With daughter Ghislaine’s appeal knocked back, it’s open season for Robert Maxwell stories… and there are a few.

Starting of course, with the new ‘House of Maxwell’ documentary, the first episode of which aired on the UK’s BBC this week. There are apparently two more.

Much of the Maxwell senior story has already been told, although the BBC claims original content from covert recordings of executives’ conversations.

In The Guardian, Stuart Jeffries says there is “only one moment where Robert (Maxwell) resembles a human being”.

I’m not sure that’s true, but he was certainly unusual: a high achiever at many levels, obsessed by the competition between himself and Rupert Murdoch; between his Daily Mirror and Murdoch’s Sun; between the smiling but insecure man and those whose place in society he sought to emulate.

Many in the newspaper industry rubbed up against him and his organisation as the Maxwell Communications Corporation grew, and the newspaper publishing and printing business I helped run was but one of many he looked at buying (we knocked back the approach). Interestingly, when he did acquire print sites in regional areas, he discovered how much he had been overcharged by mills for the newsprint he bought for the Mirror.

Typically however, the story was of a smart, sharp, and of course sometimes downright dishonest dealer. A favoured modus operandi was to advance negotiations with a target company to the degree where there appeared no question but that the deal would go ahead… and then halve the offer price when the vendor was too committed to turn back. One well-known example was a major used machinery vendor.

The BBC documentary includes footage of him strutting around Headington Hall in Oxford – which was to be his home and headquarters, and the site of a grand reception – mentioning that he had succeeded in making people believe he owned, rather than merely rented the property.

No doubt the same was true of the superyacht from which he met his death… jumped or pushed, we shall never know.

Australian editor and publisher Andy McCourt responded to my request for recollections with the name on his birth certificate – Jan Ludvik Hoch – and a comment from print PR entrepreneur Clive Goodacre, who had earlier been “granted an interview” with Maxwell for a UK trade publication. “The strangest interview I've ever done, and if he had sprouted wings and flown out of the window, I would not have been surprised," he said.

The first BBC episode takes viewers as far as Maxwell’s death – and the fevered mutterings of staff aware of the huge financial abyss into which his business empire was about to fall – by way of the early days of his unusual relationship with his daughter. Complete with the overheard conversation in which mogul and daughter “miaow” at each other.

My favourite (missing) story is still the one in which he lands by helicopter on the roof of the Mirror’s High Holborn headquarters, and relieves himself over the side, onto the heads of passers-by. An apt metaphor for the man, and how much he cared for anyone else.

Watch out for the remaining episodes.

Peter Coleman

Pictured: The Mirror’s 1990 shot of Maxwell on his superyacht, with daughter Ghislaine (for whom the Lady Ghislaine was named) and wife Elisabeth