MEDIA STUDIES
It looks as if the expansionist phase of the Egyptian empire has ended before it began
STEPHEN GLOVER
What has happened to the ambitions of Mohamed Al Fayed, the Egyptian-born owner of Harrods, to he a press magnate? A year ago he was trying to buy the Observer. Last September he relaunched Punch maga- zine. That was supposed to be the first of many glorious media ventures on the part of his new company, Liberty Publishing. These may be early days, but six months later Punch is not exactly prospering, and Mr Al Fayed has nothing else to show except a tiny radio station called Liberty.
A couple of weeks ago John Dux, chief executive of Liberty Publishing, resigned. There is no consensus as to whether he was pushed as he jumped, or jumped as he was pushed, or simply jumped. In any event, it is agreed that there was little or nothing for this hard-bitten former Murdoch executive to do. He had been used to running compa- nies with turnovers of many millions, but at Liberty he found himself playing daisy- chains with paper clips, or launching paper aeroplanes into his wastepaper basket.
His departure leaves Stewart Steven, chairman of Liberty Publishing, as a king without a court. But Mr Steven has himself changed his role by taking over the editor- ship of Punch, at least for the time being. Ever since Peter McKay vacated the editori- al chair last November, and took up his pen at the Daily Mail, Mr Steven has been occu- pied in trying to save the magazine. He is doing as good a job as might be expected of a very successful editor of the Mail on Sun- day and the London Evening Standard. But it is obvious that he can't have much time to broker deals or buy newspapers on behalf of Mr Al Fayed, even if there were deals to be brokered or newspapers to be bought.
It seems it is much harder to buy failing newspapers than one might think. There are several titles losing money or sales, or both: the Independent and the Independent on Sunday, the Observer, the two Express titles. Add to those the Daily and Sunday Mirror, which have been dropping circula- tion while still remaining decently prof- itable, and there is quite a choice. The trou- ble is that even loss-making papers are valued expensively. The Independent titles, which Liberty has certainly coveted, though without making an approach, were valued at some £70 million when they last changed hands, even though they were jointly losing at least £10 million a year.
To lavish such • sums on a loss-making paper, and to spend what it might take to turn it around, is a formidable undertaking. Mr Steven has tried to attract other part- ners, partly because Mr Al Fayed's reputa- tion is such that he might lack conviction as a sole proprietor, but also because the owner of Harrods, though very rich, can see the disadvantages in raising many hundreds of millions of pounds entirely off his own bat. That would be the price of Express Newspapers or Mirror Group. Several peo- ple, including Janet Holmes a Court who is said to own one per cent of Australia, have shown an interest, but for hard-headed investors the cost of loss-making newspa- pers is high in relation to likely future rewards. A seasoned newspaper tycoon is needed to take that sort of risk, and there aren't many of those around.
Whether Mr Al Fayed himself is made of the right stuff may be doubted. Until a cou- ple of years ago, when he made an unsuc- cessful attempt to wrench the corpse of Today from the strangely protective arms of Rupert Murdoch, he hadn't shown much love for publishing. His desire to persecute the Government doubtless partly explains this new- found enthusiasm for newspapers but, alas, his dreams are not to be. Mr Al Fayed has ruled himself out of the big league of publishers.
He had hoped to raise £500 million from floating part of Harrods, and to use some of this capital to buy newspapers. The flota- tion has been abandoned. Some say that Mr Al Fayed wished to put an unrealistical- ly high price on his shop, others that he did not relish the prospect of having to disclose information which remains confidential in a privately owned company. Whatever the reasons, he will not now have the large sums of money which would be needed, even if the burden were to be shared, to lay siege to groups as big as the Express or Mirror. He could doubtless find the funds to buy the still struggling Observer, should the Guardian Media Group ever decide to Please, Sir, what's a sex-change?' sell it, but he is unlikely to have the cash, or probably the appetite, for much more. He will have to content himself with Punch — the magazine that seemed to him the epitome of sophistication when he was a young boy scampering about on the banks of the Nile. He seems to have had danger- ously little idea of the kind of magazine he wanted, and is relying on Mr Steven to get him out of a hole. The magazine is losing money, and I rather doubt whether it is selling as many as the 60,000-odd which Is claimed for it. Mr Al Fayed's detractors say that he will reduce his losses by turning the magazine into a monthly, but that would surely be too great a humiliation even for a shopkeeper who will never be a press tycoon.
Readers who have followed earlier columns about Punch may be interested to know the whereabouts of Peter McKay, its short-lived editor. He is writing an irre- sistible new column called Ephraim Hard- castle in the Daily Mail with the assistance of a young anarchist called Sam Leith, grandson of Sir John Junor. Readers of the Evening Standard's now defunct Mr PepYs column will recognise the genre. Ephraim Hardcastle is subversive, funny and pep- pered with little scoops. Some sages have pointed out that the Daily Mail already has a diary or gossip CO umn written by Nigel Dempster, who Is approaching his 25th year in the job. TheY speculate that Paul Dacre, the Mail's slight" ly scary editor, is setting Mr McKay against Mr Dempster, as a farmer might put a hun- gry and a well-fed weasel in the same sack. I think this an unreasonably sombre view. Mr Dacre has long wished to resurrect the Ephraim Hardcastle column, which his father, Peter, wrote on the Sunday Express. It was invented by Lord Beaverbrook, Who claimed that the original Ephraim was a hopeless 18th-century columnist. So we should see this as an act of filial loyalty on Mr Dacre's part, as well as of considerable inspiration, rather than an attempt to kill off poor Mr Dempster. The point about Mr Dempster is that he is not only more famous than the people he writes about, he is also more famous than his column, which he has mysteriously tran- scended. Mr Dempster has become an institution, to which I am sure even Ephraim will defer.
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