by John Preston
At 10.30 on Christmas morning, the whole family would gather at the foot of the tree, where, with great ceremony, Maxwell would read out a passage from the Bible in his dark booming voice. Then they would all sing two carols. Only after the singing was over would presents be opened. To compensate for the fact that Maxwell had never been given any presents as a child, Betty always made sure he had more than anyone else. ‘Mummy would give him new shirts, new shoes, a new watch, all kinds of things . . .’ Ian Maxwell recalls. ‘He loved getting presents. Absolutely loved it.’
While Maxwell usually bought Betty a piece of jewellery, he took a less personalized approach to the children’s gifts. ‘Dad’s idea of giving presents was to go to his desk and write out cheques. He would stick them in envelopes, write “Love Dad” on the front and just flip them into the tree. They could be for £100, £200, or even £500.’
Present-opening would be followed by lunch. Despite the size of the Christmas turkey – often in the region of forty pounds – there was another golden rule no one dared disobey: Betty always gave half the turkey to Maxwell; everyone else had to share the rest. Then, when their father had finally eaten his fill, came the moment all the children dreaded. Each of them had to deliver a speech offering their predictions for the year ahead – what they thought was likely to happen in the world, and how they planned to become better, more useful people.
To begin with, this didn’t cast too much of a cloud over the day, but slowly everything changed. ‘Increasingly, Dad was in a terrible mood,’ Ian remembers. ‘When I was a little boy in the 1960s the Christmases were great, but then, when we get into the 1970s, everything became very different. Time and time again Christmas Day was ruined because Dad was in a filthy temper for reasons that no one could work out.
‘He just seemed to get up in a bad mood, and it went downhill from there. I noticed that food seemed to calm him down and he always appeared to make an effort over lunch. But even then everything had to be perfect. If, say, the turkey was burned – then Bam! That was it for the rest of the day.’
There was worse to come. In the summer of 1980, Ian Maxwell, then aged twenty-four, was fired by his father. At the time he was running the Pergamon offices in Paris and Frankfurt. Maxwell had told Ian to collect him at Orly airport one Sunday evening and drive him to the family’s apartment in the centre of Paris. This involved Ian catching a flight from Montpellier, where he was spending the weekend.
After missing the flight, he decided to hire a car to drive to Paris, 750 km away. ‘Knowing I wasn’t going to make it, I called my father to explain what had happened. When I’d finished, Dad said, “I’m speechless. You can’t even get it together to meet your own father. I can’t trust you with a burned-out box of matches. I’m relieving you of all your duties with immediate effect.”’
Assuming that his father hadn’t been serious, Ian turned up for work the following morning. ‘The first person I saw was my deputy wearing a black tie.’ The man told him Maxwell had called up at midnight to say that Ian had ‘been resigned’. Along with his disbelief, Ian was aware of an enormous sense of relief. ‘I thought, thank Christ. I’m finally out of the madhouse.’
In Oxford, he went to see his mother. Maxwell, it turned out, had spoken to her too. ‘He’d told her that it was the only way I was ever going to learn. That I had a ring of steel around my heart and it had to be broken into.’
Just like his older brother, Philip, who had gone to live in Argentina, Ian decided to get as far away from his father as possible – he went to California to stay with his sister Christine. ‘For the next three months I twiddled my thumbs and half-heartedly wrote my CV.’ He and his father didn’t speak. ‘Then one day I got a phone call. Dad was in Beijing and flying out to San Francisco the next day. He said I should meet him at his hotel at 8 p.m.’
If Ian had any hesitation about going, it didn’t last long. ‘I felt he was reaching out to me, and that I wasn’t kowtowing to him. Somehow that felt important.’ He duly flew to San Francisco and – on time – walked into his father’s hotel suite. ‘One of the things about Dad was that he had this very distinctive smell: it was a combination of aftershave and cigars. To me, it was always the smell of power.
‘Straightaway, he said, “Let’s stop this fucking holiday. Three months is quite long enough. What are we going to do with you?”’ When Ian said that he was enjoying being in America and would like to stay longer, Maxwell suggested he should work in Pergamon’s New York office as Director of Marketing. But while he was prepared to welcome Ian back into the fold, there would have to be an appropriate punishment for his misbehaviour.
