Max Clifford: Inquiry Into 74-Year-Old's Death Adjourned

A new date will be decided upon in due course.

An inquest into the death of Max Clifford has been adjourned.

Cambridgeshire’s assistant coroner Simon Milburn said that a hearing, originally listed at Huntingdon Law Courts on Monday, will not proceed until a later date.

The date of the next hearing will be set administratively.

The former celebrity publicist died in December 2017, while serving an eight-year sentence for sex offences, at Littlehey Prison in Cambridgeshire.

Clifford, 74, died in hospital days after collapsing in prison and at a pre-inquest review held in June, his cause of death was recorded as congestive heart failure.

Max Clifford
Max Clifford
PA Archive/PA Images

The coroner stated that cardiac AL amyloidosis – a rare condition caused by the build-up of abnormal proteins in organs and tissues – and plasma cell neoplasm, a disease which sees the body create too many plasma cells, were underlying factors in his death.

Clifford’s daughter, Louise, was not present at the hearing but speaking via a mobile phone placed on the coroner’s desk, she said that while she accepted the verdict, “there were matters that exacerbated his condition”.

The 47-year-old alleged her father did not have access to warm showers and complained to her about “being cold [and] lack of heating” in prison.

At the time of Clifford’s death, his daughter claimed “he had been ill for some time with heart problems”.

“Myself, his doctor and our legal team had fought for his diagnosis and treatment but to no avail,” she said.

Louise and her father outside Southwark Crown Court in 2014
Louise and her father outside Southwark Crown Court in 2014
Peter Macdiarmid via Getty Images

Clifford was jailed for eight years in May 2014 after being convicted of a number of charges under Operation Yewtree, the Metropolitan Police investigation set up after the Jimmy Savile scandal.

He was the first person to be convicted as part of the national investigation and found guilty of a string of indecent assaults that took place between 1977 and 1984.

In 2016, he was cleared of indecently assaulting a teenage girl after being accused of using his power to humiliate the 17-year-old into performing a sex act on him in the 1980s.

He had been due to appeal against all his convictions on the basis of fresh evidence.

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