Disgraced celebrity agent Max Clifford dies in British prison

Max Clifford had worked as a publicist for The Beatles, Muhammad Ali, Frank Sinatra and Chelsea Football Club.

Disgraced former celebrity publicist Max Clifford has died in hospital, aged 74, after collapsing in prison.

Clifford was serving an eight-year sentence at Littlehey Prison in Cambridgeshire for sex attacks carried out between 1977 and 1985 on four girls aged between 15 and 19.

He had been seriously ill since suffering a heart attack in August. He collapsed in his prison cell on Thursday and suffered a cardiac arrest on Friday.

The Ministry of Justice today announced that Clifford, who once counted The Beatles, Muhammad Ali, Frank Sinatra and Chelsea Football Club as his clients, has died.

As well as problems with his health, the ex-PR mogul had been battling financial woes after being forced to declare himself bankrupt earlier this year.

He owed about £4.5million to unsecured creditors and £3million to secured creditors.
Last year he was also ordered to pay £80,000 to one of his victims and £15,000 to another.

At his peak, Clifford was raking in £2.5million a year – buying two large homes in Surrey, one of which was valued at £3.5 million.

He also owned a £1.5million house at an exclusive golf development in Spain and bought a new £200,000 Bentley every two years.

Clifford, 74, was jailed for eight years in May 2014 and was the first defendant to be jailed from Operation Yewtree.

Another four women, who claimed they were sexually abused by Clifford were awarded compensation in April, after Clifford failed to send a representative to the hearing.

The lawyer representing the women at the time, Kim Harrison, slammed Clifford for putting her clients 'through hell'.

She said last year: 'Mr Clifford agreed a settlement with our first client of his own volition. That was not the action of a man protesting his innocence.

He was due to appeal against all his convictions early in 2018 on the basis of fresh evidence.

Clifford was the PR guru whose fall from grace was chronicled with the sort of front-page publicity he toiled to earn - and similarly avoid - for his celebrity clients.

The shamed publicity puppet master had crafted a reputation for garnering maximum exposure for the fame-hungry wannabes in his charge, while maximising his extensive Fleet Street contacts to help keep other clients off the front pages when needed.

His CV - much of which he regaled in subsequent court cases as well as his autobiography Read All About It - boasted an impressive roster of one-time clients.
He had helped launch the career of The Beatles by sending press releases about their debut single Love Me Do when record company bosses were ambivalent about the Liverpudlian four-piece.

He counted Muhammad Ali, Frank Sinatra and Chelsea Football Club as clients at the height of his career.

And his work was immortalised when a tabloid newspaper published the front page headline Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster - a story the publicist later admitted was a complete fallacy.

But as Clifford passed his half-century in the showbiz industry, allegations began to emerge that would later dismantle his considerable empire.

And when the tables turned, with Clifford becoming the story, he found himself on the receiving end of untruths - about the size of his penis (descriptions in court varying from 'tiny' to 'enormous', but being settled by a doctor as 'average').

There was further irony that, having spent decades exposing the intimate parts of other people's lives, one of Clifford's most personal details - his manhood - attracted considerable tabloid attention during his 2014 trial. He would eventually be convicted of eight counts.

Born on April 6, 1943, in Surrey, the youngest of four children, Clifford said he grew up in relative poverty, his father being a milkman and a gambler, while his mother took in lodgers for extra cash.

He left school at 15 with no qualifications and trained as a journalist after he was sacked from his first job as a shop assistant in a department store.

He went on to work for EMI in 1962 before branching out on his own and setting up Max Clifford Associates in 1970.

Clifford's extensive contacts in Fleet Street - he described himself as 'often poacher and gamekeeper at the same time' - meant he was increasingly turned to as a commentator on matters involving the media.

When aged celebrities began being arrested on suspicion of sex crimes, Clifford took to the radio claiming that former household names were 'frightened to death' of falling under suspicion.

Operation Yewtree was launched in October 2012 by Scotland Yard after Jimmy Savile was finally exposed as a prolific paedophile in an ITV documentary.

Days after the inquiry started, Clifford appeared on LBC and said in the 1960s and 1970s
some stars 'never asked for anybody's birth certificate'.

Max Clifford was jailed for eight years in May 2014 and was the first defendant to be jailed by Operation Yewtree, which began as an inquiry into entertainer Jimmy Savile's (pictured) sex crimes.

He would have a child of his own, Louise, who suffered severe physical difficulties from birth which meant Clifford - who was teetotal because he 'didn't like the taste of it' - would wake several times in the night to tend to her. She was a regular visitor in the public gallery during Clifford's court cases, supporting her father.

Clifford's first wife, Liz, died in 2003, having been cheated on repeatedly during their near-40 years of matrimony.

Clifford, a self-confessed 'ringmaster' at sex parties he organised, would re-marry in 2010, tying the knot with his former PA Jo Westwood.

By the time he appeared in court to successfully defend a historic accusation of indecent assault on a teenage girl in 2016, Clifford had swapped rubbing shoulders with A-list clients and reality TV stars for fellow inmates at the Category C Littlehey prison in Cambridgeshire.

He vowed to clear his name - claiming he was wrongfully convicted in 2014 - and said he was 'an easy target' for financially motivated fantasists.

And while his defence that he was wrongly convicted of all allegations remained as vehement as ever, his resistance to the ageing process did not have the same stoicism.

Face drawn and body withered - Clifford told jurors he had lost two stone in weight since being jailed - the only colour left in his face was the final dark hues from his once bushy, jet black eye brows.

The deep tan was gone, replaced with a skin tone more befitting someone whose freedom was restricted to, he said, 30 minutes outside of a cell per day at times.

Defence counsel Sarah Forshaw QC warned jurors of Clifford's short attention span, and of likely memory lapses owing to her client's age and the time which had elapsed between alleged incident and the court appearance.

His power of recall showed little signs of wear, however, when it came to name-dropping famous former clients.

His breathless evidence was punctuated by celebs until he was asked, almost wearily, to desist by his own defence counsel.

And he could not resist the opportunity to spin his moment in the witness box into a publicity push, telling jurors his time in prison was partly spent writing a new book.
Even then, a septuagenarian and a quarter of the way through a lengthy jail term, Clifford remained unrepentant, unrelenting, and unable to let a PR opportunity pass.