‘“There must be a penalty,” he said. “So I’m going to put you on half salary.”’
As Ian knew already only too well, in his father’s world every perceived offence had to have consequences: ‘The more serious the offence, the greater the consequences. After he had told me what he was going to do, I can remember saying to him, “Dad, is it always going to be like this?”’
For his Christmas card in 1983, Maxwell chose a photograph of himself that had been taken at his birthday party at Headington Hill Hall in June. The photograph showed Maxwell and Betty standing in the foreground while behind them a firework display spelled out the words ‘Happy Birthday Bob’ in enormous letters.
Among the recipients was Brian Basham, then head of the City PR firm the Broad Street Group. ‘I remember looking at this thing and thinking, Christ, that’s a bit weird.’ A few days later, Basham ran into Maxwell. ‘I thanked him for the card, but told him, “Bob, you really can’t say that, you know.”’
Maxwell looked puzzled and asked why not.
‘Because it’s a Christmas card,’ Basham explained. ‘It’s not supposed to be “Happy Birthday Bob.” It’s supposed to be “Happy Birthday Jesus.”’
13.
Written in the Stars
As he was having his breakfast, Clive Thornton, the mild, bespectacled, one-legged Chairman of the Daily Mirror – he’d lost the other leg in a tramcar accident – liked to read his copy of the paper. On 9 July 1984, as he always did, Thornton turned to the horoscope and looked under his star sign – Cancer – to see what the day held in store.
Normally, newspaper horoscopes are written in as wishy-washy language as possible, but to his surprise Thornton saw that this one was unusually specific: ‘Unless you have written guarantees and solid promises, then leave financial matters alone for a while,’ it advised. ‘Others may seem plausible and reliable, but the chances are you are being manipulated in some way, or worse.’
Someone, it seemed, was trying to tell him something.
Ever since he’d seen the News of the World snatched from under his nose, Robert Maxwell had been obsessed with owning a newspaper. But whenever he made a move, he seemed fated to run into the same figure blocking his path. Rupert Murdoch, he became convinced, was out to thwart him at every turn.
In early 1969, at the same time as he was claiming to be the greatest encyclopedia salesman in history, Maxwell learned that the Sun was up for sale. Once known as the Daily Herald, the Sun had been losing money ever since it had changed its name five years earlier. The paper’s proprietors, IPC, announced that if a buyer couldn’t be found, the paper would have to close down. Although nobody said so directly, the general feeling in the City and on Fleet Street was that anyone who wanted the Sun was welcome to it, but may well need their head examining.
With his usual fanfare, Maxwell announced that he was mounting a bid. Desperate to get it off their hands, IPC offered it to him at a knockdown price – just £50,000 up front – on condition that he did a deal with the print unions. Few people held out any hope the bid would come to anything. ‘Maxwell is a strange, roguish man and I can’t really believe he is going to make this thing a success,’ wrote Richard Crossman in his diary.
Negotiations dragged on. Maxwell declared there would have to be large-scale redundancies. The unions refused; deadlock loomed. As always, Ma
xwell assumed he had the upper hand; that it was only a matter of time before the unions threw in the towel. What he didn’t know was that he had a competitor. By now installed as the owner of the News of the World, Rupert Murdoch found himself with printing presses that were only in use once a week. What Murdoch wanted above all was an opportunity to keep them turning every night. ‘I thought, I’d really love a daily paper – that’s where the action will be. I had read all about how Maxwell was talking to the unions, but nothing seemed to be happening.’
Then one day Murdoch had an inspiration. ‘I wrote to IPC saying I don’t want to interfere at all, but if Captain Maxwell can’t work it out, will you give me a chance? I also sent a copy of the letter to the unions, and that same afternoon they broke off negotiations with him.’ More than half a century on, Murdoch can’t resist a small smile at the memory.
After agreeing a – much smaller – redundancy package with the unions, Rupert Murdoch was confirmed as the Sun’s new owner. This was the second time he had bested Maxwell.
Another twelve years would go by before Maxwell’s chance came again. In October 1980, the Times was put up for sale. On the face of it, the Times seemed an even more unattractive proposition than the Sun: it was losing around £15,000,000 a year and hopelessly bedevilled by union disputes.
