So, here's a tricky question. Do I treat Max Clifford as he has treated others? Or, do I not? So, not that tricky, actually. Although, I do rather wonder at the form a Max Clifford revenge attack might take. Because, on the one hand, he says he's impervious to criticism as well as being rather engagingly honest about his failings, he never attempts to justify himself, 'because I know I can't' and readily admits to all manner of really not very nice personality traits, including lying, cheating and generally being a bit of a rat-bag. On the other, if my face appears next to a minor EastEnders character in next week's Sun, with a headline which reads something like, 'Who is X's New Mystery Minger?', you'll know that he was fibbing about this, too.
Oh, he's such a fibber, Max. There's not too many people in public life who'll cheerfully admit to telling barefaced lies, as Max does, ('an important part of PR is lies and deceit, but I'm the only person who'll ever admit to it') although it explains why the PR establishment loathes him, and why every interview he's ever done is seemingly a work of purest fiction.
But then, as Max tells me, the only thing that he would really mind is if someone said he was rubbish in bed. Or 'that I had a small willy'. It's why he always encourages his kiss'n'tellers to say that their man was an animal in the sack and could keep it up all night.
'I say to them, for God's sake, try and be a little bit generous. With Rebecca Loos that wasn't a problem, she was quite happy to say that about David Beckham.'
'And Tracey Temple?'
'And Tracey Temple,' he says although somehow this seems to lack the same conviction.
Because Max has been at it again. The deputy leader's mistress was his client, and he's made a tidy amount from the Prescott's marital misery. But then this is what Max does best.
He's the ringmaster of the nation's sexual scandals and the chief conduit by which we know what we know about the private lives of David Beckham, David Mellor, Jude Law and countless others.
The net result of all this - the disarming honesty - is that he's that classic postmodern literary device: the unreliable narrator. I have no idea where the truth ends and the self-aggrandisement begins, and although he's terrifically entertaining, telling salacious anecdotes with punchlines like 'blah blah, scandal, a household name, Freddie Starr actually, but you can't write that', I'm not at all sure that I trust him. In fact, I know that I don't. But, in fairness, the feeling's pretty mutual. He greets me by saying: 'Come on in. I'm afraid I can't remember your name although yes, I know we've met. I've read the cuts. You wrote that very sarcastic piece about me, didn't you?'
'It wasn't that sarcastic,' I say and he seems to agree, although it's hard to know because as well as talking to me, he's also padding through his house in his tennis shorts and trainers - he used to play water-polo for England and at 63 still runs and plays tennis twice a week - giving directions to the housekeeper and dictating some copy down the line to the Press Gazette, the journalist's trade paper now owned by his old pal, Piers Morgan, in which he has a column.
Still, at least this clears up one niggling question I had: that he knows that I've met him before. And, it's to his credit that although it becomes increasingly clear that he's highly suspect of the line my interview is going to take, it's game of him to agree to it. Because what Max knows is that I know rather more about his private life than he'd necessarily like made public. But then, Max Clifford didn't get to be Max Clifford without being both a risk-taker and a pretty astute judge of human character.
So, that's the plus side. On the minus side, I'm left rather wondering what that must say about me. Although when he tells me what he'd like me to write in the article, and what he wouldn't like me to write in the article, I can't help thinking that maybe he's made the tiniest miscalculation.
He's a while on the phone though, so the housekeeper makes me a cup of tea and I sit in the conservatory with a pampered little lapdog for company and admire the view out over his lawns and pergola and ornamental pond. The house - behind electronic gates, on a private estate - has acres of immaculately vacuumed cream carpet, a cream, gold and beige interior, and a wealth of ostentatious flower arrangements - orchids, lilies, great big green spiky things. It's all very Surrey: newly built but in a traditional style and slap-bang in the golf and G & T belt.
As well as the housekeeper in the kitchen, there's also a landscape gardener in the garden, a van load of builders in the driveway and then a specialist engineer turns up to have a look at Max's original Fifties jukebox.
He's quite an employment provider, Max. And this is just one of his houses. His old marital home, where he lived with his wife, Liz, who died of cancer in 2003, is half a mile away, and now home to his daughter, Louise. There's also the apartment in Marbella where he goes for three months of the year. Then there are the 10 people who work for him in his office, fielding calls, and liaising with the tabloids, and this is before we've even got around to the thorny subject of Max's 'PA', Jo.
