Queen of the Lit parade
And about the father
Queen of the Lit Parade...
Back in the early 1990s, when publishing suddenly became sexy, the sexiest of all publishers was Caroline Michel. Lissom, effervescent and charming, she wore Chanel and lived in Belgravia. Her lustrous hair was said to have once knocked a waiter over in the Groucho Club. In a world in which pipe smoke and leather elbow patches had long been de rigueur, these were indeed unusual qualities.
A graduate in Sanskrit, she could also speak fluent hyperbole. She had started out in publicity and, even in a trade that thrives on overstatement, her facility with superlatives made the rest of the field seem doleful by comparison. She employed words like 'wonderful', 'amazing' and 'brilliant' the way other people use 'it', 'the' and 'and'. She was, people said, a gusher. Strangely, the people who said this tended to be male journalists who, in their own descriptions of Michel, could themselves gush like a freshly drilled oilfield. 'She seemed to be in colour while everybody else was in black and white,' wrote one accuser-cum-admirer. 'She was tanned and smelled gloriously expensive,' recalled another, who spoke longingly of her 'dark hair and black olive eyes'. 'She had IT,' he insisted, 'capital I, capital T.' (We can assume the writer was not referring to information technology - this was pre-computers.)
Note the poignant, obituary-like past tense of these testaments. To widespread bachelor mourning, Michel had just hooked up with her future husband, Matthew Evans, the then head of Faber and Faber. While the relationship may have dampened a certain desperate ardour, if anything it increased her glamour. She was now the better-looking half of a 'power couple'.
Not long after, she landed the publisher's job at Vintage, Random House's paperback imprint. Yet somewhere beneath the noise of the headlines and the tinkling of wine glasses there remained a suspicion that Michel was really a publicist rather than a publisher, a woman of limitless style but questionable content. Unkind stories circulated, some of them apocryphal (it was said that she mispronounced Goethe), and some of them more accurate. There was, for example, The Kapuscinski Memo. It sounds like a Robert Ludlum novel, but it was a now legendary note, regarding the Polish author Ryszard Kapuscinski, that Michel sent an editor during an unhappy year she endured at Granta. By all accounts, both its logic and grammar were experimental. Much bookish sniggering ensued.
A decade on and Michel has just been made managing director and publisher of HarperPress, the literary division of the publishing giant HarperCollins. She has long since proved her doubters comprehensively wrong. But her new job will nevertheless demand all her promotional skills and should also test the depths of her seemingly bottomless supplies of optimism.
To put it bluntly, the glaring problem with HarperCollins, as far as the bien pensants of British literary life are concerned, is that it's owned by Rupert Murdoch. To make things worse, a few years back Murdoch appeared to intervene to prevent HarperCollins from publishing Chris Patten's book about his time as governor of Hong Kong. As one rival publisher put it: 'They're seen as being a little philistine.'
I met Michel in the multi-storey atrium of the HarperCollins building in Hammersmith. Were I inclined to gush, I would observe that she did not walk down the stairs so much as descend to earth, a deus ex machina in Dolce e Gabbana. Instead, let's just say that she made an elegant entrance in a little black dress, gold fishnets and leopard-skin heels.
Requiring neither the lift nor the stairs, she floated back up to her office, where I asked her about HarperCollins's tarnished image. At first she was reluctant to acknowledge the issue, but then said: 'I think if there are vestiges of that around I'm very keen that we dispel them quickly.' She also admitted that before accepting the post she had asked Victoria Barnsley, the CEO and publisher of HarperCollins, if interventions from above were part of the deal.
'As far as I can gather there is no editorial interference whatsoever,' she concluded. 'I've never got to the bottom of what happened in the Patten affair, I don't know if you have, but it was a very unfortunate incident managed perhaps not terribly well.'
I said I thought the bottom of the affair was simply that Murdoch, mindful of his Sino-media interests, did not want to publish Patten's book because it was critical of the Chinese.
