Is there a thread that links the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie to the pop impresario Simon Cowell, that binds the Formula 1 chief Bernie Ecclestone to the Labour MP and former New Statesman owner Geoffrey Robinson, and runs through the newspaper proprietors Conrad Black, Richard Desmond and Robert Maxwell, as well as the business tycoons Richard Branson and Mohamed Al Fayed?
Tom Bower, the investigative journalist who has written unflinching, unflattering biographies of all nine men, thinks so. His subjects – perhaps better thought of as his victims – share “an overriding ambition to succeed, a ruthlessness to prevent those who are stopping you get to your goal, and the most astonishing ego”, he tells me. “If they allow defeat to overwhelm them they’re lost, they are of absolutely no interest to me. I’m interested in people who overcome adversity, whose ego is so dominant that even when, like Maxwell and Black, they are actually convicted, they still say they are innocent.”
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