Fall

by John Preston

  The world stands on the brink of a new era – an era of greater tolerance and internationalism. Already the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama has declared that history as we knew it has ceased to exist. In the great ideological battle of the twentieth century, liberal democracies have triumphed, and no one – at least no one in their right mind – could ever again embrace any other form of government.

  ‘Everything has changed more in the last year than anybody dared hope. The Berlin Wall has fallen. The Iron Curtain has been replaced by open doors and windows. Market forces are winning over military force.’

  Who could possibly have foreseen such upheavals? Only one person, it seems. ‘Robert Maxwell, a statesman as much as a businessman, committed his life to providing greater openness, particularly in Eastern Europe. Tireless political efforts are now opening major new business opportunities. Maxwell Communications is today a sharply-focused major player in international communications.’

  Maxwell’s two sons Kevin and Ian then appear. ‘We recognize that the largest single market which will give immediate opportunity to our group is Europe,’ says Ian. ‘We look forward to 1992 when the removal of trade barriers, followed by the opening of the Channel Tunnel in 1993, will facilitate far closer integration of our publishing, communications and distribution operations in the UK and on the Continent.’

  By now the choir has given way to Elgar’s ‘Nimrod’ from the Enigma Variations, guaranteed to stir the flintiest of hearts. The enormous M swims back into view, straddling the Earth. All around are clusters of stars, twinkling in the darkness. The message is unmistakable: this is a company whose ambitions cannot be confined within a single planet, but which stretch out deep into space:

  Maxwell Communications

  One World

  One Vision

  Maxwell Communications corporate video. 1990.

  Shortly after buying the Mirror in 1984, Maxwell told one of his new employees, ‘I own the pension fund.’ Strictly speaking, he was right. As he controlled the Mirror, he also controlled the pension fund. At the time this arrangement didn’t cause anyone any disquiet – least of all the Mirror pensioners who were reaping the benefits of some shrewd investments over the past few years. But what none of them realized was how literally Maxwell meant what he said.

  Two years later, in 1986, he borrowed £1,500,000 from the fund to tide him over a temporary shortfall. A few weeks later, the money was repaid. The next year – 1987 – he borrowed considerably more: £9,000,000. This too was repaid. What Maxwell was doing wasn’t exactly illegal, but nor was it exactly legal either. The pension fund’s deed of trust stated that trustees could only ‘lend money on such security as the Trustees think fit to any person except an Employer’.

  Maxwell, of course, was an employer – their employer.

  But as far as he was concerned the pension funds were another of his personal fiefdoms; his to do whatever he wanted with. At a meeting with the Polish Head of State, General Jaruzelski, in July 1985, Maxwell told him proudly that ‘apart from being a journalist and politician, I also manage a pension fund to the tune of five hundred million pounds’.

  Plainly intended to impress Jaruzelski, this statement failed to have the desired effect. The Polish leader turned out to be far more interested in Maxwell’s personal contradictions: ‘I had the impression that he had two, and maybe four souls,’ Jaruzelski recalled. ‘On the one hand, he had been a young boy from a very poor and backward part of Europe . . . And on the other hand, he was a man who had climbed Mount Olympus.’

  However many souls Maxwell possessed, Jaruzelski suspected that he’d failed to bridge the gap between any of them. Such fluffy theorizing would have meant nothing to Maxwell himself, of course; he was far more concerned with unifying the different parts of his empire. Bringing them all together under his centralized control.

  In March 1988, he decided to combine Mirror Group Newspapers’ four pension funds into one – to be known as the Common Investment Fund (CIF). By now, the combined assets of the CIF amounted to more than £300,000,000. Day-to-day running of the fund would be in the hands of another new company, Bishopsgate Investment Management (BIM). In turn, ownership of BIM would be transferred to a charitable body – the Maxwell Charitable Trust – based in Liechtenstein.

