Family values - Max Clifford style

THE YOUNG woman who could be responsible for bringing down the Government perches stiffly in her chair, her back held upright with a metal rod. Her name is Louise Clifford, and she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis 19 years ago. Such is the irony of fate that her chance tragedy could conceivably end the Conservatives' 18-year grip on power.

For Louise, 25, is the daughter of Max Clifford, the PR man who has made the sale of political and sexual scandal his own. He had just set up his own company when Louise developed a swollen finger which wouldn't go down, the first indication of a condition which left her in terrible pain and almost unable to walk or write.

In a life worthy of a Frederick Forsyth thriller, Mr Clifford spent 16 years ferrying her to hospital for operations to replace her hips and knees and to have the rod fixed into her spine. As he did so, he talked to doctors, nurses and patients. And he got more and more angry at the way the Government treated the National Health Service.

Cut to the PR's business, which is going better and better as his poor daughter is cut up and rebuilt. He is getting bigger stories and clients. He becomes famous for his ability to produce kiss and tell exclusives. And he resolves to use his power to unseat the corrupt Government that is so uncaring to its sick.

The extraordinary thing, as the nation realised on Monday, is that he might even manage it. For then, a day after embarrassing the Tories with allegations about Jerry Hayes MP and a relationship with a young gay man, Mr Clifford revealed that he had at least two further scandals up his sleeve which would expose the Government's hypocrisy over family values.

"It is a personal vendetta based on what they have done to the NHS," he explained on the front pages. "The death and suffering they have caused to so many people in this country is something I have watched with growing despair and anger over the last 16 years."

The reason for his vendetta has not had it easy either. Louise's face has been swollen by drugs, and she looks a decade younger than her age, but she is pretty and has a healthy interest in clothes - when we met she was wearing trendy DKNY shoes - and she fretted about how she would look in our pictures.

She waits for the next question quietly, and conceals embarrassment at being helped out of chairs or helped with her clothes. "I don't really have many bad moments where I feel I'm missing out on things. I'm really a positive person, that's my nature." But it was hard, she concedes, having her knees replaced (and they will have to be again quite soon; parts wear out) weeks before her 16th birthday. Because of her operations her education was attenuated; she eventually did her A levels at a boarding college for disabled students and got two As and a B.

Her father is so proud of his Louise; he would do anything for her. "It breaks your heart, it tears you apart," he says.

Talking about his daughter is one of the times when Clifford loses the quality he appears to share with John Major of being a brilliantly-disguised robot. It's not that he looks through you - you are not there at all. The first time we met he sat me at right angles to his desk and let me talk to the wall.

He is surprisingly courteous, however, totally professional, and his peculiar brand of honesty stymies his critics. On the wall of his New Bond Street office is the 1986 Sun story which started him on the road to fame - "Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster". It was a lie, he freely admits, as are other stories he places in newspapers. More than anyone else, Clifford has liberated the British newspaper industry from the old-fashioned assumption that news should be based on fact.

He has become, in the eyes of the establishment, a merchant of sleaze. David Mellor and Antonia de Sancha; Lady Buck; Will Carling and Princess Diana; Pamela Bordes; the Diana gym pictures. Dabbling in the stuff of other people's souls, as one establishment figure said of the press's obsession with Diana - before he discovered how she had helped the press to do so.

Mr Clifford, a self-confessed Christian, is unbothered by this. "If you're saying that by revealing sleazy people and sleazy activities that makes me sleazy, I don't think so, quite the opposite in fact," he says. "I bring things to the attention of the British public which show people in power as they really are and I'm happy to do that as and when I can." He is not out to unseat the Government for who they are, he emphasises: but for what they have done. It is this Government he wants out.

Does he believe he can do it? He hesitates. "It would depend on what the story was. If the public was totally revolted by a story which I'm able to put in front of them, not necessarily sex, it might be corruption or cruelty, then, who knows?"

The Government will have to wait to see whether the secrets which Clifford currently holds carry that power. He won't name names because he does not want them to stop the story getting into the tabloids. "These people have a lot of power; you don't want to forewarn them."

But he will say that when a scandal is given birth into the world, the public are rarely privy to the full facts. "These stories are often the tip of the iceberg," he claims; and certainly he told me something about one of the big scandals of recent years which gave it a totally different complexion.

What does Louise, Clifford's chosen heir ("but only if she wants it"), think of the methods by which her father supports her? A year into a communications degree at Bournemouth University, she is a mature, private young woman, but with strong views. She has been both overwhelmed and pleased by his fame, and the fact that the spotlight has turned on her.

She will not make judgements about the ethical question marks over the lives and motivations of his clients, many of whom she meets. "I didn't much enjoy the Mandy and Paul story," she says of the hostile coverage of Mandy Allwood's decision to keep all eight of her babies after getting pregnant following fertility treatment.

"I'd met a woman who this freakish thing had happened to but who appeared to me to genuinely want to go through with the pregnancy. In my conversations with her she wasn't this reckless person not listening to medical advice, she felt the idea of selective termination was too hideous to contemplate."

And Jerry Hayes - the latestClifford scandal, revealing that the married MP allegedly had a gay affair? "I don't have strong feelings," she answers eventually. "I feel sorry for his wife, if he was sleeping with a gay man and then going home and sleeping with her. That's appalling, putting her at risk."

Nor is Louise unduly upset at the attacks on her father. "I don't like it but he doesn't - he really doesn't - get upset. He very firmly believes that it is alright as long as his family and the people he loves know what he's all about."

And does she believe he could unseat the Government? "I don't see that, to be honest, really." She pauses. "But I wouldn't mind working in his office." And adds with a hint of yearning: "His staff all seem to have such a good time."