I had the misfortune of working for Robert Maxwell when he owned the Daily Mirror. The experience was not dissimilar, I imagine, to being a courtier to Henry VIII or one of the madder Roman emperors.
Like them, Maxwell was a tyrant. Unlike them, he couldn’t execute us, but there were clearly times when he dearly wished he could. He fired me once for contradicting his interpretation of Parliamentary privilege and then rehired me two minutes later. Maxwell was that mercurial.
One day, he encountered someone smoking in the Mirror lift. “Put that cigarette out,” ordered Maxwell. The man ignored him and carried on puffing. “How much do you earn a week?” Maxwell demanded. “£250,” the smoker said.
Maxwell got his wallet out, counted the money in cash and handed it over. “Now get out,” he barked. “You’re sacked.” The worker left with a smile on his face. He had nothing to do with the Mirror and was just an odd-job man called in to fix some plumbing.
I was a Mirror union negotiator in those days, and Maxwell always drove a hard but sneaky bargain, buttering us up with exquisite wine during pay talks at his Oxfordshire mansion. It had come from the House of Commons cellar.
As an MP, he’d headed up the Commons catering committee and, promising to return a profit, sold the entire stock to himself at a knockdown price.
We always knew Maxwell had the propensity to be a crook, and when he stole our pensions, that confirmed it. By then, it was too late because he was dead.
It explained why Maxwell kept buying companies which had nothing to do with newspapers or publishing. To get his thieving mitts on their pension funds.
Beware of politicians eyeing up our pension pots. It took 30 years to end the last scam - Nigel Nelson
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And ever since, I have been wary of people in power meddling with other people’s pensions. Which is how I came to clash with Reform Deputy Leader Richard Tice on GB News.
This is not to compare Richard with Maxwell. What the Reformer wants to do is make local government schemes more efficient so the money saved can be spent on other worthy things.
But I am suspicious when politicians eye up pension funds. The local government pot has tempted them before because it is worth £400billion, making it the biggest pension fund in the UK and one of the largest in the world.
Tory Cabinet minister Sajid Javid poked his nose in when he was Communities Secretary, and Chancellor Rachel Reeves wants to consolidate the 80 different schemes to cut admin costs.
These have been huge. A Centre for Policy Studies report in 2016 said they came to £4.5billion over 10 years. The first duty of pension trustees is to get the best return on investments to ensure they can pay their existing and future pensioners.
Labour thinks more of the money should go into big domestic infrastructure projects. Reform wants less ploughed into net zero. Pensioners don’t care, as long as the funds grow so they can enjoy a long and happy retirement.
The way successive governments behaved over the Mineworkers Pension Scheme should act as a warning. When British Coal was privatised in 1994, ministers agreed the government would act as guarantor for its pension payouts.
Under this arrangement, any future surpluses would be split 50/50 between the Treasury and scheme members. That was a good deal for miners at the time because it meant their pensions were safe. But the fund did much better than expected, handing the Treasury a massive seam of extra revenue.
And it carried on snaffling the money, racking up a £4billion windfall despite MPs imploring them to stop because they’d taken enough.
That kind of cash could have made a huge difference to the lives of retired miners or their widows. It was this Labour government which put an end to the scam. But it took 30 years to right the wrong. And the miners never did get that £4billion back.