MAXWELL’S FALL By Roy Greenslade Simon & Schuster Pounds 4.99
Among the least edifying spectacles of the aftermath of Mr Robert Maxwell’s death was the speed of the overnight conversion of his flagship newspaper, the Daily Mirror, from docile servant to exposer of the publisher’s many sins.
The newspaper that had proclaimed Mr Maxwell a ‘giant with wisdom’ was to go out of its way to condemn him as a devil. The Mirror’s exposes ranged from stories of widespread buggings of senior executives to mock-up photographs of Mr Maxwell with the white hair he would have had if he had not had it regularly dyed dark brown by his Savoy barber.
Maxwell’s Fall is the book that Mr Maxwell did not ban; he died before its publication. Its author, Roy Greenslade, is a former senior executive of Mr Rupert Murdoch’s Sun and Sunday Times, who accepted the editorship of the Daily Mirror in January 1990. He left 14 months later after agreeing a generous severance payment and a confidentiality clause designed to prevent Greenslade from ever publicly speaking ill of Mr Maxwell.
Greenslade argues that only someone who has been ‘sullied by working closely with Maxwell’ can share in the exhilaration of release felt by Mirror journalists, past and present, at the news that Mr Maxwell’s body had been found floating off the coast of the Canaries.
The book certainly records a cathartic experience, a genuine attempt to understand a part of the author’s past that he had either ignored or overlooked.
Why an experienced journalist like Greenslade, who had worked for a rival Murdoch tabloid, volunteered to work for Maxwell in the first place is a mystery. Claiming to have some sense of Mr Maxwell’s dishonesty as a person, but unsuspecting about his financial improprieties, Greenslade initially considered himself capable of taking on Maxwell the idiosyncratic bully and of imposing himself as an editor.
The book lists several episodes in which Greenslade portrays himself as having successfully stood up to Mr Maxwell by defending some of his staff from sacking, and overriding his employer’s attempts to dictate a story or headline.
On one occasion, for example, Greenslade refused to fill up his front page with the news that Mr Maxwell had bought two Israeli football clubs. On another he ignored Mr Maxwell’s telephoned ‘tip-offs’ – erroneous as it turned out – that six members of the British cabinet were about to resign over the Tory leadership contest.
In the end, however, Greenslade found himself increasingly impotent in the midst of ‘Maxwellia’ – the crazy, disorganised, cruel and corrupt world Mr Maxwell created.
Mr Maxwell never forgave his editor for a memorable interview Greenslade gave to the British newspaper trade’s weekly magazine, the UK Press Gazette, which cast gloom over the future sales of tabloids such as the Mirror.
Along the way there were moments when Greenslade chose silence rather than protest. In one of the best-written human episodes in the book, he describes Mr Maxwell’s public humiliation of a secretary.
‘Never has an extrovert with an overweening sense of self-importance and the thickest of skins, lacking even a tiny perception of the word embarrassment, got to control a newspaper group and use it so flagrantly for his self-aggrandisement,’ reflects Greenslade.
It is not merely the man himself whom Greenslade criticises. His business moves come under attack too. Perhaps the only commercial decision for which Greenslade believes Mr Maxwell did deserve praise was his move into colour printing before his rivals. The decision boosted advertising revenue, enhanced the editorial content of his newspapers and eventually forced the rest of Fleet Street to follow suit.
Apart from that single episode this is the story of irrational and improvised decision-making by a newspaper publisher who insisted on controlling the expenses of his editorial staff, while lavishly wasting his companies’ resources on personal promotion.
The blurb on this paperback boasts that Greenslade’s book is the first account since the publisher’s death of the full monstrous story. In fact several financial chapters seem to be the result of a skilful cuttings job on material already published in newspapers, rather than the product of original investigation.
As such it puts the key in the door, but fails fully to unlock the mystery of the whys and wherefores of Mr Maxwell’s dealings or to assign responsibilities to family members, employees, and financial institutions.
As for Mr Maxwell’s personal history, Mr Greenslade adds little to what can be gleaned already from Tom Bower’s The Outsider, although he is adept at pointing out the contradictions between Bower’s unofficial biography and the official account written by Joe Haines.
Greenslade suggests that Mr Maxwell commited suicide under pressure over his collapsing business empire but fails to indicate where the evidence might come from to back this up. Neither does he explain why the Daily Mirror, under his editorship, did not probe into Mr Maxwell’s pensions fund when its rival the Daily Mail did.
The chapters focusing on Greenslade’s first-hand experiences of Mr Maxwell are what gives this book its particular value, and raises it above the level of a mere attack on his labyrinthi
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