In the summer of 1966, when Reginald Maudling was feeling sorry for himself after losing out on the Tory leadership, Poulson approached him to become an international ambassador for his firm. A sharper, more scrupulous politician would have run a mile, or at least would have looked more closely into Poulson’s business practices. But even at this early stage Maudling was in physical, intellectual and moral decline, his mind dulled by greed and drink. As a family friend told his biographer, Beryl Maudling had become ‘insatiably greedy for the good things in life’, putting her husband under ‘constant pressure at home for money’, and insisting that they lead a lifestyle of parties and holidays well beyond an ordinary MP’s means. It was under this pressure that Maudling lent his name to the Real Estate Fund of America, an offshore investment trust run by the American fraudster Jerome Hoffman. Although he resigned from the board as soon as REFA became controversial, Maudling’s involvement was highly embarrassing, and his excuse – that he just wanted ‘a little pot of money’ for his old age – notably feeble. Yet with the honourable exception of Private Eye, the press gave him a free ride. He was an immensely amiable chap, as well as a former Chancellor and senior member of Heath’s front bench. How could anyone suspect him of doing anything wrong?7
In fact, as his biographer Lewis Baston has shown, Maudling was not just quite corrupt. He was immensely corrupt. From his first meeting with Poulson, he pocketed tens of thousands of pounds in gifts and retainers. In 1967 alone he accepted some £25,000, almost half a million in today’s money. In return, he made some characteristically lazy efforts to suborn Tory councillors on Poulson’s behalf, and, rather more seriously, intervened in the House of Commons to demand more government aid to Malta. This was a particularly unforgivable episode: Maudling knew that the money would go towards a new hospital on the island of Gozo, for which the contract had been awarded to … John Poulson.* Later, the House of Commons let Maudling off with a slap on the wrist, but according to the journalist who broke the story, Ray Fitzwalter, it was a clear and blatant case of parliamentary corruption. ‘Poulson asks him to do underhand things to further the cause,’ Fitzwalter explained. ‘Maudling does it. The effect follows. Then there is reward and congratulation flowing from Poulson to Maudling’ – not just the cash presents, but the covenant for Beryl’s beloved theatre.
Almost incredibly, though, Maudling’s greed did not end there. When he flew to the Middle East to publicize Poulson’s business, the architect paid for his suit and even his luggage, claiming it as a tax-deductible expense. In return, Maudling seems to have conspired to bribe a senior Dubai official, offering him a mysterious ‘favour’ in return for a lucrative hotel deal. The really astonishing thing, though, is not that he was corrupt but that he was so brazen about it. On one occasion when both Maudlings were steaming with drink, the former Chancellor dug out a pile of uncut diamonds to show Poulson, explaining that they were a bribe from Dubai. Meanwhile, he thought nothing of showing off the fancy new swimming pool at his Hertfordshire home, even though it was another present from Poulson (and a characteristically botched job that always leaked). And in January 1970, Reggie and Beryl even pitched up to Antonia Fraser’s Field of the Cloth of Gold Ball dressed as Arab sheikhs – a singularly inappropriate choice of costume given their relationship with the region.
