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Max Clifford arrives for sentencing at Southwark crown court in London in 2014.
Max Clifford arrives for sentencing at Southwark crown court in London in 2014. Photograph: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
Max Clifford arrives for sentencing at Southwark crown court in London in 2014. Photograph: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP

Max Clifford rewrote the rules of PR: a made-up story was as good as a real one

This article is more than 6 years old

A compulsive liar who prided himself on knowing where the bodies were buried, with Max Clifford you could never rule anything out

When I visited Max Clifford at Littlehey prison this August, I didn’t recognise him. The last time I saw him, three years ago, he was being led out of the dock having been sentenced to eight years in jail for eight indecent assaults on girls and women. Back then he was overweight, exhausted and, for all his bluster, beaten.

I looked around the prison visiting room for Clifford. Then I realised that the man in front of me – tough, sinewy, bearded with astonishingly bright blue eyes – was him. He had lost weight, and he looked like an ascetic priest.

Clifford was bullish – convinced he was going to win an appeal against all his convictions and clear his name. But then again I visited him just before his trial, and he was equally convinced that the case would be laughed out of court.

The publicist and I went back a long way. I didn’t deal with him often as a journalist, but when I did, I enjoyed it. He understood journalism better than any PR I’ve worked with. He was, of course, also a master manipulator. My most embarrassing experience as a journalist was with Clifford and was caught on camera in a Louis Theroux documentary about the publicist. I got caught up in one of Clifford’s lies, and made an idiot of myself.

His trial lasted seven weeks, at the end of which Clifford was convicted of a string of indecent assaults, carried out between 1977 and 1984, using his celebrity connections to lure women.

It was a humiliating trial for him – not least in that so much of it was predicated on whether his penis was “freakishly small”, as one victim claimed, or average sized. Although there were times he looked old, doddery (wearing a hearing loop that he forgot to turn on) and terrified, he generally kept up the classic Clifford front.

When the jury was out he berated me: “Oi, Simon, you’ve been here every day for seven weeks and you’ve not written a word. Some job that is. I buy my Guardian every day, and not a word.”

Another time when he saw me standing near the women’s toilets he told me he was going to expose me for loitering. He didn’t seem to realise he was on trial – this was just another show he was running. On the final day his daughter Louise, loyal to the last, walked into the court dressed in black. She feared the worst. She was right.

Clifford was a complex man – a compulsive liar, who took delight in his porkies and made a living from his mendacity. He created ludicrous fictions that were gobbled up by the tabloids – Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster was his most famous work. But he also worked on serious stories that he cared about. I interviewed the undercover police officer Mark Kennedy at his office. Yet for all his lies, there was also something essentially honest about him. He constantly bragged about his charity work – but it was true. He told everybody what a fabulous father he’d been to his disabled daughter Louise – and that was also true. Whereas many publicists end up despising journalism, Clifford, who started out at the South London Press, always loved it. He was as proud of having been a member of the National Union of Journalists as he was of having worked with the Beatles in their early days.

He was headhunted by EMI in 1962 to work in the press office, and in 1970, formed his own company, Max Clifford Associates. He rewrote the rules of public relations – for Clifford a made-up story was as good as a genuine one. It was certainly more fun. Then there was the defensive side of his work. In his memoir, he wrote that he had been hired by James Hewitt to keep him and Princess Diana out of the papers. He talked as if he ran a protection racket – keeping stories out of the news by making the victim of an exposé pay the girls more than they would get from the papers.

His memoir, Read All About It, proved meat and drink for the prosecution. Clifford was well and truly hoist with his own petard – as the prosecution read out stories about the way in which he procured girls for friends and celebrities, and slept with any number of young women while married to his long-suffering first wife Liz. He admitted that women found his power more alluring than his person. “Not only was I in the sweet shop, I owned it,” he wrote.

In June he declared his bankruptcy, owing £7.5m (including compensation to victims). At his peak, Clifford made £2.5m a year, had a home in Surrey valued at £3.5m and bought a new £200,000 Bentley every two years.

By the time I saw him in Littlehey, he had recovered his sense of invincibility. Even in prison he was the king of spin. If you listened to him, you would think he was running the place. He told me how he’d already kept one senior member of staff who had been having an affair out of the newspapers.

Playing softball and working out in the gym accounted for his new look – that alongside the fact that he had refused to eat prison food for the first few weeks. “I lost two stone in the first three months. £1.80 a day they spend on three meals. It’s food I wouldn’t feed my dog,” he said.

Littlehey is a prison for sex offenders. If he had to be in any prison this was as good a place as any, he said. Most of the prisoners were elderly and compliant. He’d lost none of his braggadocio. “I get more visits here than anybody else. I get more money sent to me.”

Did he still see many people from his old life? “Real people have stuck by me. The charities, the hospice I support, I get letters all the time from them.” What about the unreal people – the celebrities he represented? “Well I always knew what they were like. I wouldn’t have expected anything different.”

Had Simon Cowell, probably his most famous former client, been in touch? “No,” Clifford said. “He’s a coward. I knew he’d run a mile. Though his brother visits me.”

Clifford was writing another series of memoirs in prison, he told me. Many famous people had reason to be scared – he prided himself on knowing where all the bodies were buried.

Did he miss life as a publicist? “Course I do. That was my love. I had 50 or 60 great years. Wonderful years. I loved the mix. The nonsense, the celebrity, the serious stuff.”

Clifford expected to be released on parole next year, and was convinced he would be able to rebuild his life – and his reputation. If he won his appeal, he said that he might even be able to start up the business again. As always with Clifford, you were never sure if he really believed it or it was just the talk. It seemed an unlikely scenario, but with Clifford you could never rule anything out.

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