  Despite being the smallest, least visited country in Europe, Liechtenstein has the highest gross domestic product per person in the world. This is entirely due to the fact that anyone with a large enough pot of money can – for a fee – deposit it there, ensuring it stays both free of tax and safe from scrutiny. As far as Maxwell was concerned, there were a number of advantages to such an arrangement. Anyone asking to see BIM’s accounts would be told that as the company was registered in Liechtenstein, they were unable to do so. In effect, it provided him with a smokescreen behind which he could do whatever he wanted.

  To celebrate Maxwell’s purchase of Macmillan in October 1988, a lunch was held at Claridge’s hotel – the same hotel where four years earlier the manager had run after him insisting he settle his bill before he left. Among those raising their champagne glasses to toast him now was a former US Vice-President, Walter Mondale. But even as Maxwell soaked up the plaudits, he must have known that the smokescreen was wearing thin. Far from facing a glorious new dawn, Maxwell Communication Corporation, his publicly owned parent company, was crippled by debt and facing sharply rising interest rates.

  In an attempt to prop up MCC’s share price, Maxwell had started paying shareholders absurdly high dividends. At the same time he had been secretly buying up shares in MCC, spending £100,000,000 in an attempt to make them appear more desirable. To raise the money, he had to borrow even more heavily from the banks. Once again, they were happy to oblige. If the banks had any qualms about extending him another raft of loans, one thing above all set their minds at rest.

  As he had repeatedly told them, Maxwell possessed billions of pounds in cash – which he had prudently salted away in Liechtenstein. It was true that no one knew just how much money he actually had in Liechtenstein. Nor had anybody seen any evidence of its existence. None the less, the banks readily believed him when he assured them the money was there. After all, the Sunday Times Rich List for 1989–90 had estimated Maxwell’s fortune at between 1.2 billion and 1.5 billion pounds. What’s more, he’d done something that counted just as much as any number of bank statements, accounts or written guarantees.

  He had given them his word.

  23.

  Crossing the Line

  In the summer of 1990, eight months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Maxwell flew to the city in his private jet for a series of meetings. As far as he was concerned, the fall of the Wall had all sorts of implications, personal and professional. More than forty years earlier, post-war Berlin had been the making of him; he’d emerged from the ruins of the city bearing the building blocks of what would become his publishing empire. Now he was back – bigger, infinitely richer, but as keen as ever to capitalize on the opportunities offered by political upheaval.

  Travelling with him was his ‘Personal Photographer’, Mike Maloney; his ‘Head of International Affairs’, a former British ambassador to Poland called Sir John Morgan; his valet, Simon Grigg, and his PA, Andrea Martin. At the time Andrea Martin was twenty-six years old. She had started working for Maxwell two years earlier as a secretary in his ‘outer office’. Learning that she had a degree in Modern Languages, Maxwell asked if she spoke French.

  Martin said that she did.

  ‘Fluently?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He then fired a series of questions at her in French. Martin answered them all.

  ‘You’ll do,’ said Maxwell, and walked away.

  Just a few weeks after she started work, Maxwell began phoning through to the outer office asking for Martin by name. He then promoted her to become his Personal Assistant, or ‘Programme Manager’, as he insisted on calling it. While Maxwell had detested Peter Jay’s attempts to put h
is life in order, he soon grew to depend on Andrea to organize his schedule and keep everything on track.

  The Mirror’s Foreign Editor, Nick Davies, was among those who noticed how important Martin had become to him: ‘She had the run of the place and in Maxwell’s eyes could do no wrong. He came to rely on her to run his diary, his business life, his office and his office staff. And he in turn became attentive to her needs. He would make sure Andrea had what she wanted, and the butlers were instructed to provide her with whatever she wanted to eat.’

  Davies, popularly known as ‘Sneaky’ because of his furtive manner, also ran a company specializing in manufacturing underwater television sets. Although undeniably a niche market, this was less bizarre than it might sound: at the time underwater televisions were much in demand in the oil industry. A man of expensive tastes – he’d once owned a string of polo ponies – Davies had recently gone through a messy divorce. As his second wife, a former Dr Who actress called Janet Fielding, soon learned, Davies had been serially unfaithful, once inadvertently murmuring ‘Oh Susan’ into her ear while they were making love. Newly single, he was once again looking for love.