Oh dear, yes, Jo is a thorny subject. Because, as well as being Max's PA, she's also his live-in lover. And, although this is something you are never going to read about in any tabloid newspaper, she's married - just not to Max. What's more, when I met her last year - on a press trip to Ireland , with Max and Brian McFadden - I didn't realise any of this at first. But then, I discovered, neither did her husband.
In fact, I would have remained in the dark, had Max not sidled up to me and said: 'By the way, Carole, for the purposes of this article, Jo is my PA.' And then the girls from his office got drunk and told me what every tabloid diary writer and showbiz reporter in the country apparently knew. And, for an ugly lesson in how the media works, here it is: none of them wrote about it because none of them could afford to offend one of the prime sources of quality scandal.
All of which left me with an unappetising dilemma: collude with Max, or potentially wreck someone else's marriage. In the end, I decided I didn't really want to embark on a new career as a tabloid hell-whore, and it wasn't until the Daily Mail carried a tame little diary item last autumn saying Max had a 'close companion' that he was semi-outed - although even then, it transpires, it was only because he granted his permission.
'I was down in the south of France at a launch, and the journalist, who I've known a very long time, said, can't we write it, Max? It's been such a long time, and we've been very good, can't we write such and such? I said, just leave it for a little while, and I'll let you know when we can do something. As long as it isn't too... you know.
They were very patient, for a couple of years. And then eventually I said, OK then.'
It's what Piers Morgan calls Max's 'get out of jail free card'. And as I point out to him it puts him in a more privileged position than any politician, TV presenter, or celebrity in the entire country.
'Oh, I don't know about that, poppet. Maybe, I suppose. Although there were plenty who tried to get me when I was doing my bit to bring down Major's government...'
They can't have tried that hard, though - because, last autumn, Max, together with Angela Levin, a journalist on the Mail, brought out his life story. And what a story it is. There's the rise from his humble working-class roots in Wimbledon, his early days at EMI, handling the Beatles before they got famous, and, later, Sinatra, and then there's his transformation into the country's scandalmonger-in-chief.
So far, so predictable. What I hadn't been prepared for - because the only interview he's done since the book came out was with a journalist who hadn't appeared to have read it - was paragraphs like this: 'At home, Max was the rock Louise and Liz relied on as he tried to keep them both strong and positive. But his own anxieties remained bottled up inside him... He leaned on no one but escaped from his worries through his work, playing sport, and organising sex parties.'
Crikey. It turns out that Max, routinely described in interviews as 'a squeaky-clean family man' was in fact southwest London's answer to Hugh Hefner. Or maybe Cynthia Payne, since at one point he refers to it as 'procuring': he set up stars with 'models, actresses, bored housewives, that sort of thing'. And at the same time that he'd been busy exposing Tory ministers and soap stars for sexual double standards, he had himself been a serial womaniser, all the while playing happy families back home in Surrey.
'I never had a conscience about it. I wouldn't say it's right. It wasn't. But to me it was another sport. I played football, I played water-polo, I played squash, I played tennis. And I...' '...played women?'
'Well you know what I'm saying, we played each other. And in my defence, not that I can ever defend myself, if you and I had had an affair, you would have known exactly what it's about. I'm greedy, I'm married, I love my wife, she does understand me, I have a wonderful life, I'm just greedy, can you accept that? If you can accept that, fine. If you can't accept that, I totally understand. Or, as and when you get fed up - and I'm not trying to justify myself, couldn't justify myself - but... I was straight with them. I didn't play them around. I didn't pretend to be... if you see what I'm saying.'
I do see what he's saying, but I'm a bit surprised. Maybe it's the sort of thing that men say to other men all the time, but they don't often brag about it to women. I also suspect it's why Max has been so astute in his dealings with people in a takes-a-goat-to-know-a-goat sort of a way, and why he's never shown much mercy towards his victims. He says that he turns down kiss-and-tells all the time, and that there's certain people he'd never stitch up even if he had cast-iron evidence (he's a life-long Labour supporter, and despite the trials John Prescott has just been through, he says he could never bring himself to do it to Blair).
But he doesn't have much sympathy for married men who get caught out. Because they're just like him. And he never got caught. And in any case, the danger of being caught was all part of the thrill.
How else to explain the 'sex parties'? He held them throughout the Sixties, the Seventies and right the way into the Eighties, always in the distinctly unglamorous locale of the outer London suburbs.
