Guest review by John Bowers QC: FALL, THE MYSTERY OF ROBERT MAXWELL by John Preston

"John Preston brings Captain Bob back to life ..."

After attending state school in Grimsby, John Bowers was called to the Bar in 1979 and took silk in 1998. He has practised primarily in employment law and human rights. He has written or been the co-author of fourteen books on employment law. He has been Principal of Brasenose College Oxford since 2015. He also sits as a Deputy High Court Judge.

It was always the roar of the helicopter which first gave away the that He was coming; then there was the entourage of lackies including Sir Peter Jay, and finally there was the Booming Voice. When I started out as a barrister, I was regularly ushered into the presence of Jan Hoch, who had by then become (after four other name changes) Robert Maxwell. But it would not just be myself in the luxurious upper floor of the Mirror Building (inevitably renamed Maxwell House); typically in the next room would be a group of trade union negotiators, in another Bulgarian ambassador and in a third some hapless executive who had not been dropped off by the side of the M40 road miles from anywhere. Maxwell would be speaking almost simultaneously Bulgarian, German and English. A butler would be hovering nearby with delicious canapés. The same scene would play out at his stately home Headington Hall, curiously owned by Oxford City, which I also visited when conducting a case about of all things his wine cellar.

Maxwell was a brooding presence, someone who thrived on chaos, but a man who could also by turns be charm personified. Nowadays, he is best known as father of his youngest daughter Ghislaine who languishes in a Brooklyn gaol because of the alleged activities of another monster.

John Preston (whose last book on Jeremy Thorpe was turned into a TV drama) brings Captain Bob back to life in his 300-page thriller Fall. The book is based on interviews with hundreds of people who knew him including members of the family. Preston places at centre stage the family background (most of the family died in the Holocaust). His own father was a violent man.

Preston quotes Bob Bagdikian, Dean of the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. who said “Neither Caesar nor FDR nor any Pole has commanded as much power to shape the information on which so many people depend,” but it was not enough for Bob; he wanted to beat the man with the same initials as he, Rupert Murdoch. It was the ongoing rivalry with Murdoch who was usually one step ahead. It was this rivalry that led to his precipitous fall financially and ultimately from his boat.

Richard Stott, one of his editors, said that “it was the uncertainty and deep insecurity of the true outsider, a man who feels he has been precluded from the world of others and had therefore determined to build his own, with his own rules for his own game”.

Maxwell determined that he was going to be Prime Minister but although he was MP for Buckingham for two terms, the highest public office he reached was as head of the House of Commons Catering Department, the ultimate thankless task.

The Fall is published by Viking.

More reviews by John Bowers:

The Room Where it Happened by John Bolton

Tribes by David Lammy

Guest review by John Bowers: THE ROOM WHERE IT HAPPENED by John Bolton

                                           

"This is a President truly addicted to chaos ... ”

After attending state school in Grimsby, John Bowers was called to the Bar in 1979 and took silk in 1998. He has practised primarily in employment law and human rights. He has written or been the co-author of fourteen books on employment law. He has been Principal of Brasenose College Oxford since 2015. He also sits as a Deputy High Court Judge.

John Bolton is a polarising but significant figure. One suspects he could achieve an argument in a paper bag. He is a significant player in the Trump Circus because he was originally lauded by him as a great cold warrior who would make America’s enemies quake (having seen him as a regular commentator on Fox News). Gradually in office, Bolton became disillusioned with surely the most eccentric if not dangerous Commander in Chief in US history. He lasted as National Security Advisor only from 2018 to 2019. He resigned but the President, who is not one to allow people to leave with dignity, claimed that he had dismissed him, ostensibly for being too much of a war-monger. 

A great feature of the book is Bolton’s ability to contrast this Administration with that of George W Bush, where he held the post of US Ambassador to the UN; he had also served Bush Senior and Reagan. Unlike them, this is a President who has no sense of history, does not read much and does little to prepare for significant summit meetings. One does not sleep easily with him as Leader of the Free World. 

The book is the first insider’s account of Trump’s love in with the North Korean dictator. Trump adored a letter written apparently by Kim Jong Un. In fact it was Bolton says written by his underlings “as if the letter had been written by Pavlovians who knew exactly how to touch the nerves enhancing Trump’s self esteem”. Trump clearly wanted to meet Kim for the photo-op but did not read his briefings and was bested by Kim even though Kim had less cards to play and a smaller nuclear button (as Trump had once pointed out). This is at one with a disturbing kow-towing to other dictators or authoritarian figures whether they be Putin, Xi or Erdogan.

Trump’s ignorance as revealed by Bolton is truly extraordinary. As examples he thought Finland was part of Russia and he had no idea that the UK was a nuclear power. It is Trump’s attitude to Russia which is the most troubling, perplexing and difficult to explain. It is hard to understand why he would want to ensure that all but interpreters were absent from a meeting he insisted be held with Putin. As Bolton says “I was not looking forward to leaving him in a room alone with Trump”. Trump’s desire to see everything in terms of his own interest, especially his desire for re election but also commercial, is very worrying.

