Why is Mr Blair prepared to get into bed with 'Anal Annie'?
STEPHEN GLOVER
For two weeks little has happened at Express Newspapers. The company's new owner, Richard Desmond, has been on holiday in Thailand, whence he returned on Tuesday. Rosie Boycott, the unhappy editor of the Daily Express, has been doing her best to enjoy the Christmas festivities. It is the calm before the storm. There arc strong rumours that Mr Desmond is about to sack a large number of journalists as a cost saving measure to add to the 60 or so support staff with whose services he has already dispensed. If he dismisses 50 or 100 journalists he will give Ms Boycott the pretext she is looking for to jump ship.
As the drama unfolds, a growing number of politicians and journalists are asking this question. Should the government block the sale of Express Newspapers to the porn baron Mr Desmond? On competition grounds there is no case at all since he does not own any other newspapers. Might there be a case on other grounds? Many liberalminded people will recoil from the idea. Few of us want to live in a country in which a government can decide who should and should not own newspapers on a subjective assessment of character.
And yet Mr Desmond is an unusual case. Before Christmas the Guardian produced evidence linking him with hardcore pornography. The paper discovered that a company owned by him had registered a website which promises live heterosexual sex, live lesbian sex as well as other images portraying a sex-crazed woman of 78, another who was pregnant and another who goes by the name of Anal Annie. We already knew that Mr Desmond publishes unsavoury magazines such as Horny Housewives and Private Lust — indeed, he appears to be responsible for more than half of the 'top shelf magazines produced in this country. The Guardian's investigations have confirmed that 'soft porn' is hardly an adequate description of his publishing activities.
Some people might argue that in his way Rupert Murdoch, owner of the Times and the Sun, is a bit of a pornographer. Our forefathers would have considered his Page Three girls pornographic. You would not wish to give your maiden aunt free rein with some of Mr Murdoch's satellite channels in the early hours. But surely he is not in the same league as the new owner of Express Newspapers. Only the most ardent feminist would argue that Mr Murdoch's images degrade women. What Mr Desmond publishes is disgusting, and fulfils the standard definition of pornography as demeaning of women, turning them into objects to be dominated or abused by men.
You might think that all this would upset that champion of family values and regular churchgoer, Tony Blair, but hitherto he has kept his feelings firmly under control. He has told Rosie Boycott that he cannot and will not stop Mr Desmond owning the papers. A couple of weeks before Christmas Mr Blair invited the new proprietor for a chat in Downing Street. Also present was his press secretary, Alastair Campbell, who, history suggests, does not have a very censorious view of pornography. Mr Campbell's thinking is that, whatever Mr Desmond's moral shortcomings might be, the continuing support of the pro-New Labour Daily Express is important in the months before the general election. In fact the paper is pretty marginal to Labour's fortunes. A recent Mori poll suggests that the proportion of Daily Express readers intending to vote Tory is pretty much what it was at the last election when the paper endorsed the Conservatives.
There may be another reason for the apparent disinclination of Mr Blair to pull the rug from under Mr Desmond. He has fallen out of love with the Daily Mail. He resents its regular attacks on his mate Charles Falconer, the minister in charge of the Dome. His attitude of wary respect for the paper has hardened into something close to dislike. The Mail was, of course, one of the thwarted bidders for Express Newspapers, as was the Telegraph Group, owner of 77ze Spectator. My own feeling is that the right-wing Mail (for which. I should mention again, I write a column) would have discovered that in running the Laboursupporting Daily Express it was not being true to itself, but that is by the way. My suggestion is that Mr Blair's present feelings about the Daily Mail may be making him more sympathetic towards Mr Desmond than he otherwise would be.
Ile really should put the paper out of his mind. Whatever he does, it or the Telegraph Group could anyway re-emerge as potential buyers of Express Newspapers since Mr Desmond's pockets are not particularly deep. The new proprietor may find
that he has to dispose of the Daily and Sunday Express while hanging on to the Daily Star. We will see.
Mr Blair's calculation now should simply be whether Mr Desmond is a fit and proper person to own a national newspaper. I don't believe that he is. Peter Mande!son, by whose judgment Mr Blair sets such great store, is thought to have his doubts.
Of course, Mr Blair cannot simply block the sale. It is being treated as what is called 'a completed merger'. The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) is now considering the matter, having given a deadline of 27 December for representations, and is expected to report in about a month, though it has four months if it needs them. The OFT is primarily concerned with competition issues (of which, as I say, there are none) but it might uncover other information which would warrant a recommendation to Stephen Byers, the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, that Mr Desmond's take-over be referred to the Competition Commission. Strictly speaking, the OFT is independent, and Mr Byers has no power to refer without its say-so, but it is possible to imagine judicious political pressure being applied to affect the outcome. There is a precedent. In 1990 the pornographer David Sullivan was prevented from buying the Bristol Evening Post by the Monopolies and Mergers Commission (predecessor of the Competition Commission) on grounds that had to do with his reputation as a publisher rather than any issues of competition.
It is all essentially very simple. Mr Desmond is a pornographer. He has made a small fortune out of displaying women in the most repellent poses. It is interesting that the most spirited opposition to his takeover of Express Newspapers has not come from right-wing newspapers, though the Daily Mail has certainly had its say, but from the leftist Guardian and Independent. There is a surprisingly widespread agreement that pornography is not mainstream, and that it is undesirable for a pornographer to own the Daily and Sunday Express, the more so given that there were alternative prospective purchasers who are perfectly reputable. Mr Blair should set aside considerations of short-term electoral gain, as well as his feelings about the Daily Mail. Surely he does not want a man such as Richard Desmond to stand as part of his political legacy.
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