by Tom Bower
Banks pitched his presentation to appeal to his client's vanity: 'You epitomise the new spirit and change in the Mirror and you have a vision for the paper. We think that your presence on screen would enhance the paper and yourself.' Maxwell did not commit himself immediately. His reluctance was purely about his own appearance. He apparently had no qualms about the game, thus contradicting his earlier distaste for selling papers by means of bingo instead of journalism.
After reflection, he telephoned Banks and agreed to the package and to his appearance. It seems he did not take into account the fact that Murdoch had earned his fortune and phenomenal success without appearing on television and was in fact beginning to eschew publicity. Maxwell adopted the contrary view and warmed to Banks's notion that his appearance to promote bingo-fever could sell his newspaper. He explained his conversion later: 'Since I arrived at Fleet Street and everybody is playing the game, I've decided to play the game for real.' The justification for the game was that his newspaper, rather than making rash promises like its competitors, was actually paying a million pounds, proving 'the integrity of the Mirror*. If ever Maxwell exposed himself as a player and not as a strategist, this was the moment. The filming was to take place in his office in the Mirror building.
Maxwell was of course no stranger to television performances and he can be surprisingly patient with its tiresome demands, but on this occasion Banks was expecting him to behave like an actor whose words and movements had been carefully scripted. To begin with, when filming started at 2 p.m. in his office, everything looked easy:
When I bought Mirror Group Newspapers, I asked our people to come up with the most spectacular free game ever. They've done it. It's not bingo. It's the 'Win a million game'. I'm writing the cheque for a million pounds now. It's not made out to anyone, but for the first time in Britain I guarantee one of you will win it. So buy the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror or Sunday People and play the 'Win a Million' game. I could be writing your name in here very soon. It's fun, instant and free. There are thousands of cash prizes to be won, and I'm waiting to make one of you a millionaire.
By the third attempt of filming the thirty-second speech, the proprietor was becoming weary. It was, he complained, too complicated. Not the words, but everything else. He was expected not only to speak, but also to sit at the desk, write the cheque, put the cheque-book into a drawer and the signed cheque into his pocket, get up, and walk across to a logo saying, 'Who Dares Wins'. Meanwhile he would be smiling and speaking and being careful not to trip over anything.
There was a printing empire to manage, deals on the stock and currency exchanges to consider and there were constant telephone calls from all around the world to handle. His office was crowded with people and cumbersome equipment, and the lights were hot. Lines were fluffed, lights fused and, infuriatingly, he completed his walk and talk in either twenty-nine or thirty-one seconds whereas he was required to take precisely thirty seconds. Yet by 7 p.m. one take was judged suitable enough for transmission. Maxwell was thrilled with the results but by then the gimmick was no longer a secret. The Mirror's competitors had heard the news and made hasty plans to launch an identical campaign. 'There's no better form of flattery than copying,' said Maxwell, basking in the success of his own 'scoop', which was aired on ITV on 17 August.
The following day, Maxwell's photograph and message covered the Mirror's front page. The game was explained over three more pages and similar mass coverage reappeared in the newspaper on each of the following three days. The miners' strike, which days earlier had been described as 'terribly damaging', was relegated while pages and pages of the Mirror were devoted to the game and its beaming proprietor who had warmed to Banks's pitch that he personally 'epitomises the new spirit'. Joyfully, he felt that he was beating Murdoch. Not only had he launched the biggest bingo game in history but he had also resisted following the Sun's price increase despite the higher cost of newsprint. 'We have won hands down,' he said to his editorial conference. '[Murdoch] spends most of his time in America. I think he'll seriously have to consider coming home.' As always in his career, his optimism blinded him to so many awkward truths, not least of which was that Murdoch trusted his staff in Britain to handle the challenge. Delegation was a management style which Maxwell could not accept, despite his frequent assertion that ‘I am a very efficient manager of men and assets.'