None the less, Maxwell wanted it. So did Murdoch. Maxwell’s bid was treated as an impertinence by the paper’s owners, who made it plain they doubted he had the money to buy it – and even if he did, he wasn’t a fit person to own the ‘Top People’s Paper’, as it liked to style itself. Once again Murdoch won the day.
That made it three times in a row.
At the beginning of 1984, Reed International, publishers of the Daily Mirror, the Sunday Mirror and the Sunday People, discreetly let it be known that the entire company might be for sale. This time no one, not even Maxwell, expressed a flicker of interest. Like everybody else, he appeared to have been put off by the papers’ soaring costs and plummeting profits.
But what none of the Reed directors knew was that Maxwell had a mole inside the company. Bob Edwards was a director of Mirror Group newspapers, as well as an incorrigible gossip. Rather unusually, considering that he didn’t own a dog, Edwards would take his lunch every day in the headquarters of the Kennel Club. He was also one of the few people who had carried on sending Maxwell a Christmas card after he’d been branded unfit to run a public company.
Whenever Edwards heard any interesting snippets of information, he would pass them on to Maxwell. This included the news that the Mirror board couldn’t agree on what to do next. Some of them were still hoping for a sale, while others, like Clive Thornton, wanted to float the Mirror on the Stock Exchange. But estimates of how much the paper might be worth had been falling steadily: they were down to around £50,000,000.
Maxwell was almost sixty-one. By now he owned a football club, Oxford United, as well as the largest printing company in Europe – the British Printing Corporation. The BPC had been fast heading for bankruptcy when he took it over in 1981; Maxwell had restored it to profit within two years. Once deemed unfit to run a public company, he had not only proved his detractors wrong; he’d won back the respect of the City.
But still he didn’t have what he yearned for more than anything else. Three times Maxwell had tried to buy a Fleet Street paper, and three times he’d failed. If he didn’t strike now, his chance might never come again. The stakes could not have been higher. The Sun and the Daily Mirror were the UK’s most popular tabloid newspapers. As the owner of the left-leaning Mirror, Maxwell would wield enormous influence; essentially, no Labour government could be elected without the paper’s support. There was another incentive, of course: it would bring him into direct competition with Rupert Murdoch. As the owner of the right-leaning Sun, Murdoch held the same sway over the Conservative Party. Between them, they would be the two biggest powerbrokers in British politics.
Slowly, stealthily, Maxwell began to circle Clive Thornton. During a lunch at the House of Commons they both attended, he paid him elaborate court, laying on the blandishments with a trowel. One observer was reminded of ‘a salivating, handsomely-ruffed wolf descending on a perspiring City-suited pig’.
On 4 July 1984, Maxwell pounced. He called a press conference where he announced he was making a formal offer of £80,000,000 for Mirror Group Newspapers. The news was greeted with horror by Reed International. Immediately, they turned the offer down, at the same time making it clear that they would rather put their families on the street than sell to Maxwell. But, thanks to Bob Edwards, Maxwell knew that cracks were starting to appear in their resolve.
As always, he revelled in the attention. The Max Factor, as it would later become known, was turned up to full blast. So too was Maxwell’s inner Mr Toad – never far from the surface when he was anywhere near a car. Hoping for an interview, a female reporter from the Financial Times jumped into the back of his Rolls-Royce. At a set of traffic lights, they pulled up beside a Porsche.
‘Think he’ll beat us, do you?’ Maxwell asked her.
No doubt about it, she replied – whereupon he wound down his window and shouted to the Porsche driver that there was something wrong with his back wheel. As the driver pulled over to investigate, Maxwell roared away.
Over the next three days he bombarded Reed with phone calls. All of them went unanswered. He then took the fight to Reed’s doorstep by moving into a suite at the Ritz Hotel, just over the road from their headquarters. That weekend, Maxwell increased his offer to £100,000,000.
This time there was no response at all.
The Reed board weren’t the only ones appalled at the idea of selling out to Maxwell. So were the Mirror journalists. The paper’s veteran leader writer, Joe Haines, declared, ‘The man is a monster.’ Maxwell, said Haines, was ‘a liar and a crook and I can prove it’. What’s more, if Maxwell ever came through the front door of the Mirror, he was heading straight out the back.
