Robert Maxwell, Labour MP & owner of the Daily Mirror. Paul Foot on working for him
Robert Maxwell was a Labour MP from 1964-1970 and from 1984 until his death in 1991 he was the owner of the Daily Mirror. After his death after apparently falling from his yacht the Lady Ghislaine it became clear that Maxwell had kept his business empire afloat by raiding the Mirror workers pension scheme.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Maxwell
Maxwell was the father of Ghislaine who was found guilty of several offences in a New York Court this week.
The late socialist journalist Paul Foot wrote for the Mirror when Maxwell owned it and below is an extract of his thoughts on that period.
When Robert Maxwell bought the Mirror in the early eighties, he inherited Paul Foot’s weekly campaigning column. Foot insisted on maintaining full editorial control within his column, a condition which Maxwell accepted and only once tried to flout. It was an uneasy professional peace, peppered with accusations from purist lefties that Foot was selling out by working for such an arrant tyrant. He insists that “everybody works for capitalists in one sense or another… and I always remained a strong trade unionist on the side of the workers against the employer… The Mirror was read by working-class people almost all of whom I had a regard for… There was no journalistic compromise… So the business of ‘working for Maxwell’ never really worried me very much.” The crunch came with the arrival of David Montgomery, appointed chief executive by the banks who took over the Mirror after the collapse of the Maxwell Empire.
“Montgomery came in with the specific intention of smashing the unions… He sacked all the casual workers… and almost any journalist who represented any challenge or spirit of independence in the place… I stayed there as long as there was a breath of a fight against him, but in the end it was obvious that I would have to try and overcome that contradiction.” He penned a hatchet job on the Mirror Group management. “It was the only column that was ever pulled – in a way beautifully exposing the whole hypocrisy of the free press, that you can criticise anything except the people who are making profit out of the thing that you’re using to criticise. Ha!”
The above is from an interview that Paul Foot gave to Palash Dave.
There is a newly published biography of Paul Foot written by Margaret Renn (Verso)
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