  With her pencil skirts, her clipped manner and her Princess Diana pageboy haircut, Andrea Martin also made a big impression on Roy Greenslade. Recently appointed Editor of the Mirror after Richard Stott had returned to the People, Greenslade was struck by how adroitly Andrea managed Maxwell: ‘She was a good-looking blonde, well-dressed, cool, efficient and apparently unflappable. She also had a well-developed but understated sense of humour that probably helped her cope with Maxwell’s temper and his sudden changes of mood.’ As a bonus in Greenslade’s eyes, ‘she had this slight injury to her lip which helped make her very fanciable’.

  It wasn’t long before Maxwell had given Andrea his personal American Express card to use ‘whenever she saw fit’. When she bought a flat, he offered to act as guarantor for the mortgage and, for her twenty-sixth birthday, presented her with a new black BMW. At the same time, Maxwell’s long-serving PA, Jean Baddeley, was none too gently eased aside: she would end up in charge of corporate entertaining.

  Yet even Andrea didn’t escape his anger. One day Nick Davies found her in tears after Maxwell had been particularly demanding. The solicitous Davies did his best to console her – ‘instinctively I put my hand on her knee’ – and said that if she was ever feeling disheartened, she should give him a call.

  ‘Don’t let him get you down,’ he told her. ‘Don’t let him push you too hard.’

  Martin nodded and said, ‘Thanks, but I’ll be all right.’

  Maxwell also insisted that Andrea accompany him on all his foreign trips. Immediately after finishing his meetings in Berlin, he was due to fly to London to see the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. A landing slot had been booked several days earlier to ensure his plane arrived in time for him to reach Downing Street. Maxwell told Grigg he would collect Andrea Martin from the hotel where they had all been staying and bring her himself.

  ‘I remember asking him if he was sure. He said, “Yes, yes,” in his big bass voice. “You go ahead and I will collect Andrea.”’

  Grigg, Maloney and Sir John Morgan headed off to the airport. As usual Maxwell was late; by the time he arrived it was almost time for the plane to leave. But when he got out of the back of the car, Grigg saw that Maxwell was alone. ‘I thought, bloody hell, where’s Andrea? What’s happened?’

  As tactfully as he could, Grigg told him that he must have forgotten to collect her – that if he was to get back to London in time for his meeting with Mrs Thatcher, there was no alternative but to leave her behind.

  Maxwell was livid. ‘One by one he started berating us – me, John Morgan, Mike Maloney, the pilot . . . “Why is Andrea not here? Why didn’t you think of it?” The ridiculous thing was we were completely innocent. I think he knew it too, except he couldn’t afford to admit it to himself; it was just easier to blame others. Being the object of Maxwell’s wrath was a very daunting experience. Although you knew you hadn’t done anything wrong, you still felt completely stripped; it was as if you were standing there naked in front of him.’

  Meanwhile the clock was ticking away. However, Maxwell refused to budge without Andrea – ‘he made it perfectly obvious he wasn’t going anywhere’. Eventually Sir John Morgan was dispatched to call Downing Street, offer profuse apologies and explain that Maxwell had been unavoidably detained in Berlin. A car was sent to pick up Andrea from the hotel and, more than an hour later than planned, the plane took off.

  Afterwards, everyone who had been waiting on the tarmac that day found themselves asking the same question: why was Maxwell so determined to travel with his PA that he was prepared to stand up the Prime Minister in order to do so?

  It was a question Betty Maxwell had also been asking herself. Although Maxwell seldom went to Headington Hill Hall any more, Betty would often come up to London to check he was looking after himself. Increasingly, she felt that her husband had gone through some fundamental change. A line had been crossed. Maxwell had always worked hard, but now his life had become even more frenetic than before. Everything was in a constant state of flux, as if he couldn’t stand to be in the same place for long. Always he had to be jetting off to yet more countries, meeting more important people, buying more companies . . .