'It was absolutely ridiculous. I'll give an example. A mate of mine had a little flat in Colliers Wood. He was a printer and on a Friday evening, I used to use the flat. Mac would come back from the late shift at three or four in the morning, and there would be this one at it in that bedroom, and this one there, and that one there, and these ones standing in the corridor... he'd say, Max, I'm ever so tired, do you think you could ask such-and-such to leave, because I'm knackered. And these people, they would be household names.'
It sounds not so much like an anecdote as an account of a scene from a Sixties British sex comedy. Which isn't such a bad comparison actually, since Diana Dors was a 'friend' of Max's and in the book he drops fairly heavy hints about an affair.
'So what? People would be slipping away during the party?' I ask him. 'Or it would be happening in front of you?'
'It wasn't you do her, and you do him... it was natural combustion. Like-minded people. Coming together. And I was the ringmaster.'
'So, you were a participator? Or just the organiser?'
'Well, I would say it, but I was extremely selective. With me it was quality rather than quantity, which was why I was probably extremely lucky in terms of sexual diseases. Of course we'd never heard of Aids and things like that, I mean Jesus Christ! When I think back... so it was natural spontaneity. But, hmm, there was an awful lot of it.'
I'm not sure what I'm supposed to make of this information. Or why he's chosen to unburden himself about it now. Liz, his wife, to whom I don't doubt that he was devoted in his own way, 'suspected', he says, but never found out; but he did introduce his long-term mistress, Ria, to his daughter and when he says he had no conscience at all about it, he means it: he's so boastful! It makes me half-wish that somebody would come forth and say he's got a small willy.
He also claims to have 'retired' 10 years ago. But then, as Sir Jimmy Goldsmith put it, 'A man who marries his mistress creates a vacancy.' And, besides, as he keeps on telling me, 'Everyone's at it.'
'Nearly everybody I've ever known has affairs. Nearly every journalist I've ever met has affairs. I haven't met one, in 40-odd years, who hasn't. You wouldn't realise it, you wouldn't know it, you wouldn't believe it, but most of them are. It's not that I think they are, I know they are! What you've got to understand is that the biggest part of my game is not promotion, it's protection. Keeping things away from the media every year becomes a bigger and bigger slice of Max Clifford Associates.'
There's something a bit depressing about hanging out in Max's moral universe. It's a world where men are men and women are trollops. It's not that he doesn't have scruples - he does. But it's a pick'n'mix sort of philosophy that'd take a greater intellect than mine to disentangle. He's an unlikely but passionate advocate of social justice, hates what the Tories did to the NHS, and gives away buckets of his own cash to charity. His daughter, Louise, developed rheumatoid arthritis at the age of six, and, over the years, has had 17 major operations, all of which Max was there for - the last person she saw before going under, the first person she saw on waking up - and it's left him with an almost visceral hatred for the Conservatives and an evangelical zeal to raise money for children's charities.
But, when it comes to everything else, he's completely amoral, borderline psychopathic. Oh dear, I can't really say that, can I? Although if anybody is libel-proof it's surely I-tell-lies-for-cash Max. What I mean is that he seems to lack the ability to empathise in any meaningful way. With his wife, with the victims of his stories.
He had 150 front pages in the past 18 months, although, he says, it's the least of his business these days. He cross-fertilises like mad: the reason Gillian McKeith was on Celebrity X Factor is because both she and Simon Cowell are clients. The reason I went to Galway with Brian McFadden is because he and Club 328, a charter jet operation, were both clients. And then there's his 'protection' - and I'd like to say 'racket', because that's what it sounds like - paying people off here, getting them jobs there, although there's no doubt that he's a brilliant advertisement for his own services.
The reason, he says, that his sexual exploits were never exposed is because, 'I beat the tabloids at their own game. It was a competition. Another sport... And I won.'
He's a great one for competition, there's no doubt about that. He loves it, thrives on it, is currently involved in a feud with the News of the World because they stitched up Kerry Katona, his then client, and now won't deal with them, and he agreed to let Louis Theroux hang out with him for several months just to see if he could out-Theroux him (the consensus is that he did). Every tennis match he plays, he says, 'is like the final at Wimbledon. And when I kick a ball around, it's the World Cup. It's ridiculous, but I can't help myself.'
I think to myself that I wouldn't like to cross him, and there's an argument that this article will seal my journalistic death warrant, but then, what the hell, I go and ask him about Jo.
