the times | Saturday April 9 2022 saturday review 7
A slightly cheerier story from the recent
past was to be found in Thatcher & Reagan:
A Very Special Relationship. Well, cheery
if you weren’t my parents, who used to
drag me out of primary school to go on
CND marches to shout at presidential
cavalcades and watch people in skeleton
costumes replicating a nuclear attack by
pretending to die on the pavement.
The BBC had got Charles Moore to front
this largely uncritical, although not unin-
teresting account of Thatcher’s friendship
with Ronnie, a sure sign of the director-
general Tim Davie’s impartiality agenda.
Can you imagine the BBC of any of the
past five decades commissioning this?
Moore clearly admires and perhaps still
loves his subject, although with the loyalty
and affection of a liege lord. “Here she is,”
he said of her at a White House dinner,
“looking pretty glamorous, actually.” Even
Ronnie fell for her, his film-star twinkle no
match for her strong-woman greengrocer-
daughter sass. The fact that he didn’t
much care for his alcoholic dad, but
adored his mother seemed to be the psy-
chological key to his relationship with
Thatcher, Moore implied, which, like so
much in his excellent series, made good
common sense.Talking of strong women, do you
remember The Split, which arrived four
years ago trailing if not clouds of glory
certainly lots of positive PR? A mainly
female cast, writer and executive team was
welcome, except they forgot to make it as
good as it could have been. It follows the
Defoe sisters, two of them lawyers at the
divorce firm overseen by Deborah Find-
lay’s Ruth, the cases offering colour, guest
stars and often ironic commentary on
their private travails.Y
ou can tell a lot about a
person when they act
without thinking: the
reflex behaviour of
someone going about
their day, doing what
they regard as normal.
And the thing that has always stuck in my
mind about Robert Maxwell was his
alleged propensity for wiping his backside
on laundered hand towels that other, less
rich, people would be left to pick up. What
kind of man does that, you may ask, before
realising the question probably doesn’t
need answering.
This delightful anecdote didn’t feature
in the three-part documentary House of
Maxwell, but the director, Daniel Vernon,
and his team didn’t exactly have a shortage
of material. Corporate and family video,
bugged phone calls between harassed
Mirror Group executives when Robert fell
off his yacht in 1991 and the harrowing
testimony of two victims of the Jeffrey Ep-
stein/Ghislaine Maxwell trafficking ring
were among its new riffs on a familiar tale.
It’s not difficult to see why the story con-
tinues to fascinate. Part thriller, part true
crime story, this tale of a dynasty, monsters
and twisted love was valiantly marshalled
into a three-act structure: Robert’s rise; the
Mirror Group fraud; and the sexual hor-
rors perpetrated by Ghislaine and her
lover Epstein. It threatened to run out of
control, and at times the wealth of material
was overwhelming; but what held it to-
gether was the granular nature of the
storytelling recounted almost entirely in
first-person testimony. You felt the horror,
just as Vernon seems to have felt this story
personally. His grandfather was a Daily
Mirror night editor in the pre-Maxwell
days, and that name reverberated round
his kitchen table. I was doing my A-levels
when Maxwell died and it still reverber-
ates for me.
Another thing Maxwell thought per-
fectly normal was having a film crew
regularly trail him, which offered this
documentary a wealth of footage: deathly
stares; telling an underling to “f*** off”
when he accidentally walked in on a filmed
interview; and total, staggering self-
regard. It did touch on his habits, a sloven-
liness born of greed and disregard. We saw
him stuffing canapés at a party and were
told he enjoyed peeing out of his helicopter
(and possibly, in his final act on earth, pee-
ing off his yacht). The journalist Bronwen
Maddox (formerly of this parish) observed
him as his empire was crumbling and
noticed he had soup stains on his tie. Not
yet knowing the full extent of his fraud,
Maddox presumed the people around him
were too scared to point it out. I liked Mad-
dox’s comparison of the Maxwell com-
pany finances to a toddler’s room where
someone had “put the toys randomly into
different drawers”. The fraud had the bra-
zenness of a child raiding the biscuit tin.
His executives weren’t allowed to meet
without a Maxwell in the room so they
passed each other notes and met in secret.
The Mirror’s finance chief was advised
to change his route into work. Someone
who bought a Maxwell family lamp at auc-
tion found a listening device inside. Bug-
ging employees is one thing but bugging
your family has a whiff of Bond villain
about it. Tom Bower, his biographer, noted
that while he was looking into Maxwell’s
past, Maxwell seemed to have hired people
to plant an electronic listening device in
his garden, creating the rather frightening
image of the old rogue seeing what he was
writing in real time (possibly while strok-
ing a cat). The strange stories came at you
like machinegun fire.
Ghislaine was Robert’s favourite daugh-
ter but the series only hinted at the true
nature of their relationship in reports from
Carol Bragoli, a Mirror secretary, of a
speakerphone call in which Ghislaine and
Robert miaowed at each other. Was Ep-
stein just a replacement daddy monster?
We learnt that the two men probably had
business dealings and Epstein may have
hidden some of Maxwell’s moolah, but did
she love the pederast? What does that kind
of love actually mean? Or did he just offer
her the glamorous life her daddy’s crimes
denied her? Who procures other women
for the person they love? Some questions
don’t need answering, some never will be.Was Epstein just Ghislaine’s
replacement daddy monster?
It returned for a third run this week and
the problems haven’t gone away. It’s still
well constructed, the plot a propulsive,
melodramatic jigsaw puzzle and Nicola
Walker (who plays Hannah) is as mesmer-
ising as ever. But something feels slightly
bloodless. They’re supposedly a close-knit
family but it often seems as if they barely
know each other. The writer Abi Morgan
often mistakes chirpiness for intimacy and
this can drain the emotional engagement,
even when a key character dies, as happens
in the first episode; a moment you could
see coming a mile off and which this show
hadn’t earned. Still, nice kitchen islands.
Hugo Rifkind is awayExecutives
weren’t
allowe d to
meet without
a Maxwell so
they passed
notes and
met in secret
unhappy families Robert and Betty Maxwell with seven of their nine childrenDAILY MAIL/REXHouse of Maxwell
BBC2
Thatcher & Reagan:
A Very Special
Relationship
BBC2
The Split
BBC1
Ben Dowell on TV