How Desmond the porn king has put the frighteners on the Rothermeres
STEPHEN GLOVER
My breakfast last Sunday was enlivened by the front-page headline in the Sunday Express: 'Daily Mail Link to Vice Girls.' I write a column for the Daily Mail. Had some cherished colleague disgraced himself? Was a fellow columnist running a brothel near King's Cross'? Alas, the link was not so direct. Some time ago Associated Newspapers, publisher of the Daily Mail, bought Loot, a highly profitable magazine specialising in free classified advertisements. According to the Sunday Express, 'vice girls are advertising themselves through the pages' of these titles.
Ha, ha, I thought. Was this very likely? Richard Desmond, proprietor of the Sunday and Daily Express, is a successful pornographer who has in the past fought battles with the Daily Mail, though officially a truce was called some 18 months ago. Presumably, I surmised, this was a recrudescence of Desmond's hate campaign against the paper, and doubtless involved a considerable twisting of the facts. But the story seemed to have legs. It did indeed appear that prostitutes have been placing their smalls in the pages of Loot, though on what scale I cannot be sure since I do not subscribe to the magazine. Mr Desmond had used his considerable expertise as a pornographer to sniff out ads which might have escaped the notice of ordinary mortals like you and me.
I am sure it was inadvertent, but Loot's running of such advertisements does seem very odd, though I expect it is perfectly legal since they are couched in invitations to visit massage parlours and so forth. No doubt the magazine will now review its policy. There is another policy which should also be reviewed. This is the truce which Associated Newspapers entered into with Mr Desmond at the beginning of last year. On Associated's part the terms of the deal have been scrupulously adhered to. Mr Desmond may have observed the letter of the agreement, but he has repeatedly flouted its spirit. Newspapers do not normally attack rival titles, whatever their sins and omissions, in the way the Sunday Express excoriated Associated Newspapers last Sunday.
The origins of the truce are as follows. After Mr Desmond acquired the Express papers in December 1999, the Mail, like others, drew attention to his pornographic past. The Mail does not like pornography; and perhaps its campaign was the more ferocious because Associated's own bid for the Express titles appeared not to have been taken
entirely seriously. At all events, it could not be denied that Mr Desmond's fortune had been built on pornography. His magazines Horny Housewives, Private Lust and Asian Babes were described in some quarters as being 'soft porn'. But the Guardian discovered that a company owned by Mr Desmond had registered a website which promised live heterosexual sex and live lesbian sex, as well as other images portraying a sex-crazed woman of 78, another who was pregnant and another who went by the name of Anal Annie. That is disgusting.
The Mail continued its pounding of Mr Desmond, and when it learnt that the pornographer had popped round to Downing Street for a chat with Tony Blair, its fury knew no bounds. (Since then, of course, Mr Desmond has been a visitor to Chequers, and has become Alastair Campbell's favourite proprietor.) But in February 2000 Mr Desmond struck back with two articles in the Daily Express attacking Lord Rothermere, then aged 32, the proprietor of the Daily Mail. The first was a rehash of material about the first Lord Rothermere's flirtation with fascism in the 1930s. The second piece concerned an affair which the present Lord Rothermere had had, aged 20 and several years before his marriage, which produced a child out of wedlock.
It did not seem to me that Lord Rothermere's wild oats were particularly discreditable, the more so since, as the article was forced to concede, he continues to support his child and his former lover. Nevertheless, this attack was evidently distressing to him and his wife. A deal was made between Mr Desmond and an Associated chieftain that was brilliantly described by my esteemed colleague. Roy Greenslade, in the Guardian. The Daily Mail agreed to withdraw a promotional campaign highlighting Mr Desmond's pornographic past, and to stop labelling him as a vile pornographer in its pages. For his part, Mr Desmond undertook to stop writing nasty pieces about Lord Rothermere's private life.
It seemed to me then, and it seems to me now, that this was a grossly unequal arrangement. Unless Lord Rothermere is, unbeknownst to us, head of a multi-millionpound white slaving empire, he has done nothing of which he need feel ashamed. Mr Desmond, by contrast, is a hard-core pornographer who has insinuated his way into the heart of British public life. But if the deal was unequal, so was its observance. Week-in, week-out the socalled media pages of the Sunday Express attack Lord Rothermere and Paul Dacre, editor-in-chief of Associated Newspapers and editor of the Daily Mail. (They also run scurrilous pieces about every other newspaper group. They make the media pages of Mohamed Fayed's defunct Punch look like the Book of Common Prayer.) The recent article in the Sunday Express, accompanied by a sententious leader, marks the furthest point Mr Desmond has reached in his war against Associated Newspapers.
It is a good axiom in life never to deal with blackmailers because they always come back for more. I do not, of course, imply that Mr Desmond is literally a blackmailer, but he has certainly put the frighteners on the Rothermeres. My point is that you should never make agreements with such people. No one remotely like Mr Desmond has ever owned a national newspaper in this country. Though he may be entertained by Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell, he does not really seek respectability. And because he has no reputation to lose, he is potentially dangerous. It is much better to confront such people. Better to show them that you know exactly what they are, and that you're not afraid of telling the world.
In November 1947 Hugh Dalton, the chancellor of the exchequer, resigned after he had outlined the contents of his Budget to the lobby correspondent of the Star, a London evening newspaper, thinking he was speaking off the record. Even before he rose in the Commons, the paper was on the streets, predicting the Budget.
Last Saturday evening the Treasury press department rang several newspapers. Each was offered a morsel from Gordon Brown's Comprehensive Spending Review which, in the Treasury's view, best suited its priorities. So the Observer led with the story that every secondary school in Britain would get an increase of £50,000 in its budget. The Sunday Times splash informed readers that Mr Brown would announce a crackdown on waste. And so on.
Mr Dalton's values have long been consigned to history. But isn't the press, in gobbling up these morsels, acting as a PR arm of the government?
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