Maurice Saatchi: the greatest campaign for the love of his life

Maurice Saatchi does not lack determination. He made his name and considerable reputation by building what was in the early 1990s the world’s largest advertising agency. But selling products to the public is one thing. Selling radical reform to the medical establishment is altogether more challenging.

Last week, more than 100 oncologists signed a letter to the Times criticising Lord Saatchi’s medical innovation bill, which is making its way through parliament. They argued that it is misconceived, will not help patients and, most damningly, that “it will not make any meaningful difference to progress in treating cancer”.

Yet the whole point of the bill, to which Saatchi has dedicated the last four years, is to make a major advance in the fight against cancer; if not a cure, then at least some far more productive solutions. It is his strong contention that the treatment of cancer has been inhibited by the law of medical negligence. His bill is predicated on the notion that the sort of experimentation that drives science forward is currently discouraged by the fear of legal suits.

In the letter, the oncologists denied this claim: “The law of medical negligence does not hinder our work or prevent innovation,” they wrote.

Still, it’s unlikely that Saatchi will be deterred by the judgment of these experts, not least because he is a man who is convinced of his mission. And mission is the appropriate word.

In December 2009, Saatchi’s wife, the novelist Josephine Hart, was diagnosed with primary peritoneal cancer. She died 18 months later. Saatchi was shocked by the lack of available treatment. He and his elder brother, Charles, had a mantra at Saatchi & Saatchi: “Nothing is impossible”. As his former colleague, Tim Bell, once said: “He never thinks there’s a wall he can’t get round or over.”

For someone used to asserting his will it must have been particularly frustrating to stand by impotently while his wife succumbed to terminal illness. Her death, he later said, “was a wasted death” and “that all 165,000 cancer deaths in this country every year are wasted because science advances not one centimetre as a result of them”.

Hart and Saatchi’s marriage was one of celebrated closeness, in which Saatchi performed the role of the ultimate uxorious husband: loyal, devoted and utterly in love. He would tell people that his wife was the person he most admired and the writer he most respected. His grief has been massive. He told an interviewer two years ago that every morning he eats breakfast by his wife’s tomb at their country house in Sussex. He admitted that he still spoke to her all the time and described himself as “beyond hope”. As he put it: “She is me. I am her. We are one.”

The psychological reading of the bill that, following Hart’s death, he has committed himself to getting passed, is not lost on Saatchi. And he is aware of the objections that, as a consequence, have been and will be made.

“‘This is just grief talking’,” he has said, ventriloquising his critics. “‘He would say that, poor chap. Deranged and distracted by grief, he has produced this’.” But Saatchi has a ready answer: “I don’t think bereavement is a disqualification for rational thought.”

And rational thought has always been his strong suit. The son of Iraqi Jews who moved to England when he was a baby, Saatchi was a bright child who studied sociology at the LSE in the mid-1960s. It was a period of student protest and revolutionary ideals, but Saatchi was resolutely focused on his studies – he received a first.

Deciding against an academic career, he joined Michael Heseltine’s Haymarket publishing company, where he met Hart. They didn’t marry until 1984, after each had been through a previous marriage. Heseltine described the young Saatchi as “an ace”, but when Charles said he wanted to set up an advertising agency, Maurice instantly answered his call for a partner.

In the early years, it was widely seen that Charles, already an established creative director, was the boss and his younger brother very definitely the junior partner. Stories of Charles shouting at Maurice, and even attacking him with a chair, have decorated many an advertising lunch. Apparently the older brother used to ask his younger sibling: “How could you have come from the same womb as me?”

But gradually it was the younger Saatchi, with his astute business sense and diligent analysis of deals, who became increasingly integral to Saatchi & Saatchi’s success. Perhaps most important of all, it was Maurice who developed a close relationship with Margaret Thatcher when the agency landed the Conservative party account, a move that, as a result of the famous “Labour Isn’t Working” campaign, was to make the brothers’ names.

