Max Clifford’s Beatles claim challenged

Max Clifford, the publicist who has been appearing on the nation's television screens with alarming frequency over the past few weeks as the public mouthpiece of Jade Goody, the cancer-stricken reality TV star, has had one of his most outlandish claims - that he made the Beatles - challenged. 

Very much not so, says the Liverpool band's official biographer, Hunter Davies, who became acquainted with the four mop tops during the 1960s when he was working on their authorised biography, and who disputes Clifford's oft-repeated boast that he somehow "made" John Lennon, Ringo Starr, George Harrison and Sir Paul McCartney when, at the ripe old age of 19, he was working in the EMI press office. 

"I have about 500 Beatles books, plus about 2,000 magazines, programmes and articles about The Beatles, yet I have not read one reference in them to Mr Clifford's contribution," Davies told the Daily Telegraph. "I was with the Beatles for 18 months and from none of them, nor from Brian Epstein, did I hear the words: Thank God for Max, we would not have done it otherwise." 

He says that Clifford may, as a junior assistant at EMI in 1962-63, have "shifted a few [press] handouts", but that Epstein always took control of The Beatles' "real publicity work". ·