by John Preston
When Ryōichi Sasakawa stepped out of his chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce Phantom VI – the largest car the company had ever manufactured – Ian Maxwell saw that he was not wearing a suit – standard attire on such occasions. Instead, he was dressed in full Japanese formal dress, with a long pleated skirt and a kimono jacket. He also turned out not to speak any English – he and Maxwell always communicated through an interpreter.
At the gates of Buckingham Palace, the invitation was carefully scrutinized. To Maxwell’s relief, the two of them were waved through. However, his relief didn’t last long. As they walked into the main reception room at the Palace, Maxwell looked out of the window and saw hundreds of people milling about in the Buckingham Palace garden.
His heart sank. ‘All I can think is, how the hell am I ever going to get Sasakawa to meet the Queen?’
But, at this point, he had a stroke of luck. ‘This man comes up to me and says, “Is this by any chance Ryōichi Sasakawa?”’ He turned out to be the Vice-President of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children – a charity that Sasakawa had recently donated £2,000,000 to in his role as a born-again philanthropist.
Would Sasakawa care to meet the charity’s patron, Princess Margaret, the man asked.
Yes, said Maxwell. He’d like that very much indeed.
‘We go into the garden and we’re told where to stand. After a few minutes Princess Margaret arrives and I’m introduced as Robert Maxwell. I start to tell her that actually I’m Ian Maxwell, Bob’s son, but before I can introduce her to Sasakawa, there’s this commotion in the background.’
The crowd parted and around the corner came the Queen. ‘When she sees her, Princess Margaret turns away from us and says, “Lilibet, come and meet Bob Maxwell’s son.”’ As soon as Sasakawa laid eyes on the Queen, something unexpected happened: he fell to the ground and started emitting a high-pitched wailing sound.
The Queen looked at him.
‘What have we here?’ she asked.
Maxwell told her that this was Ryōichi Sasakawa, the noted Japanese philanthropist. By this point the Queen had been on the throne for more than three decades and must have become used to people reacting oddly in her presence. Even so, it’s doubtful if she had ever before seen an 86-year-old former fascist in traditional Japanese costume lying wailing at her feet.
‘He can get up, you know,’ the Queen said.
Ian Maxwell explained that it was customary in Japan, when meeting royalty, not to look at them directly, and also to prostrate oneself on the ground. The Queen continued to stare at Sasakawa. Then she abruptly changed the subject.
‘How it’s going with the Mirror?’ she asked.
Maxwell told her that everything was still up in the air, but he thought his father’s bid would be successful.
‘I do hope so,’ said the Queen.
At 5.30 p.m., Carpenter went to the Ritz, where Maxwell was waiting in his suite. The two of them shook hands before walking over the road to go through the necessary paperwork. Maxwell, as he was fully aware, had got a terrific deal. While the newspapers may have been doing badly, the value of the Mirror building and its shareholdings were worth what he had paid for the entire group.
By the time lawyers on both sides had gone through all the paperwork and the contracts had been signed, it was just before midnight.
‘Are you going home now?’ Maxwell was asked.
‘Yes, off to bed,’ he replied.
Before he left, Les Carpenter had one last request. ‘Bob, do me a favour. Don’t go to the Mirror tonight. Let’s be tactful and break the news in the morning.’
This was an excellent idea, agreed Maxwell; he had no wish to cause any unnecessary ructions. Going back to his suite at the Ritz, he phoned Bob Edwards at ten past midnight. Already asleep in bed, Edwards stumbled naked to the telephone. When he picked it up, he heard Maxwell announce, ‘We have lift-off!’ Maxwell then told Edwards to phone all the members of the Mirror board and summon them to a meeting starting at 2.45 that morning.
‘Get there at one o’clock yourself,’ he said, ‘and we’ll have a drink.’
Outside, Maxwell’s Rolls-Royce was waiting by the Ritz entrance.
‘Where to, sir?’ asked his chauffeur.
‘Where the fuck do you think?’ he said. ‘To the Mirror!’