'You'd have to ask Victoria or people who are closer to what happened,' she stonewalled and gave me a smile that can only be termed diplomatic.
She then went on to celebrate the 'extraordinary', 'brilliant', 'innovative' staff and writers in the HarperPress stable, which is made up of Fourth Estate, Flamingo and HarperCollins non-fiction imprints. 'I want us to be a natural home for quality fiction and non-fiction,' she continued. 'I want the best writing in the world to find a home here.'
A recent poll in the Bookseller magazine placed HarperCollins at the foot of an 'author-care' table. This is one area of publishing where it's safe to assume Michel will make a rapid impact. She offers the kind of author-care that would please even Hollywood's most demanding film stars. When she was at Vintage, she made certain to send a bouquet of flowers to each of her authors on the paperback publication of their books, no matter where in the world they might be.
In a process dubbed by her former colleagues at Random House, as 'Micheling', she would love-bomb writers, as well as staff, with compliments. She once began a letter to Jeanette Winterson: 'The biggest misery for me is finishing a book by you.' At Vintage, she formed intimate bonds with the A-list of British authors, among them Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, A.S. Byatt, and Winterson.
It was not without reason that Rushdie supposedly responded to news of Michel's departure from Random House with the words: 'But what's going to happen to me?' The novelist Howard Jacobson has known Michel since her first days in publishing. He keenly appreciates the comforting balm of her attentions. 'She has the gift of making you believe you are her favourite author,' he told me. 'And even as I'm saying it, I still somehow want to believe it.'
When I mentioned this comment to Michel, she stared at me with an expression of sincerity bordering on incomprehension and said: 'But Howard is special.'
I wondered if perhaps, stripped of such tenderness, her authors at Vintage might feel a little abandoned. 'My successor, Rachel Cugnoni, is terrific, really, really terrific,' she replied.
But still, I persisted, you've built up a close relationship with those authors. 'Well I love what they do. I love what they write, and a lot of them have become great friends over the years.'
So will they not feel a tad bereft? 'Well I hope not. Because I'm always here for them to call, to talk to.'
You wouldn't mind Random House authors calling you here at HarperCollins? 'I'd love it.'
Would that be a matter of having one eye, perhaps, on attracting them to HarperCollins? 'That's not for me to say.'
Why? 'I think they have to make up their own minds about what they want to do.'
Of course. But one can always encourage them. 'I think they would have to...' she broke off. 'It's not for me to say.'
Her background is haute-cosmopolitan. She spent her early years in Harrogate, moved to Geneva, and then returned to Britain when she was nine. Her father is the controversial Wolfgang Michel, who describes himself as 'an agent of high-technology deals'. She used the term 'commodity broker'.
After a misconceived year studying postgraduate law, she took a job on William Cookson's poetry magazine Agenda. 'I spent a great deal of time rejecting my own poems,' she jokes, 'which I'd sent in under a different name. So I knew I wasn't destined to be a poet.'
Next stop was the publicity department at Chatto. This was 1981, when, to use Jacobson's phrase, publishers were all about 'creaking old stairs' and author tours were almost unheard of. 'I can remember the Times phoning to interview Bernard Malamud,' Michel recalls, 'and my going to Nora Smallwood for his phone number. She said: 'Our authors write books, they don't talk about them.' That's how it was. And then Carmen Callil arrived after six months and literally took me by the scruff of my neck and taught me everything I know about publishing. She was very publicity-driven.'
She moved on to a series of different publishers, including a 24-hour stint at Weidenfeld. In that single day, however, it has been said that a short skirt she wore was the crucial factor in persuading the late Alan Clark to publish his diaries with Weidenfeld. The following day she joined Bloomsbury, the publishing sensation of the late Eighties and early Nineties. She became a phenomenon and it was to be her last job in publicity.