Maudling’s corruption did not end when he became Home Secretary. In July 1970, for example, he received a gift of £3,000 from one of Poulson’s firms, for which he sent a grateful letter noting that it would ‘meet all my cash requirements for the foreseeable future’. And although he no longer flew to the Middle East on missions for Poulson, he suborned his own son Martin instead, recommending him as his replacement on Poulson’s board. He also encouraged his son to act as a glorified bagman for the corrupt property tycoon Eric Miller, who combined the roles of fundraiser for Harold Wilson, chairman of Peachey Properties and director of Fulham football club. Miller was so crooked he made Poulson look a man of probity, and he liked to show off Martin Maudling as a kind of trophy. One lunch guest later remembered that at the end of the meal, Miller asked young Maudling to hand round the cigar box: when opened, it proved to be stuffed with £50 notes. But the links between the tycoon and the Home Secretary did not end there. Miller owned the freehold on Maudling’s house, frequently invited him for dinner (baked potato with caviar, rather oddly, was a favourite dish), and in December 1970 presented Beryl Maudling with a silver chess set worth £2,750 (roughly £32,000 in today’s money). At one level, it beggars belief that the minister responsible for law and order in Britain thought he could get away with this kind of behaviour. But if John Poulson had been a better businessman, then Maudling might well have got away with it.8
Poulson’s business had been running into trouble since the late 1960s, when two large cheques to the Inland Revenue bounced. As Maudling’s biographer writes, Poulson was ‘leaking money all over the place’, and on New Year’s Eve 1969 he was forced to relinquish power over his own empire, giving way to his wife’s brother-in-law John King – later the ruthless chairman of British Airways and Mrs Thatcher’s favourite businessman. Disastrously, however, Poulson was still badly in debt, and in January 1972 he declared bankruptcy. Since he had always kept detailed records of his financial transactions, exposure was now inevitable. Confronted with the evidence of his wrongdoing during a tumultuous hearing in Wakefield, Poulson melodramatically collapsed under the strain, thereby guaranteeing himself a place in the headlines. By the end of July 1972, the Metropolitan Police had opened a criminal investigation, and a year later, after wading through mountains of paperwork, they charged Poulson with fraud. And when the case opened in October, it all came out: the presents, the bribes, the brown envelopes. ‘It was not corruption,’ Poulson said defiantly, ‘because it is generally done by every building firm in this land.’ There was ‘so much drinking and entertaining’, he insisted, that it was unfair to single him out. But it was no good: on 11 February 1974, Poulson was found guilty. Even in the depths of humiliation his self-confidence never deserted him. ‘I have been a fool,’ he said, ‘surrounded by a pack of leeches. I took the world on its own terms, and no one can deny I once had it in my fist.’ Mr Justice Waller, however, called him an ‘incalculably evil’ man and sent him down for five years, later increased to seven. ‘To offer corrupt gifts’, the judge said, ‘strikes at the very heart of our government system.’9
As for Maudling, he never returned to government after July 1972. While Poulson’s trial did not quite uncover the extent of their collaboration, it offered more than enough hints to leave the former Home Secretary looking distinctly shop-soiled. By 1974 he was under investigation by the Fraud Squad, the DTI and the Inland Revenue, although they never managed to unearth enough dirt to bring him down. When Granada’s World in Action programme revealed the details of the Malta hospital scam in March 1974, Maudling made a personal statement in the Commons denying any impropriety – a statement that while not technically a lie, fell very short of the truth. A year later, Mrs Thatcher recalled him to the front bench as Shadow Foreign Secretary, but as she later put it, his performance was ‘a source of embarrassment’. She sacked him in November 1976, and a year later, after more revelations about his association with Poulson, he suffered the indignity of being investigated, albeit very feebly, by a parliamentary Select Committee. After sinking into outright alcoholism, he died of cirrhosis of the liver in February 1979. Perhaps it was appropriate that he died at exactly the moment – the Winter of Discontent – when the post-war consensus was breaking up, for, as an unrepentant One Nation moderate, he had been its most articulate Tory champion. Even so, his passing at the age of just 61 seemed a dreadful waste. Few politicians of his generation were blessed with greater intelligence and charm, but few were cursed with such indolence and greed. He had found ‘nothing more worth the wear of winning’, he wrote on the final page of his memoirs, ‘than laughter and the love of friends’. Except, perhaps, the love of money.10
