Max Clifford - Britain's 'King of Spin' and publicist to the tabloid stars

Name: Max Clifford Nationality: British Companies run: Max Clifford Associates (MCA) Search Google for Max Clifford and the media puppeteer extraordinaire is found among thousands of articles featuring tabloid icons of our time - Simon Cowell, Jade Goody, Kerry Katona, Piers Morgan. Their life through a lens captured, massaged and managed by the man himself. Max Clifford is without doubt the country's best-known publicist. No sooner than a story hits a red-top front page than Clifford is appearing on a screen near you parrying or like a chef prepping an onion, expertly peeling away the skin to reveal another layer of the story. All while the public salivate, impatient for the next salacious morsel or tantalising tidbit. But Max Clifford is more than a mere PR agent. After going into business in 1970, he's managed to build a highly successful media management organisation, Max Clifford Associates (MCA). His association with the very beginnings of the Beatles' story while at EMI may have been largely insignificant, but it exposed the young Clifford to the world of representing stars. Jimi Hendrix, Tom Jones, the Bee Gees, Frank Sinatra and Mohammed Ali followed. In the 1980s and 1990s Clifford was the frontman for stories involving comedian and alleged hamster-eater Freddie Starr, magician and human flying machine David Copperfield, and the former NFL star acquitted of murdering his ex-wife, OJ Simpson. He also exposed Tory MP David Mellor’s extra-marital affair, leading to The Sun famously depicting Mellor in a Chelsea strip during the minister’s dangerous liasons with mistress Antonia de Sancha. And Tory peer Lord Jeffrey Archer was on the receiving end of a Clifford-managed exposé, with Archer eventually convicted of perjury and imprisoned for asking a friend to lie about his whereabouts in an attempt to stop a story about him sleeping with a prostitute. More recently, he's represented countless ordinary members of the public to manage their extraordinary stories, from the woman pregnant with octuplets to the 13-year-old who reportedly became the country's youngest father in early 2009. Entrepreneurs such as Dragons' Den's Peter Jones, Pimlico Plumbers' Charlie Mullins, Simon Cowell, and Kavita Oberoi have also received his advice to raise or manage their public profiles. And for former Ratners boss Gerald Ratner it was a case of helping to resurrect his business career when he returned from media Siberia having famously labelled an item Ratners sold as 'crap'. Purists in the press may not like it, but Clifford knows how to beat them at their own game, leaving them to write about his stories only when driven to express disgust for the public’s fascination with his latest scoop. His other role over the past 20 years has been to keep his high profile clientele out of the press when a major scandal involving them threatened to break. A traditionalist, he reveals in his interview with Entrepreneur TV that he does business on trust, a handshake sufficing, and avoids technology like the plague where possible. Nevertheless, Clifford's place in the public's consciousness is unlikely to be threatened any time soon. Clifford remains a patron of two children’s charities, the Rhys Daniels Trust and the Chase Hospice.

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