Bolton’s description of a meeting with President Xi Jinping of China is a classic. Xi read arduously note cards hashed out in advance while Trump ad libbed “with no one on the US side knowing what he would say from one minute to the next”. Xi ingratiated himself with Trump by saying he looked forward to working with him for another six years, at which point Trump said people were saying the two-term limit on presidents should be repealed for him. Trump then asked Xi to help him win the next election by alluding to China’s economic capability to affect the ongoing campaigns. Of course relations have now taken a turn for the worse with mutual allegations now filling the air.

The book also covers in detail the coup to topple Maduro in Venezuela which never quite happened. Iran, the Taliban, G7 meetings and getting Europeans to pay more for their defence are other themes which run through the work. Bolton provides some rare insights such as that he recalls that “Perhaps uniquely in presidential history, Trump engendered controversy over attendance at funerals” in particular those of Barbara Bush and John McCain, with whom he continued his petty squabble well after his death.

Bolton also sheds some light into the naked and ruthless media management of the Trump team. For example, he rushed out a statement on Saudi Arabia because this will “divert from Ivanka” who had been accused of using her personal e mail for government business.

This is a President truly “addicted to chaos” as the book blurb states. This is a truly dysfunctional White House and it is difficult to see why any rational person would want to work there. The book richly demonstrates how the daily tweets get in the way of developing rational foreign policy. 

The Democrats wanted to call Bolton to appear in the impeachment process. He does not quite deal with why he did not agree to testify and instead saved up his revelations for this no doubt lucrative book although he does aim probably merited criticism at the way the process was handled.

Bolton has few good words to say about anyone and has contempt for the idea that Trump was originally surrounded by an “axis of adults”. He takes aim at the inadequacies as he saw them of Mattis, Pompeo and Tillerson and is scathing about Nicky Haley, the Ambassador to the UN.

Bolton has a racy style and his insight into foreign policy in the past is illuminating. His overall verdict on Trump is “he second-guessed people’s motives, saw conspiracies behind rocks and remained stunningly uninformed on how to run the White House, let alone the federal government”. It is hard not to agree and the evidence is clearly presented in the book’s 577 pages.

The Room Where It Happened is published by Simon and Schuster.

See also: John Bowers' review of Tribes by David Lammy.

Guest review by John Bowers QC: TRIBES by David Lammy

"A mixture of personal background, sociological and political observations and what may be seen as a manifesto for a future Labour Government."

After attending state school in Grimsby, John Bowers was called to the Bar in 1979 and took silk in 1998. He has practised primarily in employment law and human rights. He has written or been the co-author of 14 books on employment law. He has been Principal of Brasenose College Oxford since 2015. He also sits as a Deputy High Court Judge.

The word “tribal” has become unfashionable; it seems an old-fashioned word. It may be abusive (and certainly pejorative) to say someone behaves in a tribal way. But we all have our tribes, our identities, our clubs, even our football affiliations. And increasingly with social media, we only gain information within our own tribal groups. Tribalism has benign and malign features.

Thus a 2017 survey by the Washington Post found that 47% of Republicans thought that Trump had won the popular vote because this is precisely what they had been told by the right-wing media. Many Democrats would not want their children to marry a Republican. Brexiteers and Remainers seemed very different tribes with little in common. The country divided more in relation to the deep passions this debate unleashed than the normal politics of class. Strangely and tragically, it took Covid-19 to produce a national unity, at least temporarily.

David Lammy MP examines all of this (pre-Covid-19) in this important book. As the MP for Tottenham, he has made the running on several campaigns, most notably on access to universities, Grenfell Tower and Windrush. He knows about race relations and the importance of integration. Tottenham is a place with tribal intensity. In recent years globalisation and digitisation have ed to a new more pernicious type of tribalism. He cites the remarks of Celia de Anca that “the new tribalism comes from a shift from a longing for independence from a society made up of communities to a longing for belonging in a society made up of individuals”.

David himself is an interesting mixture of identities. His parents came from Guyana and he grew up in the British Caribbean community in a single-parent household but he spent term time as a choirboy in the very English environment of a Peterborough public school. He is black but married to a white woman and his children are of course mixed race. His DNA test showed that he was 25% Tuareg, 25% Temme from Sierra Leone, 25% Bantu, 5% Celtic and the rest mish mash. He has a tribal loyalty (surprising as it may seem) to Arsenal Football Club.

The 343-page book is made up of a mixture of personal background (his visit to the ancestral home in the Tuareg tribe in Niger is particularly moving), sociological and political observations and what may be seen as a manifesto for a future Labour Government (of which he may be a member having just been promoted to the Shadow Cabinet).

The book is divided into three parts: My Tribes; how belonging can break society; and how belonging can make society. He calls for “a new civic politics of belonging” which recognises that people have tribes but must be part of wider society and he rails against the “ethnic nationalists” and “the populists who offer the false solution of animosity to solve the real problems of our time”.

It is worth a read but some of it is uncomfortable reading - whatever tribe(s) you may belong to and particularly if you think you don’t belong to a tribe at all.

Tribes is published by Constable.