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.
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R.W. Johnson, an emeritus fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, lives in Cape Town, where he is completing a book on South Africa since the advent of democracy.
Other articles by this contributor:
Rogue’s Paradise · The Russians and the Anglo-Boer War by Apollon Davidson and Irina Filatova
Cads · Roosevelt’s Secret War: FDR and World War Two Espionage by Joseph Persico.
Mr Shepperd to you · Classes and Cultures: England 1918-51 by Ross McKibbin
Burning Blankets · Robert Mugabe’s latest tidy-up
Nerds, Rabbits and a General Lack of Testosterone · Major and Lamont
How Mugabe came to power · R.W. Johnson talks to Wilfred Mhanda
Where do we go from here? · Zimbabwe
Her Boy · Mark Thatcher
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