that he was a Labour MP, as well as the Chairman of Pergamon Press. ‘Maxwell arrived and started telling me about his business. He’d just bought some little book company in Australia that was marketing encyclopedias. He said, “I’ve really got to get a partner.”’ It soon became clear that Maxwell had grand ideas about his new venture. ‘At one point I asked him, “Are we talking about South East Asia as well as Australia?” He said, “Oh yes, we’ll do that too.”’
Unbeknownst to Murdoch, Maxwell had just been in India, where he had attracted the attention of the Commonwealth Relations Office. They subsequently wrote a letter to the Director of British Information Services in New Delhi: ‘Thank you very much for keeping us in the picture about the activities of Maxwell of the Pergamon Press during his visit to India . . . There is little we can do about him, except to drop the odd word of warning in places where our confidence is respected. He is a very enterprising fellow. It is a pity that the quality of his publications is so poor.’
Intrigued by Maxwell’s proposition, Murdoch invited him to dinner that night. By his own admission Murdoch was ‘a bit spellbound’ by Maxwell – so much so that he agreed to take his encyclopedias for a million Australian dollars. In return, the two of them would become equal partners in Pergamon Australia. At the end of the evening, Murdoch told him, ‘I’ll come to London to see you and we can work it out.’
A couple of months later – before he’d had a chance to go to London – Murdoch met up with an old friend of his who had worked on the Adelaide News and was now the head of advertising at IPC. Over lunch Murdoch told him about this great deal he had done with Maxwell to sell his encyclopedias. His friend’s reaction was not what he had been expecting. ‘Immediately, he started laughing and said whatever you do, don’t touch that.’
It turned out that IPC had originally owned the encyclopedias. Having tried and failed to sell them, they had decided they were worthless and had offloaded them – for free – on to Maxwell. ‘He was trying to con me. I must say I thought it was quite funny, but the man was obviously a crook. The next time I saw him I said, “Look, I don’t think we were made to be partners, so let’s forget it.” Maxwell said OK and that was that.’
As far as Murdoch was concerned, he never expected to see Maxwell again, still less have anything more to do with him. But here he turned out to be wrong. This wasn’t the end of their acquaintance; it was only the start.
Five years later, in October 1968, Professor Derek Jackson, about to embark on his sixth marriage at the age of sixty-two and running a little short of cash, decided to sell his 25 per cent stake in the News of the World. While Jackson was hopeful that his latest marriage might last longer than its predecessors, his friends were not so optimistic: his track record did not inspire confidence. On the same day that his third wife gave birth to his only child, Jackson had abandoned her in the maternity ward and run off with her half-sister.
A keen amateur jockey, Jackson was bisexual: among his many male lovers was the artist Francis Bacon. ‘I ride under both rules,’ he declared proudly. Jackson had had a distinguished war. As an expert on spectroscopy – the study of the absorption and emission of light – he’d been instrumental in developing the strips of tinfoil known as ‘chaff’ that were dropped over Germany to cripple their radar.
Despite this, he had a love of everything German – and an equally broad streak of anti-Semitism. Whenever he met Oswald Mosley, whom he idolized, he would greet him by giving him a peck on the cheek and a pinch on the bottom.
Jackson had inherited his stake in the News of the World from his father, Sir Charles Jackson, who combined running the paper with building up one of the world’s largest collections of silver spoons. When Sir Charles took over the News of the World in 1902, the circulation was 40,000. By 1948, it had gone up to 4.4 million.
After the war, Derek Jackson became a tax exile in Ireland. Soon after his arrival, the Irish government decided the News of the World’s obsession with sexually rapacious vicars represented such a threat to the moral fabric of the country that they banned it. Every week, Jackson’s copy would arrive at his house in a plain brown envelope.
But this didn’t stop him from keeping a keen eye on the paper’s fortunes, or the state of his shares. He was, he anticipated, in for a big payday as soon as the sale went through – so big that Jackson would be able to keep his new wife, and any subsequent ones, in the style to which he had become accustomed.
Jackson’s decision to sell his shares prompted panic in the News of the World boardroom. No one was more shocked than his cousin, Sir William Carr. Popularly known as ‘Pissing Billy’ on account of his alcohol intake – reckoned to be Herculean even by Fleet Street standards – Sir William had taken over from Derek Jackson’s father as Chairman of the paper. Anyone wanting a meeting with him was strongly advised to arrange it before noon; afterwards, he tended to be incoherent.
