Ian Aitken – Rattling the Bars
MY OLD friend and former colleague Julia Langdon presented a gloriously entertaining programme on Radio 4 last weekend about travelling round the world with Robert Maxwell during his heyday as proprietor of the Daily Mirror. Called Travels with Cap’n Bob, Julia and her guests recited some grotesquely funny stories about the relentless egocentricity and self-promotion of the great man, and the havoc that he spread wherever he went.
The conclusion one had to draw, I think, was that Maxwell was actually mad – indeed, a word that occurred once or twice during the show was “psychopathâ€, which my dictionary defines as a person who commits anti-social acts with no feeling of moral responsibility. It seems to fit Cap’n Bob to a tee.
I formed that opinion of him a very long time ago, when he was Labour MP for Buckingham way back in the early years of the Harold Wilson Government. My first conscious sight of him was on Budget day, with a packed House of Commons eagerly awaiting the medicine to be doled out by Chancellor James Callaghan.
Maxwell seized the opportunity of a large audience to rise on some damn silly point or other and refused to shut up until the Speaker, with the noisy approval of the entire House, finally ordered him to sit down. He did so with every appearance of man who has been unjustly treated. It was clear that he, at least, regarded all publicity as good publicity.
Although a mere backbencher, he was constantly seeking headlines with daft wheezes, including an embarrassing plan to promote “Britishness†(now, where have I heard that term more recently?) which Wilson briefly seemed to be taking seriously. The one feature that all his schemes had in common was that Bob himself had a central role in them.
This reached a bizarre climax when he made an offer to the House: if they would put him in charge of the Commons catering he was prepared to guarantee that he could turn its persistent deficit into a profit within a year. Somewhat bemused by the man’s chutzpah, the MPs took him on.
What followed was extraordinary. First of all, he closed all the cafeterias at 9pm – and don’t forget that the House routinely sat until midnight or later in those days. He then replaced them with American-style automats into which you shoved some coins and then pushed the frozen item you had bought into a microwave heater.
Next, he put the cellars of the Commons up for hire, eventually letting them off to a major British wine importer. To ensure that his tenants got vacant possession, he sold off the whole of the House’s unrivalled wine stock at knockdown prices.
For several weeks, it was possible to walk into any of the building’s many bars, ask for a glass of wine and, if you were in luck, be served with some magnificent French claret for a few pennies. If you were out of luck, you got Algerian plonk. Maxwell, meanwhile, sold quite a lot of the best stuff to himself, also at knockdown prices.
But Cap’n Bob saw to it that his reputation was safe by tossing some juicy bones to the journalists of the parliamentary lobby. First, he put right a long-standing lobby grievance – which was that there was no bar where MPs and journalists could meet on equal terms. He solved the problem by re-opening a long-closed Westminster institution called Annie’s Bar, which quickly became the principal exchange and mart for political gossip in the Commons.
Then he threw open the terrace of the Commons to lobby journalists, a priceless facility during the long, hot summer months of late-night sittings. The gratitude of the lobby knew no bounds. So when a triumphant Maxwell eventually announced that he had kept his promise and that the catering committee’s balance sheet was in the black for the first time in anyone’s memory, he was assured of a good press.
But nemesis was just around the corner. When Wilson gambled on an early general election – and lost – in June 1970, Cap’n Bob was defeated in Buckingham and thus his parliamentary career came to an abrupt halt. One of the first tasks of the new House of Commons was to appoint a new chairman of the catering committee. Maxwell’s Tory successor quickly discovered how the transformation of the books had been accomplished. It was quite simple: Maxwell hadn’t been paying the bills.
No doubt he had hoped to juggle the whole mess in the belief that, in the long run, he would be able to put it right. But, thanks to the electors of Buckingham, there was no long run. Happily for Maxwell, however, when the truth came out he was no longer around to face the music. It is all rather reminiscent, is it not, of what was to happen on a rather larger scale when he disappeared from his yacht many years later?
I remember thinking at the time that there was something very strange about a man who would run such risks for, as far as I am aware, no significant financial gain to himself (what’s a case or two of wine among friends?) So it seems to have been done simply in order to posture before his fellow MPs as a brilliant financier. But all he managed to demonstrate was that he was, if not quite a full-blown crook, certainly well on the way to becoming one.
From my own point of view, however, the episode had a satisfactory outcome, because it and other experiences of him at Westminster convinced me very early on that Maxwell was not a man to work for under any circumstances. That is just as well, because he twice offered me well-paid jobs on his newspapers and I was able to say no without even the tiniest twinge of regret.
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