editor of the Sunday Mirror), Ernest Burrington, (then editor of the People) and Joe Haines (then a Daily Mirror columnist and a director of the Mirror Group) – all owned by Maxwell’s Mirror Group Newspapers.
Jay filed Frost’s report in his bulging ‘Bower File’, which was marked in large letters ‘Private and Confidential’, reflecting the heading of every document it contained. Each letter on the topic signed by the chief of staff urged its recipient to treat the matter with utmost secrecy. Jay had become rather proficient in conducting the operation.
Ever since his employer had heard in summer 1987 that I was planning to write Maxwell: the Outsider, an unauthorised biography of himself, Peter Jay had been employed as his chief of intelligence to gather and co-ordinate information about my activities and identify those people whom I was interviewing. On one occasion, detectives had clearly followed me to a meeting with Anne Dove, Maxwell’s former secretary, with whom he had enjoyed a close relationship in the 1950s. The results of their work were formalised under Jay’s supervision in sworn statements which would be used to back the avalanche of writs and court hearings, costing £1 million, which obsessed Maxwell until his death.
Initially, Maxwell tried to prevent the book’s publication in February 1988, at the same time publishing his own version written by Joe Haines. When my book hit the top of the bestseller list, Maxwell sought through individual cajolery and writs to prevent every bookshop in Britain selling the title. Eventually he was successful in this endeavour, but he nevertheless continued to hound me and the publishers by pursuing various writs for libel. Jay’s task was to co-ordinate and supervise the unprecedented legal battle.
By spring 1989, one year after publication, when the first of three publishers had agreed to publish the paperback version only to retreat rather than face the subject’s wrath, Maxwell’s anger was increasing in parallel to the secretly developing insolvency of his empire. His fury had shifted from the book’s accurate description of his unaltered dishonesty to something which in his view was more sinister. He believed that I had become a focus for his enemies and a receptacle of damaging information. Just as he was finalising a deceptive annual financial report for the Maxwell Communication Corporation, of which he was chairman, he embarked upon a new venture to humiliate the book’s publisher and bankrupt its author.
Four lawyers were Maxwell’s principal advisers. Lord Mishcon and Anthony Julius were his solicitors and Richard Rampton QC and Victoria Sharp were the barristers. During their frequent court appearances, they betrayed no hint of doubt about their client’s virtues. On the contrary, they pursued his mission with depressing vigour, commitment and pitilessness.
Their client’s anger had by then increased still further. The book had been published in France and his defamation action there had failed. To his fury, a court had ordered that he pay me FFrs 10,000 in costs. The threat that the book might also be published in his beloved New York galvanised him to resort to more draconian measures.
Maxwell had become convinced, in the words of Stephen Nathan, another barrister hired for advice, that I had ‘compiled (and continued to compile) an extensive record of information concerning Mr Maxwell and has put the distillation of that information on to a computer which he keeps at home’. Maxwell’s source was Frost, who, during his gumshoe expedition around Hampstead, had picked up from an ‘unidentified source’ the notion that my study had become a centre for subversive activities against the Chairman.
Nathan had been asked to advise whether I could be prosecuted for failing to register as a data-user under the Data Protection Act 1984 or, better still, whether Maxwell might approach the Director of Public Prosecutions. The DPP, the Chairman hoped, would direct the police to seize the computer without warning. That course, advised Nathan, would be possible only if Maxwell could persuade the DPP of the allegedly dangerous contents of the computer.
Frustrated by Nathan’s wishy-washy advice, Maxwell ordered Lord Mishcon to seek the seizure of my computer on the orders of a judge under an Anton Piller order. Naturally Jay passed on the instruction to Julius. Such an order, suggested Jay, would enable ‘Bower’s computer records to be seized under warrant, without advance notice being given, therefore without Bower having an opportunity to destroy or conceal such records’. In retrospect, the irony of Maxwell mentioning Anton Piller was manifest. The order, as Mishcon explained, is used to obtain the seizure of documents for the investigation of fraud or systematic dishonesty. And Jay, in passing on Mishcon’s advice to the Chairman in another ‘Intermemo’ on 7 April 1989 headed ‘Bower’s Computer’ and marked ‘Strictly Confidential’, noted mournfully, ‘Legally speaking, this is not (quite) the situation with Bower.’
Mishcon urged his client to adopt the customary course and apply to the court for the computer records. But, he cautioned, ‘Our evidence that these records exist is thin.’ Therefore, advised the peer, ‘I recommend that investigations should continue.’ Hence Maxwell ordered Jay to seek the evidence required, and this was why Jay was inspired to ask the detective to place the scanner at the bottom of my garden. But after receiving Potter’s disappointing news, Jay concluded, ‘It is not really practical to proceed along the lines we discussed.’
That was by no means the end of the battle. Until October 1991, Maxwell regularly held meetings with lawyers and with his personal security staff to propel the battle towards my bankruptcy and his vindication. The readiness of Peter Jay, a journalist and former British ambassador, to function as his willing tool was sadly not unique in Britain or elsewhere. He merely epitomised a cravenness common among a horde of self-important personalities and powerbrokers whose self-esteem was boosted by the Chairman’s attentions and deep purse.
Unfortunately, the sort of campaign directed against my book acted as a disincentive for most newspapers against exposing Maxwell in his lifetime. Many blame Britain’s libel laws and lawyers’ fees for protecting him, yet the law and its expense were not the sole reason for British newspapers’ reluctance or inability to uncover his crimes. More important was the environment in which newspapers now operate.
Few newspaper editors and even fewer proprietors nowadays relish causing discomfort to miscreant powerbrokers. By nature anti-Establishment, the so-called ‘investigative’ reporter finds himself working for newspapers which are increasingly pro-Establishment. Only on celluloid, it seems, does an editor smile when listening to a screaming complainant exposed by his journalists.
Proper journalism, as opposed to straightforward reporting or the columnists’ self-righteous sermonising, is an expensive, frustrating and lonely chore. Often it is unproductive. Even the rarity of success earns the ‘investigative’ journalist only the irksome epitaph of being ‘obsessional’ or ‘dangerous’. The final product is often complicated to read, unentertaining and inconclusive. No major City slicker has ever been brought down merely by newspaper articles. Like the Fraud Squad, financial journalists usually need a crash before they can detect and report upon the real defects. Often, only with hindsight does the crime seem obvious. Even though in Maxwell’s case his propensity to commit a fraud had been obvious since 1954, it was almost impossible for any journalist to produce the evidence contemporaneously.
Moreover, many of those who reported Maxwell’s affairs during the 1980s were only vaguely aware of the details of the Pergamon saga in 1969, when his publishing empire had disintegrated amid suspicions of dishonesty which appeared to have terminated his business life. After three damning DTI reports, no one expected Maxwell’s resurrection. However, the DTI inspectors, having found the evidence of fraud and voiced a memorable phrase about his unfitness to manage a public company, had not directly accused him of criminality. It was the inspectors’ cowardly reluctance to publish their real convictions and the police failure to prosecute which permitted Maxwell during the 1980s, when explaining his life, to distort the record of the Pergamon saga.
Accordingly, by 1987, Buckingham Palace, the City, Westminster and Whitehall had forgotten or forgiven the past. In the year in which Maxwell’s final frauds began, most journalists reflected the prevailing sentiment and were willing to afford him the benefit of the doubt.
To have broken through Maxwell’s barrier required not only a brave inside source who was willing to steal documents but also someone who would risk the