Just five days after the hugely expensive campaign to boost the Mirror was launched, it was scooped by its rival. On 23 August, the Sun announced the first bingo millionaire. The television pictures showed Maxwell gritting his teeth. Murdoch had beaten him, again. Churlishly, he directed the paper to make the best of his defeat by proclaiming all over the Mirror's front page, the ‘Sun's millionaire can thank the Mirror’. But Banks had unwittingly released an irrepressible genie.
Maxwell enjoyed appearing on television. The day following his first appearance, he telephoned Banks: 'John, I've arranged it all. Get your cameras round there immediately.' Coutts Bank, at Maxwell's behest, had agreed to provide one million pounds in notes on a trolley for a new commercial in which he would star. In the meantime, he resorted to his other favourite to stimulate sales. The Mirror's price was cut by one penny - a tactic he had unsuccessfully employed nine years earlier at the Scottish Daily News. Every day for three weeks, the Mirror's front page was dominated by news of its price cut and the 'million pound game'. At the end, he gave away his million pounds and surreptitiously increased the price. The enormous impact which Banks had promised had rebounded. The readers had become unsettled. The gyrations in price reflected the newspaper's variations in content. Molloy and his staff knew the cause. Their newspaper was less spicy and less fun to read. If they tried to intervene, Maxwell ignored them. He was enjoying the publicity and it was fun running newspapers. His contribution, he felt, was satisfying and should increase even if the Mirror's circulation, after a slight increase, was beginning to fall. All that was needed, he believed, was a greater contribution from himself.
In October, Britain became aware of a dreadful famine in Ethiopia. The television news pictures were dramatic and Maxwell saw a chance to help the starving and the Mirror. In line with its great tradition, the Mirror would save the unfortunates with Maxwell in charge of the operation.
At 6 p.m. one day in mid-October, Lord King, the chairman of British Airways, who had donated the aeroplane for no charge, was waiting at Heathrow to bid Maxwell farewell on that mercy voyage. Alongside his lordship was the mayor of Cardiff and a galaxy of helpers. They waited in vain. Maxwell was in Oxford watching his football team battling against Arsenal in the Milk Cup. While King fumed and struggled against a dose of flu, Maxwell refused to leave the ground until the second half. 'Well, he owned the team, didn't he?' recalls his aide Neil Bentley, 'And he was damned if he'd miss the match.' Maxwell arrived four hours late, ignored King's curses and rushed up the plane's steps. The negatives of the photos taken for the next day's Mirror of Maxwell waving farewell were destroyed to save Maxwell from embarrassment.
Few journalists travelling with him on the specially chartered 'mercy mission' to Addis Ababa were convinced that this was a normal venture, since Maxwell featured so heavily in the Mirror's coverage of the victims' plight. He and his retinue were omnipresent, a trait which few outside his organisation had yet witnessed. The personal attendants, the battery of telephones, the huge consumption of food and his sheer need to place himself, rather than the victims, at the centre of attention contrasted strangely with the images of famine. Back in London, David Seymour, Goodman and other Mirror staff were startled when the proprietor, having commandeered the Hilton Hotel in Addis, sent messages dictating what action the newspaper should demand to solve the latest crisis in the miners' strike: 'He was completely out of touch but still sending us his "action memos" as if we were a business not a newspaper and his judgements were contradicted by the facts.' Like so many others, Seymour and Goodman would eventually leave in despair.
On Maxwell's return, the
escapades increasingly promoted Maxwell rather than the newspaper. On 4 March, Mirror readers were entertained by a flattering profile of the President of Bulgaria who was believed to have organised the murder in London of the dissident Georgi Markov with a poisoned umbrella and to have sanctioned the attempted murder of the Pope. At the end of the gushy eulogy about a country which few Mirror readers would appreciate, the article mentioned the President's 'special guest across the table, Robert Maxwell', who apparently 'had just struck a huge deal with the Bulgarian Government to help update the country's printing and packaging industries'. Tucked away elsewhere, the paper reported that the miners' strike had ended on the previous day.