He's quite happy to talk about her. They met through one of his charities - she volunteers at a children's hospice. 'And I also knew her slightly from Cobham. I'd be having a cup of coffee and she'd be there with her husband. And you know, whatever, whatever. I always thought, "What an attractive woman." And she's my type. The colouring, the... whatever.
I've always gone for brunettes rather than blondes. Although that doesn't mean there hasn't been the odd blonde... but anyway, after Liz died, I needed somebody to help. Because Liz ran the house. She paid the cheques. I didn't have a clue. And I said to Jo, "Listen, love, I need someone, to run the home, to organise the cleaner..." and she came and said, "I'll do it." And then... well, it was just natural spontaneity.'
Ah, natural spontaneity, there it is again. It's a big thing with Max. He's been called a lot of things in his career. 'A little turd' by Edwina Currie, and the 'sleazeball's sleazeball' by David Mellor, which is almost enough to make you warm to him. 'But to me, people having sex isn't sleazy. It's great. It's one of the most pleasurable things in life. I'm very lucky in that from a very young age, sex is one of those things that I've really enjoyed. The way I do sport and a nice meal, and good conversation and being in love and all of these things.'
Which is funny when you think about the fact that he's made his name and fortune out of the nation's collective prurience. Sex, for Max, is not the free-and-easy love-in he describes, but a capital asset. The British market he says is the best in the world and in the book there's a nice little story about how every Friday night before he goes home, he takes a print-out of what he's got in the bank.
'And then on a Saturday morning I compare it with what I had the month before. And I always like to beat myself. I'm always in competition with myself.'
'So what did you have in the bank last Saturday?' I ask him. 'I think it was £1.7m in cash. And then this place cost me £3m, which I have a small mortgage on. And my other home, which is worth £2m, is paid for, Louise's flat is paid for, and my flat in Spain, which is worth about £1.5m, that's paid for.'
He only moved into the new house a couple of months ago, so that he and Jo had a new start in a new home and she's been to see a lawyer about getting a divorce. He's quite happy to talk about her, but then gives me strict instructions about what I'm allowed and what I'm not allowed to write about.
'I'm happy for anyone to imply whatever they want about me, but what I don't want is her daughter being upset. Her husband's been through enough anyway. I don't want to rub salt in the wounds. I'd much rather you said, 'There's a new lady in his life,' and left it at that.'
'But I've met Jo...'
'It's very simple, we're both very happy, and she's living with me...' and then he tails off to take another call, his fifth in an hour-and-a-half, although I don't mind because he has a helpful habit of repeating what the other person says so that you can follow the conversation.
'David Mills? Tessa Jowell's husband? He's interested in me representing him? Well, I'll tell him what I tell everybody. He's very welcome to come and have a chat and if I believe him, I'll take him on. And if I don't I won't. What was the name of the Italian chap who wanted me to represent him? You know, the ex prime minister. Berlusconi, that's it. Hmmm.
Well, we'll see won't we? But tell him I'm quite happy to sit down and talk to him.' And, then, Jo herself arrives. In Galway, I spent more than an hour chatting to her, and part of the reason I couldn't bring myself to do a Max on her was that I liked her. She's a rather glamorous fortysomething with a taste for gold jewellery and expensive handbags. And she was friendly, which is always a plus with me, and told me about her daughter, a ballerina, and looked pained when she said she had 'complications' in her personal life.
This time round, though, she can barely bring herself to look at me. She comes in to tell Max he's got to finish up because they need to go for lunch, and won't catch my eye. Things get even frostier when I go into the kitchen.
'You can't write about me!' she says. I don't really know how to respond to this and, in the end, I say, 'That's a bit unrealistic.'
'You can't go messing things up! Not just when I've got it all sorted out. You can say I'm the housekeeper, or something.'
'But I've met you,' I say. 'I'm talking to you now.'
'But you don't have to mention me! I've only just got everything sorted.'
Oh dear. If anybody knows the media game, it's Max, and he presumably knew precisely what he was doing when he agreed to the interview. As he told me, 'David Beckham is old enough and ugly enough to know what he was doing.'
As he is, too. Which makes me wonder what this interview is actually all about. If Max has another agenda, which I'm unwittingly fulfilling. Or if he simply believes that he's beyond the reach of any journalist. Who knows? He's older, smarter, more experienced and better connected than me and if anybody's going to come off badly from this, I've no doubt ultimately that it will be me.