I've never met an ex-literary publicist who hasn't complained about the neurotic self-absorption of authors, but Michel is the exception. 'I loved it,' she says. 'I absolutely loved it.'
For someone whose name frequently crops up in lists of powerful women, Michel retains an enthusiasm for her work that is positively girlish. Even so, I felt sure there must have been horror stories. 'Yeah,' she eventually concedes, 'I remember being chased around a Manchester hotel by Derek Hatton, who then pounded on my door saying, "I've got a really good video you can come and watch in my room." An offer which I turned down.'
With her husband, Lord Evans, the government whip in the House of Lords, she is a regular on the so-called New Establishment dinner party circuit, which features other such liberal luminaries as (Lord) Richard and Ruthie Rogers, Alan Yentob and (Lord) Melvyn Bragg. She amused colleagues once when, in a discussion on the merits of advertising on the London Underground, she argued that it didn't work because she couldn't remember a single Tube poster. It was swiftly pointed out to her that this might be because she had never travelled on the Tube. 'She's very friendly,' said another one-time colleague, 'but essentially disconnected from ordinary people.'
From the outside, it could seem that she was little more than a social dilettante who knows how to massage swollen egos. But that would be to overlook not only her considerable achievements but also the daunting amount of work she gets through. One former workmate described her as 'weirdly dedicated. It's not just ambition, it really is her vocation.'
She reads six or seven manuscripts per week as well as a further six or seven proposals, and has done pretty much every week for the past 10 years. That's somewhere in the region of 750,000 words a week, 40 million a year, 400 million in a decade. I try to compute these figures but as my bedside is still littered by a neglected copy of Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities that I began reading about three years ago, it all proves too much. 'I've always got pages of manuscripts in pockets in every single bag, wherever,' she explains. 'I can't sleep unless I read. I don't sleep a great deal.'
It turns out she reads every night in bed until 1am, and also tries to get up in the middle of the night for further reading. 'It drives Matthew mad. I read in the morning, read at the weekends. The great thing is, I'm lucky because when I sit with the kids at the weekend and they're watching The Simpsons I can switch off and I can read.'
As I left, she loaded me up with six recent HarperCollins hardbacks. Or roughly four days' worth of Michel reading. One of them was Jonathan Franzen's collection of essays, How to Be Alone. In a piece entitled Why Bother?, which bemoans the dwindling importance of the novel in contemporary culture, Franzen recalls his post-student romance with books: 'I was in love with literature and with a woman to whom I'd been attracted in part because she was a brilliant reader.'
He could have been writing about Michel. There has been no shortage of novelists attracted to her in part because she is a brilliant, or certainly prodigious, reader. But will her draw prove quite so magnetic from behind the force field of the Murdoch empire? The Caroline Michel story, you sense, has a few twists in it yet. For the time being, it's just a matter of reading on.
When Libya tried to tempt Labour with cash
So what happened to AKA's dictat of no middleman in any deals with MoD. This Michels looks like a arms dealer if there was one.Libya secretly offered a huge donation to the cash-strapped Labour party as part of its attempts to end its international isolation, the Guardian can disclose. Ministerial sources say the Libyan proposal was instantly rejected.
But a Guardian investigation has uncovered other recent attempts by Libya to use back channels to get close to Labour politicians.
These include an offer of lucrative deals with the arms company BAE Systems, and a plan to publish a biography of Colonel Gadafy in Britain.
Libya's offer of an enormous donation came at a time when Labour had a £10m deficit last September. It originated from Ahmed Gadaff Al Daim, Col Gadafy's cousin and a senior figure in the regime, and was passed to the Labour peer, Lord Evans of Temple Guiting, by a London-based businessman, Wolfgang Michel.
{From above story Lord Evans is Wolfgang Michel's son-in-law and publisher of Faber and Faber!}
Lord Evans rejected the offer out of hand and informed the party's general secretary, David Triesman. "The proposal was absolutely ridiculous," said a Labour source. "Even if foreign donations were not outlawed, we never would have considered it. The Libyans want to rub shoulders with British politicians and seemed to think this was a way."