John Hegarty, who went on to found his own agency, recalled that in contrast to Charles, who maintained an antisocial distance, Maurice was “very good at shaking people’s hands, getting people together. He was affable, learned, very rounded.”

A keen reader of business literature, Saatchi was turned on early to the “globalisation” theories of Harvard professor Theodore Levitt, which became the intellectual justification for the agency’s rapid spread around the world, until it had offices in 77 countries. But hubris set in. The brothers unsuccessfully tried to buy Midland Bank, the financial markets became wary, and in December 1994 Maurice was kicked out as chairman following a shareholder revolt. He quickly regrouped and set up a new agency, M&C Saatchi, in which Charles was only really nominally involved.

“Charles didn’t like Josephine,” said their biographer, Ivan Fallon. Such was Maurice’s devotion to Hart, it’s hard to imagine he could have tolerated his brother’s antipathetic feelings. Friends say the brothers no longer speak.

In 1996, Maurice was made a peer and he served as shadow Treasury spokesman under Ian Duncan Smith’s leadership. His interests in terms of legislation were mostly focused on reducing red tape and simplifying the tax system – classic Tory concerns.

He was made co-chairman of the Conservative party in 2003. But after Michael Howard’s defeat in the 2005 general election, he seemed to take personal responsibility when he published a pamphlet with the chapter heading “How I Lost the Election”.

He is still agitating for tax reform. This year, he called for the abolition of corporation tax for all small businesses, but it’s the medical innovation bill that he, and many of his admirers, believes will be his great political contribution.

He says that almost all his friends initially advised him not to pursue the bill. You can see their point. It’s not just that it might be dismissed as the ravings of a grief-stricken man. It’s also the danger that it could turn into a charter for quacks and charlatans.

Saatchi maintains that the bill clarifies the differences between “responsible innovation” and “reckless experimentation”. Whether that line can be drawn with reliable accuracy is open to debate. What is clear is that cancer is a disease whose treatment, in many cases, offers little hope to the patient or their loved ones. Saatchi insists that the problem is the standardised response.

“Innovation is deviation,” he said last year, “so non-deviation is non-innovation, and here you have the explanation for why there is no cure for cancer. It’s as simple as that.”

It’s not that simple, of course, but it’s all too easy to conceive the circumstances in which those for whom conventional cancer treatment can do nothing might wish to try a drug or approach that has not fully completed the necessary trials. As has been noted by Saatchi and his supporters, it can take 15 years and £1bn to approve a single drug. But exactly who decides – and how – when the experimental option should come into play? And what mechanism will ensure risk-taking doesn’t begin to extend beyond a strict remit?

These are valid questions and doubtless Saatchi feels they are dealt with in the bill. But they will not mean much to someone who was given the three-word diagnosis Hart received: “Malignant. Advanced. Inoperable.”

That’s when people want to reach out for an alternative, any alternative. If it makes its way through the Lords and then the Commons, Saatchi’s bill might well provide that alternative. But whether that will mean better survival results is something that, for all Lord Saatchi’s certainty, remains unknown.

Born 21 June 1946 in Baghdad, the third of four sons to Nathan Saatchi, a textile merchant, and Daisy Ezer. The following year the family moved to north London.

Best of times In terms of both his professional and political ambitions, probably the Conservative party 1979 election campaign that made Saatchi & Saatchi’s name and also helped bring his heroine, Margaret Thatcher, to power

Worst of times The death of his beloved wife, Josephine Hart, in 2011. He has said that he has tried to “continue Josephine’s life as Josephine”.

What he says “You have drugs that are 40 years old. You have surgical procedures that are 40 years old. You have a survival rate that is the same as 40 years ago and the damage done to the immune system by the treatment is so severe that it’s hard to know if the patient dies from the cancer or the treatment.”

What others say “We do not believe that Lord Saatchi’s bill will help patients, and are dismayed that it is being promoted as offering hope to patients and their families when it will not make any meaningful difference to progress in treating cancer.” Letter to the Times signed by more than 100 senior oncologists.