Bob Edwards spent the next hour phoning up the astonished Mirror directors, rousing them from their beds and telling them to head straight to the Mirror for a board meeting. But when he arrived, he found the place in darkness. By this point a thunderstorm had broken. As Edwards stood there with the rain drumming on his umbrella and lightning crackling overhead, he found himself gripped by a sudden sense of unease.
‘I decided that my role in the developing drama would be similar to that of the music critic friend of Citizen Kane, played by Joseph Cotten, whose newspaper was taken over by Kane and who became a disillusioned employee swamped in drink and self-pity.’ Edwards’s musings were soon cut short. ‘I gradually became illuminated in the shadows by the approaching headlights of a Rolls-Royce.’
Maxwell’s arrival at the Mirror caught everyone on the nightshift off-guard.
‘Who are you?’ the doorman asked.
‘I’m the new owner,’ Maxwell told him, walking straight into the leather-lined executive lift. Up on the third floor, the panic-stricken editorial staff learned that he was on his way. The Mirror’s Editor, Mike Molloy, a dapper bow-tied man with carefully coiffed blond hair and an equally well-tended moustache, decided there was only one thing he could do.
‘It’s my duty to go and greet him.’
Molloy had first met Maxwell ten years earlier at a Labour Party Conference in Blackpool. It was an encounter he had never forgotten: ‘The strangely orange colour of his complexion, his ink-black hair and enormous eyebrows gave him the look of a music-hall comedian; but his smile was like that of Richard III.’
Now Maxwell strode into the Chairman’s office, headed straight for the drinks cabinet and poured himself a large Scotch. Afterwards, he held up the bottle.
‘Anyone else want one?’
As he looked on, Molloy found there was an image in his head that he couldn’t dislodge. ‘He looked just like an animal laying down its scent.’
By the time the board meeting was over, the thunderstorm had passed and the sky was starting to lighten. Shell-shocked and bleary, the Mirror executives staggered out into the dawn. Five hours later, Clive Thornton arrived to clear out his office. As he was leaving the building for the last time, Thornton was asked if he’d had any contact with Maxwell.
‘I could hardly miss him,’ he said glumly. ‘He was sitting behind my desk.’
That morning, Maxwell called a meeting of the paper’s union leaders – the Fathers of Chapel, as they were known. He explained that he planned to topple Rupert Murdoch’s Sun as the most popular paper in the UK and restore the Mirror’s fortunes to their former glory. From the union leaders’ reaction, it was plain that they were sceptical – both of his plans and of his motives.
Maxwell was affronted.
‘Do you think I’m just on an ego trip?’ he asked.
‘Yes!’ they bellowed back in unison.
However, he had better luck wooing the paper’s senior editorial staff. At lunchtime Maxwell took them to the Royal Suite in Claridge’s hotel. Bob Edwards offered Maxwell a lift in his own chauffeur-driven car. It proved to be an eventful journey. ‘His attitude to the driver was extraordinary,’ Edwards recalled later. ‘“Go to the left!” he would shout. “Nip in front!” “Jump the lights!”’
By the time they arrived, Edwards noticed that his chauffeur’s hands were shaking so much that he could barely hold the wheel. Not only that: ‘We had also gone the worst possible way.’
At Claridge’s, champagne and Buck’s Fizz were served, along with an enormous cheese soufflé. But as they were leaving another event occured – one that several of those present would look back on as a foretaste
of things to come. Outside the hotel, Maxwell was pursued by the manager. ‘Mr Maxwell, Mr Maxwell, come back,’ he cried. ‘You haven’t paid.’
Waving a hand, Maxwell told the man to send the bill to his office.
The manager was having none of it. ‘You always say that, and you never pay. You must pay now!’
Reluctantly, but with no sign of embarrassment, Maxwell took out his wallet and settled the bill.