After the end of May, Maxwell was presented in the Mirror as a roving ambassador. Photographs would appear of Maxwell with Soviet and Chinese leaders exchanging views about the world situation. There was also a footnote mentioning that a lucrative business deal had been concluded. During a trip to Poland, Maxwell visited General Jaruzelski, the Polish military leader who had organised the first military coup against a civilian Communist government in the Soviet bloc but had failed to squash the Solidarity movement. In a radio interview recorded after his dinner with Jaruzelski, Maxwell said that the Solidarity problem was 'solved' and that his newspapers would be 'devoting less space' to the dissenters. The accurate reporting of his comments in London caused an outcry. He countered that he had been distorted, especially by a 'mendacious' Times article. Nevertheless he found that he was defending himself against accusations that he was promoting not just himself but also his business interests.
The Mirror, it was said, had become a family photograph album which reflected the family business. No fewer than five of the seven children were now employed by their father's companies, which silenced any suggestion that on his death there would be no inheritance. His sons Kevin and Ian had become key executives in the management team. The three would meet at 8 a.m. for private discussions, before Maxwell encountered other executives. The Mirror's front-page story on 10 June 1985 confirmed the trend. It reported that Maxwell would rescue Britain's technical wizard, Sir Clive Sinclair, whose company was tottering towards bankruptcy. Maxwell, according to the report would launch of £12 million bid to save the company. Like his earlier bid to rescue Aston Martin, it was described as an act of patriotism. Production of that night's newspaper was delayed while the announcement was dispatched from Headington Hall to the Mirror building. Maxwell was subsequently asked why he had ordered the editor to carry the Sinclair story on the front page. He replied: 'The fact that I was involved in it is incidental. . . . I'm certainly not aware [of holding up the front page].
The matter of the front page is a decision for the editor.' Asked if a rescue bid mounted by someone else would have appeared so prominently, Maxwell replied, ‘I never answer hypothetical questions.' In August with noticeably less publicity, he pulled out of the deal. Profits, he decided, were more important than patriotism.
After one year, despite spending £5 million in promotion, the Mirror had lost 350,000 sales. Six months later the circulation would fall to 2.9 million, a massive half a million less than when he bought it. It confounded the new proprietor's commitment to achieve daily sales of four million copies. The combined daily loss for the whole group was one million sales. It was an unprecedented collapse in the history of Fleet Street. Marketing Week commented, ‘It takes something close to genius to lose so much circulation so quickly.' His target of overtaking the Sun within one year had withered.
Maxwell, understandably worried, consulted Molloy. Molloy's advice was to return to the old formula of cheque-book journalism and heavy advertising. In April, Maxwell announced a £10 million promotion campaign, sanctioned the use of 'dolly birds' and approved the invasion of privacy. Mirror executives were authorised to buy the titillating memoirs of Peter Bogdanovich, a film director whose beautiful girlfriend, a model called Dorothy Stratten, had been brutally murdered. Bogdanovich claimed that she had been the victim of sexual perverts associated with Hugh Hefner's Playboy empire. It was an averagely intrusive and voyeuristic sex saga.
In normal circumstances, the serialisation would have passed off unnoticed but since it was Maxwell's latest stratagem against Murdoch, there was an opportunity for his competitors to lampoon the challenger. By that time, Maxwell's energetic self-promotion in his newspapers and on television chat shows was a major topic of conversation. While Maxwell assumed that all the requests for interviews and appearances were recognition of his importance, the invitations were in fact often motivated by the search for good entertainment, especially to expose any glaring inconsistencies. So, when Fleet Street heard that he had strayed into areas beyond his experience, the incentive to embarrass 'Cap'n Bob', as he had unaffectionately been dubbed, was irresistible. The Sun decided to run the identical story about the model's murder but culled from contemporaneous newspaper accounts. In the industry it is called 'a spoiler' and can be deflected by time-honoured methods. Maxwell naturally was ignorant of those devices and resorted once again to asking the courts for an injunction against the Sun. In the process, the owner of the Mirror was boosting his competitor's circulation.