A number of Libya's approaches have been made through Mr Michel. The German-born 74-year-old, who lives in Chelsea, describes himself as an agent on hi-tech international deals.
Mr Michel has done business deals with many of the world's most controversial regimes, including Iraq, Russia and Iran.
According to his associates, Mr Michel sought to arrange a 1998 meeting between the Libyans and Labour politicians. Libya was secretly offering £6bn-worth of aviation deals in return for the permanent lifting of sanctions.
Mr Michel sought to use as an intermediary Matthew Evans, the Labour peer and former chairman of the publishers Faber and Faber. Lord Evans is Mr Michel's son-in-law and was recruited to the Blair government in December as a whip.
Separately, confidential talks did eventually get off the ground between BAE, Britain's biggest arms manufacturer, UK officials, and Mr Gadaff Al Daim on behalf of Libya, with meetings in Switzerland and London. But they remained inconclusive.
The two countries are continuing to edge closer. Last August, the Foreign Office minister Mike O'Brien flew to Tripoli to meet Col Gadafy in the first such encounter for 20 years.
Sources at Faber and Faber say Mr Michel suggested the firm publish a biography of Col Gadafy. But Lord Evans told the Guardian he rejected the deal in September 2001.
"I went to a meeting with Ahmed Gadaff Al Daim who wished to talk about a biography about his cousin. I made the point it would have to deal with Lockerbie and the regime's funding of terrorism. After discussion with my colleagues at Faber, we decided not to pursue the idea."
Mr Michel confirmed that he had raised "a possible publishing opportunity". But he told the Guardian that he did it on his own account, "not on behalf of Ahmet Gadaff Al Daim".
Government sources say Lord Evans has been meticulous in disclosing his family connections, and that he has kept Wolfgang Michel and his Libyan link "at arm's length". Lord Evans' government job does not involve defence or international issues, they point out.
Mr Gadaff Al Daim first received unwelcome publicity in 1989, when the former international call girl Pamella Bordes said she had had a long affair with him while he was negotiating commercial tie-ups between Libya and the Italian car firm Fiat.
Mr Gadaff Al Daim, approached through the Libyan embassy in London, last week did not respond to invitations to comment.
Mr Michel, who said he knew Mr Gadaff Al Daim, cloaks his business affairs in mystery via a Liechtenstein offshore trust. Records show a UK investment company ultimately controlled by him - Entera Corporation - has brought into Britain more than £2m in commissions earned from India.
Associates say he has acted to sell arms on behalf of Russia, but Mr Michel denied this. He said he had "negotiated legitimate sales of civil aircraft to India". He points out his commissions include earnings from the export of jute.
Company records show he also has a business link with the French state-owned aero engine company Snecma, which powers Mirage fighters, the Airbus, and Russian trainers. Mr Michel denies he has been their agent.
Questions have been raised as to whether he was involved in negotiations to sell Mirage fighters to Saddam Hussein in Iraq - a deal promoted by the French government which collapsed in 1990 when Iraq invaded Kuwait.
Mr Michel said he had visited Iraq once but not in that period. He agreed he had concluded agricultural deals with the Iranians in the company of such controversial figures as the Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, and the late tycoon Tiny Rowland. Mr Michel's lawyer emphasised last week he had not been involved in any improper or illegal military sales or business dealings.
And also shows why the deal was with UK subsidiary of FM and not the Italian company itself.
Wonder if Labour and INC funding is linked to arms deals all along? Price of Independence?
ya 
On the other hand, he claimed he had helped India's foreign exchange position by encouraging several of his friends to visit India as tourists. 
As for the corruption charges then being made against Sanjay Gandhi, "he is just a boy and businessmen and politicians may have used him.... Sanjay is a young politician and not very experienced. That is why he has not been successful." 
