Blackmail: The Maxwells, Harvey Proctor, And The Marquis Of Granby

As I mentioned earlier in the week HERE, The People ran a story in 1986 about an attempt to pressure Robert Maxwell into halting its reportage of the Harvey Proctor scandal.

“A sinister phone caller said that if we continued with our “campaign” against the kinky MP [Harvey Proctor] he would reveal compromising details of an alleged relationship between Mr Maxwell’s daughter Ghislaine and the son of a Duke.” The People 10/26/1986

The “son of a Duke” that The People named was David Charles Robert Manners, the then Marquis of Granby and now the 11th Duke of Rutland, who is quoted as describing the allegations as “nonsense”.

And I believe he is absolutely correct, I think this allegation regarding David Manners is complete nonsense but whose nonsense ?

Now, I was reminded yesterday that Harvey Proctor works for David Manners the Duke of Rutland and currently lives on the Belvoir Castle estate in Leicestershire.

Think about that.

You can either believe that a blackmail attempt was made threatening to expose a relationship between Ghislaine Maxwell and David Manners if Robert Maxwell didn’t stop publishing stories regarding Harvey Proctor and that coincidently David Manners now employs Harvey Proctor…

Or you can accept that something else is going on here.

Lets look at at this issue from Robert Maxwell’s perspective. The People are at the time running a series of exposés concerning the sexual proclivities of Harvey Proctor and he receives a clumsy blackmail threat that if he doesn’t stop then it will be made public that his daughter Ghislaine is having a relationship with “the son of a Duke” and that such an exposé would be extremely embarrassing, perhaps the “the son of a Duke” in question is recently married, who knows.

And let’s say, for arguments sake, that the person making this clumsy blackmail threat wouldn’t want the friendly relationship between Harvey Proctor and the Marquis of Granby to become public and Robert Maxwell knows this.

In that context this story makes perfect sense. This story could then be viewed as a brutal but clever way of, on the one hand defusing the blackmail threat by appearing to be open about it, while at the same time subtly turning the tables on the person who has made the threat.