Not surprisingly, the News of the World’s fortunes had slumped under Carr’s chairmanship. Even so, it was still a hugely profitable concern. In October 1968, the paper’s shares were valued at 28 shillings each. As by far the largest-selling Sunday newspaper in the country, it also wielded enormous influence.
Jackson gave Sir William first refusal on his shares, but Carr’s offer was only a fraction above the market value, so he decided to sell to the highest bidder – thus precipitating a takeover battle. This was the moment Maxwell had been waiting for, the moment when he would finally move from the wings on to centre stage. Having secured Derek Jackson’s pledge to sell him his 25 per cent stake, his opening bid for the paper was £26,000,000 – 37 shillings and 6 pence a share. But while Maxwell may have been hell-bent on buying the News of the World, Betty was a lot less keen: ‘I had heard it was a scandal sheet with nude pictures and I like serious reading,’ she told a journalist. ‘Personally, it is not a newspaper I would like in the house with young children and young girls.’
The news of Maxwell’s bid was relayed to Sir William, who was laid up in bed with flu. Immediately he called for an extra-strong drink and issued a statement. The bid, he said starkly, was ‘impudent’. The Editor of the News of the World, Stafford Somerfield, was equally appalled. Described as ‘bow-tied in manner and with a big round face’, Somerfield had a reputation for pursuing ‘salacious puritanism with missionary zeal’.
By an odd coincidence, he too had been in bed when he heard the news, being treated for high blood pressure in a nursing home. The nurse had told him it was imperative he should remain lying down, or he was at grave risk of having a heart attack. Idly, Somerfield glanced at a copy of the Evening Standard she had just given him to read.
‘That did it,’ he recalled.’
Immediately, Somerfield jumped out of bed and began to get dressed. ‘Why are you putting your trousers on?’ the nurse demanded. ‘Something I’ve just remembered,’ he told her. Within twenty minutes, Somerfield was back in his office. There, he wrote an editorial for Sunday’s paper: ‘We are having a little local difficulty at the News of the World,’ he began. ‘It concerns the ownership of the paper. Mr Robert Maxwell, a Socialist MP, is trying to take it over . . . I think it would not be a good thing for Mr Maxwell, formerly Jan Ludwig Hoch, to gain control of this newspaper which I know has your respect, loyalty and affection – a newspaper which I know is as British as roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.’
Somerfield went on in similar vein for some time before frothing up to a rousing finale: ‘This is a British newspaper, run by British people. Let’s keep it that way.’
The editorial caused a storm. The Times wrote that, judging by the contents of the News of the World, ‘indecent assault, incest, buggery and the disarrangement of young ladies’ underclothing in darkened railway carriages’ were a lot closer to Somerfield’s hea
rt than roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. As far as the Liberal MP David Steel was concerned, the editorial was ‘a revolting piece of chauvinism. Mr Maxwell is not everybody’s cup of tea, but he is as disgustingly British as anyone I know. He even has a Rolls-Royce with a telephone in it.’
Amid all the excitement, the paper’s share price soared to 48 shillings and 6 pence. On 22 October, Maxwell increased his bid to £34,000,000: 50 shillings a share. Privately, Somerfield conceded that things were looking bleak. Then, two days later, his telephone rang at midnight as he was about to go to bed. It was a friend of his on the night desk of the Daily Express who had just heard some news he thought would interest him. Suspecting he might be overheard by his colleagues, the man chose not to be too specific, or to mention any names.
He said simply, ‘Your saviour is here.’
Every October, as he had done since he was a teenager, Rupert Murdoch flew from Sydney to Melbourne for the Caulfield Cup – one of the biggest events in the Australian flat-racing calendar. But this year it was a race he would never see. ‘I was in bed in a hotel in Melbourne at about seven o’clock in the morning when the phone rang.’ This time the caller was Lord Catto, Chairman of the merchant bankers Morgan Grenfell. Catto told a bleary-eyed Murdoch that he’d just had a meeting with representatives of the Carr family. Two weeks earlier, when Murdoch had heard of Maxwell’s bid for the News of the World, he had been politely rebuffed. But now everything had changed. ‘Apparently Carr’s representatives had told him, “You better get your young man over here fast.”’
Murdoch was galvanized. ‘My first thought was “Oh God!” My second thought was that I’d better catch the first plane to London. So I called my wife in Sydney and said get to the airport with a bunch of clothes and my passport.’ While he flew to Sydney to pick up his belongings, Murdoch’s office persuaded Lufthansa to delay their London flight until he arrived.