Standing outside the High Court in the Strand, Maxwell condemned the Sun as a 'lying, cheating, thieving paper' for regurgitating an old interview with the model and dressing it up as a scoop. There was even talk of demanding the imprisonment of the Sun's editor. Inside the courtroom, the judge rejected Maxwell's case and ordered that he pay the £50,000 costs. Outside in the streets again, Maxwell said, 'Spoiling may be legal, but it's not nice.' Fleet Street, he said, needed to be 'cleaned up'. The cleansing would no longer concern the coverage of lurid sex scandals but would be designed to prevent competition. 'Everything's got a moral, if you can only find it,' as the Duchess said to Alice.
On the first anniversary of his purchase Maxwell was asked about his interference: ‘I don't think that has any effect on the sales of the paper except to improve the adrenalin throughout the building. . . . Whether I appear in the paper or not, that's a matter for them to decide, not for me.' When pressed to explain whether those stories would have received such prominence or even coverage if Maxwell had not featured, he replied, 'You'll have to ask the editor, not me. . . . It's the editors who interfere in the publisher's prerogative, not the other way round.'
In August 1985, Maxwell was finally persuaded that his enjoyment was too expensive. His financial staff forecast that the group's paltry £1 million profit would be replaced during that year by a £6 million loss. His salesmanship had failed and he had made no progress in reducing the Mirror's printing costs, which were approximately three times higher than the Sun's. His flamboyance had disillusioned his editorial staff and, worse, had undermined his credibility with the unions. His warning, issued in April, that all the newspapers would close if there were not 'massive cost reductions' had been ignored. Although he spoke about the 'People inside Mirror newspapers [who] know that I do not bluff. I will close the newspapers if they are ever brought to a halt by the unions,' the unions had not shifted their ground. Reasoned negotiations had failed and the papers' future was overshadowed by the threat posed by Eddie Shah's proposed Today. With the latest German presses and free of all union restrictions, Shah promised to produce a national colour tabloid, which at the time seemed to threaten all of Fleet Street's tabloids. In August, Maxwell launched a broadside against the unions using the anticipated appearance of Today to focus attention on the finite nature of their monopoly. As the Mirror Group losses mounted, Bill Miles noticed that the 'air of compromise disappeared. He became much more aggressive.' Maxwell's mixed blessing was that the appalling relations between SOGAT and the NGA, and between the national officials and the in-house shop stewards (FOCs), would enable him to play off one group of workers against the other. 'We realised that when Maxwell bought the Mirror, the writing was on the wall,' says Miles. ‘I always believed his threats, but others didn't.'
At the beginning of August, Maxwell
adopted the same tactics as at BPC. All the chapel leaders were summoned to the Mirror building and under the threat of a deadline began simultaneous negotiations to achieve voluntary redundancies. The crux of Maxwell's demands was that the Sporting Life, which was losing £3 million annually, should be printed by a subsidiary of Pergamon, which was not bound by Fleet Street's restrictions. At the end of two weeks, Maxwell struck a complicated deal with the NGA's general secretary Tony Dubbins, which allowed the printing of the Sporting Life to be moved. Hours later, the FOC of the NGA in the Mirror building refused to accept the agreement. To put pressure on Maxwell, NGA members, on 21 August, disrupted the Mirror's production. Maxwell retaliated the following day by stopping production of all the newspapers and warning that 6,500 employees faced dismissal. 'The NGA were not like kamikaze pilots,' says Bill Keyes, 'because at least the kamikazes knew what they were doing.' When Maxwell's threat failed to persuade the NGA to surrender, he announced on 30 August that the Mirror would no longer be printed in Fleet Street. 'It is impossible to build success on anarchy,' he said. 'It seems equally impossible to be rid of that anarchy, so deeply entrenched has it become. ... I believed I could change a floundering enterprise into a flourishing one. Regrettably, I must admit failure so far. . . . The choice facing Fleet Street and its unions is to change or perish. The unions, by refusing to allow me to publish except on their anarchical terms, have demonstrated their unwillingness to change.' The Sporting Life, he announced, was for sale. The union leaders were divided about the credibility of Maxwell's threats.