I feel sorry for Jo, though, I do. She fell out of love with one man and into love with another, it's not exactly the crime of the century.
But she's been saved the baying hordes of paparazzi that anyone else would have had if Max had been as famous as Max but not Max. And to have not written about her would have been to collude with him on his mission to control the whole of the UK mainstream media.
I don't feel particularly good about it, though. And when they give me a lift to the station in his Bentley, the quiet purr of the engine does little to disguise the silence that reverberates around the cream-leather interior. When we say goodbye, Max turns in the passenger seat, and says, simply: 'Be gentle with her.'
I hope I have been. I just rather wish Max would sometimes think of doing the same.
Read All About It, edited by Max Clifford, is published by Virgin at £8.99.
Making a splash
Freddie Starr, March 1986, The Sun
This was the turning point in Clifford's career and the birth of a new type of 'creative' (ie made-up) PR. Fledgling publicist Max persuaded Kelvin MacKenzie, the then Sun editor, to run a story about how Starr put his friend Lea La Salle's hamster, Supersonic, between two pieces of bread and gobbled it up.
'Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster' is now the stuff of tabloid legend, nominated by the BBC as one of the greatest headlines of all time.
David Mellor And Antonia De Sancha, September 1992, The People
At the height of John Major's Back to Basics campaign, David Mellor was secretary of state for the newly created department of heritage, and Antonia de Sancha was an unemployed actress. Max approached The People with her story, they coughed up £30,000 and bugged her apartment, revealing Mellor's predilection for 'toe-jobs'.
This story is classic Clifford - he happily admits he invented the detail that Mellor wore his Chelsea FC strip during sex. Mellor resigned and now works in sports radio.
Mandy Allwood and The Octuplets, September 1996, News Of The World
When Mandy Allwood found out she was pregnant with octuplets following hormone treatment, she called Max. He tied her up in an exclusive deal with the News of the World until tragically, in the 19th week, she miscarried. She later successfully sued Clifford for secretly profiting from the story. He admits it was 'regrettable'.
Jeffrey Archer, Ted Francis And Monica Coghlan, November 1999, News Of The World
Jeffrey Archer's Mayor of London campaign was floundering when he was accused of spending the night with a prostitute called Monica Coghlan. The campaign finally died when Clifford made sure that the News of the World learnt how Archer's old school friend, Ted Francis, had provided Archer with a false alibi for that very same evening.
David Beckham And Rebecca Loos, April 2004, News Of The World
Max describes this as 'the greatest tabloid expose of the decade'. It was certainly one of the most lucrative, netting Loos around £700,000 in assorted deals with News of the World and Sky. In common with most of Clifford's kiss'n'tells by this stage, she called him, sparking a tabloid bidding war, and was then spirited off to a remote Spanish villa by a pair of NoW reporters.
Sven Goran Eriksson, Mark Palios and Faria Alam, August 2004, Mail On Sunday and News Of The World
When rumours first surfaced that FA secretary Faria Alam had had affairs with both Mark Palios, the FA Chief Executive, and Sven Goran Eriksson, she turned to Max, quit her job, and received £200,000 apiece from the Mail on Sunday and NoW. Palios resigned, as did Colin Gibson, the FA press secretary. Later, Alam tried to sue the FA for unfair dismissal. She lost and went on Celebrity Big Brother instead.
Jude Law And Daisy Wright, July 2005, Sunday Mirror
Jude'n'Sienna were the hottest couple in the land until 26-year-old nanny Daisy Wright got on the phone to Max. 'Jude was a masterful lover who made my whole body tingle,' she told the Sunday Mirror.
She thought they were falling in love and valued him as a 'friend'. Law dropped her like a stone and apologised to Miller, but not enough to dissuade her from dumping him and being branded 'Love Rat Law'. Jude'n'Sienna are now back together.
John Prescott And Tracey Temple, April 2006, Daily Mirror
The Daily Mirror broke the story after Barrie Williams, Tracey Temple's fiance, told them he'd become suspicious she might be having an affair after she started moaning 'DPM' (for Deputy Prime Minister) in her sleep.
He received £20,000, then Temple went to Clifford and a bidding war commenced. NoW offered £500,000, but because of its feud with Clifford, announced the offer was only good if he wasn't involved. In the end she stuck with him and sold the story to the Mail on Sunday for £250,000.