Show-business publicist who lived, and perished, by the sword

Obituary: Max Clifford was unrepentant about the stories he sold to British tabloids

Max Clifford
Born: April 6th, 1943
Died: December 10th, 2017

If ever there was an example of the maxim that those who live by the sword ultimately perish by it, the publicist Max Clifford, who has died aged 74, exemplified it. For more than 40 years he represented and defended a string of famous and not-so-famous clients and boasted of his professional and sexual prowess, not least in his 2005 autobiography, Read All About It.

Never reticent at self-publicity, Clifford was unrepentant about the stories he sold to the tabloids, both true and false – and the ones he claimed he had kept out of the papers on his clients’ behalf. He once boasted at the Oxford Union, the university’s debating society: “Every day, every week, every month, a lot of the lies that you see in the newspapers, in magazines, on television, on radio, are mine.”

Among those he claimed to have represented were Muhammad Ali , Simon Cowell, Diana Ross, OJ Simpson and Shane Warne. Besides the gossipy dross there was also the revelation of the actor Antonia de Sancha’s affair with the Tory cabinet minister David Mellor in 1992, which ended his political career and the admission by the television producer Ted Francis that he had given a false alibi to help his friend Jeffrey Archer, which was repeated in the famous libel trial that resulted in the novelist’s imprisonment in 2001. As a self-proclaimed Labour supporter, Clifford professed to enjoy embarrassing Tories, though he also did work for Ukip.

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Cowell once said that hiring Clifford had been his best decision. Whether the comedian Freddie Starr felt the same after the Sun's front page claimed wrongly, at Clifford's urging, that he had eaten someone's hamster was less clear.

But when Clifford came to court in 2014, charged with 11 counts of indecent assault against seven teenage girls over a 20-year period between the mid-1960s and the 1980s, his celebrity friends abandoned him. His was the first conviction arising out of Operation Yewtree, the investigation by London’s Metropolitan Police Service following the Jimmy Savile sexual-abuse scandal – the first of a string of revelations about celebrities and others exposing the seamy, predatory side of show business.

After he was found guilty on eight of the counts against four of the victims, his courtroom bluster finally deserted him as Mr Justice Anthony Leonard told him that his behaviour had been quite extraordinary and that he had shown no remorse. Clifford was sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment.

Only occasionally did Clifford come a cropper, as in 2002, when he lost a libel action brought by Neil and Christine Hamilton over a rape claim he had promoted

Born in raised in London, Clifford was the youngest of four children of Frank Clifford, an electrician, and his wife, Lilian (nee Boffee). He left school at 15 with no qualifications and was soon sacked as an apprentice sales assistant at a Wimbledon department store.

Through a relative who was a printer he landed a job as an office boy at the Eagle comic and progressed from there to the Merton and Morden News, where besides reporting duties he also wrote a music column. He was taken on as a junior publicity officer at EMI in 1962, at the dawn of the British pop industry. Clifford later claimed to have helped to promote the early Beatles single Love Me Do and subsequently as an assistant to have represented the talents of Tom Jones, Jimi Hendrix and the Bee Gees.

In 1970 he set up Max Clifford Associates, which over the next 44 years became the best-known show-business publicity organisation in the UK, with offices on New Bond Street and – inevitably – a silver Rolls-Royce (registration 100 MAX) at the door ready to take Clifford home to a Surrey mansion.

Only occasionally he came a cropper, as in 2002, when he lost a libel action brought by Neil and Christine Hamilton over a rape claim he had promoted on behalf of a woman called Nadine Milroy-Sloan , who was herself subsequently imprisoned for attempting to pervert the course of justice.

Clifford was shameless about the manipulation, bullying and intimidation he used and cheerfully admitted playing off one tabloid against another. He was genial, with a hint of menace, but also easily approachable – even for the Guardian newspaper, to which he gave the story of Mark Kennedy, the undercover police officer who infiltrated an environmentalist group and had an affair with one of its activists.

In Read All About It he could not resist boasting of being a control freak, holding sex parties and having affairs, including four while married to his first wife. He was, he said, too greedy to be faithful. "I became a ring-master, a role I liked to have in many aspects of my life . . . The parties became my circus and various people performed in various ways . . . I knew one or two agents who would issue contracts in return for sexual favours. One [friend] was a plumber but I pretended to the girls at the party he was a film producer. Sexual procuring has never bothered me." He told his trial that even if he had looked like the Hunchback of Notre Dame aspirant women would still have flung themselves at him.

Such boasts made it very difficult for him to rebut the allegations of witnesses, during his trial nine years later, that he had enticed and manipulated them into having sex with promises of introductions and film work. In court he denounced them as liars and fantasists to no avail. An appeal against his conviction and sentence was turned down last year.

Clifford’s first wife, Liz Porter, whom he met at a dance in south London in 1963, died of lung cancer in 2003. In 2010 he married a former personal assistant, Jo Westwood; she divorced him after the trial. Clifford is survived by his daughter, Louise, from his first marriage. – Guardian