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bsp; Like all good scandals, the Poulson–Maudling affair captured public attention not only because it offered a compelling morality tale of individual greed and overweening ambition, but because it exposed the deep corruption beneath the surface of public life. As investigators dug deeper in the mid-1970s, they discovered that Poulson’s contacts amounted to more than a handful of rogue civil servants. Subsequent trials saw officials of British Rail, the National Coal Board and even the South-Western Metropolitan Hospital Board in the dock, while an entirely unrelated investigation into local government corruption in South Wales ended with thirty people being found guilty, most of them local businessmen. And in a sensational case overshadowed by the Poulson scandal, the Birmingham city architect Alan Maudsley, who had almost single-handedly controlled the country’s biggest public housing programme outside London, was arrested in November 1973 and charged with corruption. Maudsley had been in cahoots not just with the architectural firm of Ebery and Sharp, but with the Bryants housing giant, to whom he had given two-thirds of all Birmingham’s high-rise contracts. Ebery and Sharp paid him £10 a house; Bryants paid for holidays, excursions and fine living. When the case came to court in the spring of 1974, Maudsley pleaded guilty, but it did not save him from prison. He had fallen short of the ‘high standards the public of this country expect of public servants’, Mr Justice Mocatta said solemnly. But the judge was behind the times. To anybody who read a newspaper, high standards seemed a thing of the past. The Maudsley case, said the prosecuting counsel George Carman, was merely ‘the tip of the iceberg’.11
Was Britain really more corrupt than ever in the 1970s? It is certainly true that the sweeping redevelopment of towns and cities offered unprecedented possibilities to builders, planners and councillors: as the go-getting, Cortina-driving developer puts it in John Betjeman’s poem ‘Executive’ (1974), all he needs is a ‘luncheon and a drink or two’ to ‘fix the Planning Officer, the Town Clerk and the Mayor’. It is also true that most people genuinely believed that things had got worse. Indeed, if the press was to be believed, the nation had sunk into an unprecedented rut of selfishness, avarice and unashamed graft. ‘Corruption runs through all levels of British public life,’ wrote the journalist Clive Irving in his state-of-the nation survey Pox Britannica (also 1974), aimed at American readers. ‘Careers have been finished by the temptations of a few bottles of whiskey, a vacation in Majorca, a swimming pool in the yard. There’s a subtle, interlocking brotherhood with connections in every town – and there’s always the man to see.’12
What allowed this to thrive, Irving thought, was the ‘absence of any tradition of muckraking’. But this diagnosis was out of date. The revival of muckraking since the mid-1960s, epitomized by the success of Private Eye, the Sunday Times Insight Team and Granada’s World in Action, was precisely what had convinced people that Britain had succumbed to massive corruption. And in an intensely competitive and increasingly populist media climate, where the irreverence of the Eye or the Sun often set the tone, readers now looked at the shadowy world of quiet handshakes, unspoken agreements and brown envelopes – a world that had long existed – in a new light. In 1970 alone, Private Eye’s Footnotes column ran stories about Poulson, T. Dan Smith, BP’s sanctions-busting in Rhodesia and the Irish government’s role in IRA gun-running, most of which the mainstream press ignored until later. Two years later, during Paul Foot’s last year at the magazine, the column included stories about the corrupt Tyneside politician Andy Cunningham, the Heath government’s secret talks with the IRA, Lord Carrington’s land deals, Jim Slater’s property deals and a pollution scandal at Rio Tinto-Zinc’s Avonmouth smelter. In many respects this was the magazine’s finest hour: more than any other publication, the Eye could claim to have punctured the bubble of self-congratulation and secrecy surrounding British public life. It might get more than a few details wrong, but, as ITV’s What the Papers Say commented after its Poulson allegations had been vindicated, Private Eye was ‘more important to journalism than half the Fleet Street papers’.13