The first edition of the Mirror under Maxwell’s ownership came with a banner headline reading ‘FORWARD WITH BRITAIN!’ and an editorial that had been written by Maxwell himself: ‘We stand for a modern Britain – a country which truly needs modernizing, with industry and trade unions alike prepared to face the hard facts of survival in the Eighties. I have been in a position to buy the Daily Mirror. But what I cannot buy is the loyalty of its readers. That will have to continue to be earned. To me, the Mirror has always meant something special. I believe it means something special to those who work for it and you who buy it. The British people. That is why the Mirror today carries our new slogan: “Forward with Britain!” That slogan is my policy.’
Although Bob Edwards’s sense of unease hadn’t gone away, it grew a little fainter after he read Maxwell’s horoscope – Gemini – in the next Monday’s Evening Standard. Just as Clive Thornton’s demise had been foretold in the stars, so too, it seemed, had Maxwell’s triumph. ‘A career change must add to your long-term security,’ the horoscope declared confidently. ‘Although the coming months will at certain times be demanding, not for one second should you think you are doomed to fail!’
14.
Madness
At last Maxwell had what he had always wanted: a newspaper of his own. At last he could go toe-to-toe with his greatest rival. Together, he and Rupert Murdoch would slug it out in a fight to become the most powerful newspaper baron in the country. But Maxwell had another, even loftier, ambition: he wanted to be the greatest media mogul the world had ever known.
By now he had become a figure of fascination, regarded with a constantly shifting mix of awe, fear and derision. At a reception at the French embassy, Prince Charles bombarded Mike Molloy with questions about his new boss: ‘What an extraordinary man. What’s he like to work for? Where does he get all his money from?’
At the same reception, Bob Edwards was approached by Princess Margaret’s former husband, Lord Snowdon. ‘I must see him,’ Snowdon said. Edwards offered to introduce them, but this turned out to be the last thing on Snowdon’s mind.
‘No, no,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to meet him. I just want to look at him.’
On the day after he took over the Mirror, Maxwell called a press conference where he announced that the paper would gain an extra million readers within a year. By any standards, this was a wildly ambitious plan; at the time the circulation stood at 3.5 million. Few, if anyone, on the Mirror believed it was possible. Undeterred, Maxwell decided that what the paper needed was a game to encourage new readers. A game that would encourage them to keep buying the paper day after day.
There was a certain amount of logic in this; after all, Rupert Murdoch had a game – Bingo – in the Sun, so why shouldn’t he? But while there may have been logic here, there was also reckoned to be a large amount of lunacy. Not only was any game bound to be very costly, but history had shown that new readers tended to melt away as soon as the prize had been won. Various Mirror executives pleaded with Maxwell to change his mind.
He ignored them.
His game, he declared, would be ‘The Game of the Decade’. Two rival advertising agencies were told to come up with some ideas and report back within a week. The winning proposal aimed squarely at two of the most glaring chinks in Maxwell’s armour: his vanity and his lack of any sense of absurdity.
‘You are the biggest celebrity around, Bob,’ the boss of the advertising agency told him. ‘You should be fronting this campaign. You are the unique selling point. That is why we are calling it “Who Dares Wins”. You have dared and you have won.’
Gravely, Maxwell nodded, then gave his verdict. ‘I have come to the conclusion that you are right.’
Listening to this, Richard Stott, then Editor of the Sunday People, thought it was the most flagrant display of toadying he had ever witnessed. He was also reminded of something that he had noticed before: how there tended to be a big difference between people’s behaviour in front of Maxwell and their recollections of it afterwards. In Maxwell’s presence, normally bullish, swaggering people – usually men – would often became sycophantic to the point of spinelessness. Yet afterwards they would be full of stories about how they had fearlessly stood their ground, refusing to have any truck with Maxwell and his disgraceful ways.
Who Dares Wins – Bingo in all but name – was to be launched with a slogan: ‘Do you sincerely want to be rich?’ Again, people begged Maxwell to reconsider. Was this really the sort of question a socialist paper should be asking its readers?
He took no notice.
As well as featuring in television adverts to launch the game, Maxwell’s face began appearing in the Mirror ever more frequently – over a hundred times in the first six months of his ownership. This didn’t escape anybody’s attention, least of all Rupert Murdoch’s. ‘I could see the way he was running the Mirror was a joke. Always putting himself on the front page. My picture never appears in my papers, and preferably no quotes either. But, of course, his ego was enormous.’