  In the same way that he tried to satisfy his hunger by wolfing down food with his hands, Maxwell seemed to be gorging himself on activity. By now he was moving so fast it was difficult for anybody else to keep up. Behind him, he left a trail of chaos. ‘The truth was that by the late 1980s, Bob’s office was in an appalling state . . . It was impossible to believe that anyone could operate in such disorder.’ While the outer office was bad enough, Betty found that Maxwell’s own office was even worse. The heaps of paper on his desk may have looked reasonably tidy, but, when she examined them more closely, she saw that some of the letters he hadn’t replied to were several years old.

  Increasingly, Maxwell expected Betty and their son Ian to stand in for him at engagements he was either too busy, or too disorganized, to attend. At a reception at 10 Downing Street, Mrs Thatcher asked, ‘Where’s Robert?’ in a puzzled voice – hardly surprising in view of what had happened not long before. Much to Betty’s embarrassment, he twice failed to show up for dinners at the French embassy: ‘The ambassador was furious – and rightly so.’

  Sometimes she would find she was supposed to attend a function on the day it was happening. When she called to complain, she was no longer put through to her husband; instead, she would be fobbed off with a secretary. After this had happened several times Betty wrote him a curt letter: ‘You must give orders to your secretaries that no invitations should be accepted on my behalf without having had the courtesy to send or fax me the invitation. I no longer want to stand in for you unless you deem my presence imperative.’

  Betty had no doubt where the blame lay. Unlike Roy Greenslade, she was not at all impressed by the way in which Andrea ran Maxwell’s affairs. ‘It was ludicrous to expect a girl in her mid-twenties and with her lack of experience to be able to assume responsibility almost single-handedly for an office as busy as Bob’s, but he liked her partly because she followed his instructions, didn’t answer back, didn’t nag him and had an even temper.’

  Maxwell, Betty clearly saw, had become ‘besotted’ with Andrea, ‘his infatuation blinding him as to her suitability for the job’. He would call her last thing at night to wish her good night and first thing in the morning to check she had slept well. He even told her she was welcome to come and live in his apartment.

  Several years later, after reading that Andrea had complained about Maxwell’s attentions, Betty was not inclined to be sympathetic. ‘If this were true and her complaints serious, she could easily have walked out, she obviously enjoyed the high salary and perks of the job – travelling in private jets, staying in de luxe hotels, or on the Lady Ghislaine.’ As for Maxwell himself, plainly he should have known better – ‘but i
n the end the infatuation of an ageing man for a young girl appeared to take precedence over his duties as chairman of a vast empire’.

  Ever since Nick Davies had found Andrea crying, he had felt there was ‘an unspoken bond’ between them. As always, Davies was on hand to offer a comforting shoulder and words of advice: ‘I warned her to be careful.’ It was advice that, for the time being at least, would go unheeded.

  Ian Maxwell had recently been appointed joint Managing Director of Maxwell Communication Corporation along with his younger brother, Kevin – Ian looked after the publishing side and Kevin the financial. He too had noticed how different his father was when he was around Andrea. ‘He was much more childlike. He also calmed down; he never swore or flew off the handle when she was there. I never saw him being physically affectionate to her, but I could see how important Andrea was. Although she was very guarded and never said much, you got a sense that nothing escaped her. I was also conscious of the fact that it was important to keep on Andrea’s right side. She basically controlled access to him; she was the gate-keeper.’

  In December 1988, leaders of all the member countries of the European Economic Community met in Rhodes to discuss the future direction of the EEC. Afterwards everyone who’d been present agreed the meeting had been a great success. As the official report declared proudly, ‘The European Council notes with particular satisfaction that the decisions adopted with a view to making a success of the Single European Act have already contributed to the creation of favourable conditions for the smooth, steady and dynamic development of the Community as it moves towards 1992.’