By this point corruption had become one of the clichés of national cultural life. In Lindsay Anderson’s film O Lucky Man!, which was shot in the summer of 1972 and released a year later, Malcolm McDowell’s journey through contemporary society is the vehicle for a satire in the best picaresque tradition. Beginning the film as a young coffee salesman, he gets mixed up in everything from state-sponsored torture to the sale of chemical weapons to a crooked African dictator. As the critic Alexander Walker put it, Anderson’s film presents ‘the comedy of private corrup-tion in public life’, with a splendid array of character actors – Ralph Richardson, Arthur Lowe, Rachel Roberts, Graham Crowden, Dandy Nichols – playing ‘ruthless tycoons, hypocritical town-hall worthies, venal policemen, perverted judges, fascist mercenaries, two-faced PR people, tyrant rulers from Black Africa [and] sin-obsessed do-gooders’. And while other British films of the era preferred to wallow in lurid escapism, the radical young playwrights of the early 1970s were quick to follow Anderson’s lead. ‘We thought, wrongly, as it turned out, that England was in a state of apocalyptic crisis,’ recalled the dramatist David Hare. ‘We had lost faith in its institutions, we thought that Britain’s assumption of a non-existent world role was ludicrous, and we also thought that its economic vitality was so sapped that it wouldn’t last long.’14
Hare’s plan was to write ‘short, nasty little plays which would alert an otherwise dormant population to this news’, but in 1973 the new artistic director of the Nottingham Playhouse, Richard Eyre, invited him and his friend Howard Brenton to write a ‘big’ play diagnosing the state of the nation. The result was Brassneck, a sprawling satire of British life since the 1940s, told through the story of one ambitious Midlands family, the Bagleys. Hare later called it the story of the ‘People’s Peace … seen through the lives of the petty bourgeoisie, builders, solicitors, brewers, politicians, the Masonic gang who carve up provincial England’. The family wealth is based on ruthless property speculation, while both Tory and Labour politicians are suborned through bribes and blackmail. And in the architect Roderick Bagley we meet the embodiment of national corruption in the age of Poulson and Maudling. When Roderick wins the contract for a new hospital, his uncle cynically forecasts ‘problems on the site, weather, that sort of thing, costs will rise during the building, we’ll have to revise the estimates. Revise the profits. Slightly. Often. Upwards.’ The years pass: Roderick builds tower blocks, makes money, exploits his political contacts and expands into the new markets of post-colonial Africa. The wheel of fortune turns: his tower blocks leak, his business goes bankrupt, he unwittingly admits to taking bribes and he is sent to prison. ‘The Labour Party will whisper down the line,’ one of his political cronies assures him. ‘Builders, councils, Government departments will gloss over fat bad debts … Vast sums you owe will disappear in the fog. Books will be fiddled and invoices burnt the length of the land.’ And in the play’s supremely depressing final scene, the survivors of the Bagley network meet in a seedy strip-club in 1973 to plot their next move. One of them suggests a new venture, ‘a product for our times, the perfect product, totally artificial, man-made, creating its own market, one hundred percent consumer identification’: heroin from China. The deal is done: as the curtain falls, they raise their glasses ‘to the last days of capitalism’.15
If Brassneck seemed rather downbeat, it was as nothing compared with Hare’s next play. Knuckle opened in the West End in the first week of March 1974, a coincidence of timing making it the perfect theatrical epitaph for the Heath years. Again, the theme is the shabbiness and corruption of modern Britain, which we see through the eyes of Curly, a gun salesman who has returned to his native Guildford to investigate the death of his sister Sarah. And again property speculation lies at the heart of the mystery. Sarah killed herself, it turns out, after stumbling upon a gigantic scam in which an elderly woman was committed to an asylum so that developers could replace her house with ‘seventeen floors of prestige offices cr
owned with an antique supermarket’. Even the cynical Curly is taken aback by the state of the nation after twelve years away. ‘Newspapers can be bought, judges can be leant on, politicians can be stuffed with truffles and cognac,’ he remarks. ‘When I got back I found this country was a jampot for swindlers and cons and racketeers. Not just property. Boarding houses and bordellos and nightclubs and crooked charter flights, private clinics, horse-hair wigs and tin-can motor cars, venereal cafés with ice-cream made from whale blubber and sausages full of sawdust.’ Even Guildford itself, supposedly a genteel Surrey county town, emerges as a sleazy, shabby place, a haven for property swindlers, sado-masochists and ‘middle-aged voyeurs’. ‘I have twice been attacked at the country club,’ the club hostess Jenny tells him; ‘the man in the house opposite has a telephoto lens, my breasts are often touched on commuter trains, my body is covered with random thumbprints, the doctor says he needs to undress me completely to vaccinate my arm’.16
State of Emergency: the Way We Were Page 68
