Help Yourself 
R.W. Johnson
- Reggie: The Life of Reginald Maudling by Lewis Baston Buy this book
In the spring of 1974, as reports multiplied of his involvement with crooks such as John Poulson and T. Dan Smith, Reginald Maudling disappeared to Paris with his wife, Beryl. The Daily Mail’s Harry Longmuir had little difficulty locating him in the ‘Président’ suite of the George V. Checking in himself, Longmuir spent a whole Sunday morning with a confused, disorientated Maudling in his dressing-gown. Maudling chatted away amiably – providing damning copy – while drinking the contents of Longmuir’s minibar.
Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article is available for purchase online. Buy this article.
R.W. Johnson is an emeritus fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. His new book, South Africa’s Brave New World, will be published by Penguin in the spring.
Other articles by this contributor:
Mr Shepperd to you · Classes and Cultures: England 1918-51 by Ross McKibbin
Nerds, Rabbits and a General Lack of Testosterone · Major and Lamont
Burning Blankets · Robert Mugabe’s latest tidy-up
Her Boy · Mark Thatcher
Rogue’s Paradise · The Russians and the Anglo-Boer War by Apollon Davidson and Irina Filatova
Where do we go from here? · Zimbabwe
How Mugabe came to power · R.W. Johnson talks to Wilfred Mhanda
Cads · Roosevelt’s Secret War: FDR and World War Two Espionage by Joseph Persico.
print layout
tell a friend