By now, though, further cracks had begun to appear in the Reed board – cracks Maxwell was increasingly confident he would be able to squeeze through. On Monday, 9 July, he made a move whose apparent air of gentility fooled nobody: he invited Reed’s Chief Executive, Les Carpenter, to come to his suite at the Ritz for tea and cucumber sandwiches the following afternoon.
But when Maxwell’s son Ian went into work the next morning he found his father in a highly agitated state. ‘He knew this was a day that was going to change his life and he was very touchy. As soon as I came in, Dad said, “I’ve got a problem.”
‘“What problem?” I asked.
‘The problem,’ Maxwell told him, ‘is Ryōichi Sasakawa.’
Although Maxwell could be wildly indiscriminate in his choice of friends, Ryōichi Sasakawa still seems a strange choice of bedfellow. During the Second World War, he had been the leader of a group of Japanese fascists called the Patriotic People’s Party, whose members idolized Hitler and dressed in black SS-style uniforms. Imprisoned as a war criminal, Sasakawa whiled away his time by reading obsessively about powerboat racing. At the time the only legal forms of gambling in Japan were bicycle racing and horse racing. And then in 1951 another sport was added to the list – powerboat racing.
Immediately Sasakawa was released from prison, he set about turning himself into the powerboat king of Japan. Over the next twenty years, he made so much money from powerboat racing that he once said proudly, ‘I am the world’s richest fascist.’ In an attempt to buff up his image, he launched the Sasakawa Peace Foundation and tried – unsuccessfully – to buy himself the Nobel Peace Prize by bribing the judges.
At eighty-six years old, Sasakawa had one remaining ambition: he wanted to meet the Queen. Maxwell had promised to fix it and arranged an invitation for them both to go to a garden party at Buckingham Place. But the garden party was that afternoon – at exactly the same time Maxwell had invited Les Carpenter to tea and cucumber sandwiches at the Ritz.
‘Dad said, “What are we going to do
? He’s flown in all the way from Japan specially to meet the Queen. How the fuck are we going to deal with it?”’
Ian asked to see the invitation. ‘When I looked closely, I saw it was made out to Ian Robert Maxwell. Whoever had written it had put the anglicized version of Dad’s original first name – Jan – as well as the one he had taken – Robert. I said, “But, Dad, I’m also Ian Robert Maxwell. Why don’t I go instead and take him as my guest?”’
At first Maxwell dismissed the idea out of hand – ‘It’ll never work; they’ll know you’re not me.’
But by now the pressure was getting to him. After pacing around his office for another few minutes, he began to change his tune.
‘I suppose it might be worth a try . . .’
At three o’clock that afternoon Reed’s Chief Executive, Les Carpenter, knocked on the door of Maxwell’s suite at the Ritz. Fearful that Maxwell would make a promise and renege on it later, the Reed board had told Carpenter that if they were going to accept his offer, Maxwell must stump up the £100,000,000 in cash – by the end of the day.
But first of all Carpenter had some haggling of his own to do. He told Maxwell that he wanted more than £100,000,000.
Reluctantly, Maxwell raised his offer to £107,000,000.
It was not enough.
‘I want a hundred and thirteen million,’ Carpenter told him.
Maxwell refused.
Standing up, Carpenter walked towards the door. Before he opened it, he turned around and said, ‘It’s a hundred and thirteen million or nothing.’
Maxwell protested that he didn’t have another £6,000,000. Carpenter told him he needed to consult with his board before going any further. When he arrived back at Reed headquarters, Carpenter learned that the latest estimate of how much a flotation might raise had fallen again – to below £50,000,000.
Carpenter informed the board that he had held out for £113,000,000, but that Maxwell claimed that he didn’t have the extra £6,000,000. In the last twenty-four hours, the attitude of the Reed board had gone through a complete about-turn. Having initially declared that they would never sell the Mirror Group to Maxwell under any circumstances, they were now so desperate to get the newspapers off their hands that they came up with an unusual plan – they offered to lend him the extra £6,000,000 themselves, at an extremely favourable rate of interest.