“Looking after the stars and working with them from the very beginning I was able to use them to my advantage,” he says. “If a major star is buying a new home built by a certain property company it makes the news – if you took the star out of it, it wouldn’t be half as interesting. Editorial is so much more successful in promoting than advertising. You can read a wonderful piece about a restaurant, a show, a company, property that does far more than an advert. If a star I was representing was buying a new home it would get two or three times the space – it’s a simple equation that I learnt that very early on.

So, often an article would contain wonderful editorial coverage for two or three of my clients in one. For example in the last few years I flew Simon Cowell down to southern Spain to look at properties where he was interested in buying, of course the properties he looked at belonged to clients of mine. I flew him down in a private jet, Bombardier, a Canadian company that I happened to be doing PR for, to look at properties that I also represented. I had at least three clients being promoted out of a series of articles and television programmes that I’d arranged while I was down there.

Max also represented the victims of the 7/7 bombings, who he believes were ‘very badly misrepresented’ and the victims of Farepac trying to help them get compensation for all the money they lost. There is no doubt that he has used his strong position in PR to break stories that are very personal to him. Hypocrisy is something; he makes very clear, that he has no time for. Although not instrumental in exposing David Mellor’s affair with Antonia de Sancha, Clifford’s battle in representing de Sancha against the contrived post-spin story of the ‘family man Mellor’ ultimately brought down John Major’s Back to Basics agenda. Clifford also helped to expose Jeffrey Archer’s perjury in the 1980s during his candidacy for the post of Mayor of London. “I’ve exposed paedophile rings. I’ve exposed Gary Glitter, Jonathan King, Jeffrey Archer – lots of very famous and powerful people because of the total hypocrisy. I exposed the hypocrisy of the last Conservative Government who were preaching about family values,” says Max. “Mellor was at it, John Major was at it and they were lecturing us about the importance of the family – the hypocrisy, which I’m glad to say, contributed to their downfall. There are lots of things that I get involved with on a personal basis. It’s a lovely position to be in as you can actually do something to make a difference.”

“The sad thing about celebrity culture is that it makes kids at school think ‘We can do that so we don’t need to bother.’ More and more people want to be famous and less and less people think they need to work, or that they need any talent because there are loads of people with no talent that are successful. I don’t think it’s about what should be done in schools. I think what is lacking with kids today is the discipline in families, it’s not schools. They tend to push their kids into schools and expect them to do all the things that they don’t do. I’m a governor of a school and it never ceases to amaze me what teachers are expected to put up with and what they’re expected to do. I do believe the more good news in the media the better, but it seems that only bad news gets into the newspapers. I would love to see the young Richard Bransons’ of the day because they are a great example and hopefully an inspiration to others to show that if you work hard and you try, you can achieve huge amounts. It would be very healthy for young people to be reading and hearing about other young entrepreneurs who have made it successfully from their own ability, their own endeavours and their hard work – that’s a healthy message. “A genuine entrepreneur is someone who has achieved success through their ability, wherever they started out from – they all arrive from different directions. But I think that in a healthy democracy youngsters should be more aware of their potential. All too often the media is full of people that have no talent and are purely there because of a freak television show – that’s sad and it gives the wrong message. Now when youngsters are asked what they want to be they say famous and by famous they mean someone who’s done absolutely nothing but is making a fortune.