The former Chairman of Mirror Group Newspapers, Hugh Cudlipp, was particularly alarmed by all this self-advertisement. As he wrote in his diary, ‘In 1984, it is true to say that anyone in the United Kingdom not aware that all the Mirror Group Newspapers are now published by Robert Maxwell must be deaf, dumb, blind, or all three.’
To make sure he was always seen looking his best, Maxwell even appointed his own ‘Personal Photographer’. Mike Maloney was a junior photographer on the Mirror when he was asked to take some flattering shots of the new proprietor. As brash as he was eager to get ahead, Maloney, like Maxwell, drove a Rolls-Royce with personalized number plates – his, however, was second-hand and had taken him years to save up for.
Quickly, Maloney worked out there were some key dos and don’ts here. The first was the most important of all: ‘Disguise his paunch.’ This was easier said than done, but he devised a way of shrinking Maxwell down to an acceptable size: ‘His best angle was taken from above, looking down, and using a wide-angle lens to make him look taller and slimmer.’ Maloney was also careful never to shoot Maxwell with the flash below the camera pointing up. ‘This gives a dreadful ghoulish effect, highlighting the wrong features and making the subject look like Dracula.’
Just as the Who Dares Wins slogan had been ‘borrowed’ from the SAS, so Maxwell also helped himself to Metro Goldwyn Mayer’s roaring lion as his new logo. In future, the lion’s head would appear on all the letterheads and company literature of MGN – as Mirror Group Newspapers had been rechristened. A specially woven blue and gold carpet bearing both the lion’s head and the letters MGN was laid on the editorial floor.
The Who Dares Wins prize was to be one million pounds – the highest in newspaper history. It was launched with an extra large photograph of Maxwell standing in front of one million pounds in bank notes – nervously lent for the occasion by the Queen’s bankers, Coutts. ‘Mr Maxwell’s pretty daughter, Ghislaine, 22, was on hand to see the cash in all denominations wheeled out under the watchful eyes of police and bank security staff,’ the Mirror reported. Ghislaine also made a – rather regal – statement of her own: ‘It pleases me to know it will make one of our readers very happy soon.’
Five days later – before anyone had had a chance to win the prize – the Sun announced that it had just created the first ‘Bingo millionaire’. Murdoch had done it again. Television pictures of Maxwell being told the news showed him looking more Dracula-like than ever.
When Clive Thornton had been Chairman of the Mirror, he decided that his vast, oak-panelled o
ffice sent out quite the wrong message. Such grandeur, such ostentation, had no place in a newspaper that claimed to speak for the working class of Great Britain. He decided that a wall should be symbolically erected in the middle of his office, dividing it in two. This proved trickier than he had anticipated. Several different unions had to be consulted and negotiations went on for more than three months before agreement was finally reached.
The moment Maxwell took over the Mirror, he decided that – just as symbolically – the wall should be torn down. By the time Joe Haines went to see Maxwell on the morning of Sunday, 15 July, demolition work had already begun. Born and brought up in a Rotherhithe slum, Haines had left school at fourteen, and joined the Glasgow Herald as a copyboy. After a stint as Harold Wilson’s Press Secretary at 10 Downing Street, he became Chief Leader Writer at the Mirror. Haines proved brilliant at distilling the essence of a complex political argument into a few punchy sentences. A lifelong socialist, he was widely regarded as the moral conscience of the paper.
While his abilities were not in doubt, Haines was also reckoned to be someone you crossed at your peril. A small, balding man with steel-framed spectacles, he had a reputation for being extremely touchy, and also for possessing photographic recall of every slight he had ever suffered. Having denounced Maxwell as a crook and a monster, Haines assumed that his days were numbered.
While he was clearing his desk, his phone went. Would he come up to the ninth floor?
Haines had no doubt what was in store. ‘It was a moment of high tension to me. A public execution was expected.’