The
newspaper and ex-porn baron has built a reputation for a flamboyant
style. Now it's the turn of Channel 5 to tremble when he gets his duck
horn out
Every decade gets the media villain it deserves. Rupert Murdoch's
emergence at the Sun
in the 70s coincided with the coarsening of British life and he
gleefully exaggerated it; nobody better exemplified 80s greed than
Robert Maxwell, preaching probity while raiding his employees' life
savings to keep himself in helicopters; Conrad Black, meanwhile,
personified exactly the cult of the CEO and the corporate hubris of the
90s. In this tradition, Richard Desmond,
for 10 years now the proprietor of the
Daily
Express has been the man for our times.
In the photographs that accompanied his
£103m purchase of Channel 5 , Desmond was pictured outside the
station's Covent Garden offices under a banner that advertised one of
the channel's shows. "Don't Stop Believing," the banner read. It might
have been a caption to Desmond's recent career. If there has been one
commodity that Desmond has traded in over the last decade it is the
credulity of the British public. He has made it his mission to explore
the outer reaches of the idea that you couldn't make it up. For the most
part, it has been a tremendous success.
Most rich men who buy into papers do so in order to purchase political
influence; Desmond is a curious exception. He seems to buy papers and
now television stations principally in order to offer final scientific
proof of the adage that: "No one ever went broke underestimating the
intelligence of the public."
When he purchased the Express group in the millennium year, with the
fortune he had made from porn magazines at Northern and Shell, he placed
most of his editorial faith in the idea that, contrary to all natural
law, the obsession with celebrity, which he had nurtured in the pages of
OK!, still had plenty
of life left in it.
Rosie Boycott, the hapless editor he inherited, recalled him toasting
his arrival in the company of the Beckhams whose wedding he had lately
"bought" for a million pounds in his penthouse office: "Fuckin' hell,
I own the Express. And
David, you're the best footballer in England. Fucking brilliant.
Victoria, you're the most famous pop star in England. Fucking
brilliant."
Even Piers Morgan, at that time editor of the
Daily Mirror, was
beginning to have sweaty existential fears that there might be more to
life than soap stars showing their knickers getting out of taxis, but
Desmond was nothing if not dogged in his beliefs. Thus, while other
media barons have been fretting of late about "digital platforms" and
"e-readers", Desmond has been evangelical and steadfast in his
concentration on content. "TITS! TITS! TITS! On a big blonde bird.
That's what I want on the front of my magazines," was how he reportedly
defined his philosophy at a staff meeting shortly after purchasing the
Express.
It says much for this faith that the slight decline in the circulation
of OK! this year was
attributed not to changing multimedia habits or the complex fallout of
the credit crunch but to the fact that, according to one business
analyst in the Times:
"Katie Price may have got married to Alex Reid this February but that's
not as good as divorcing Peter Andre last year."
For someone who once presided over a range of titles that attempted to
create a taxonomy for the infinite range of human desire
Big Ones,
Fifty Plus, Readers'
Wives, Big and Black,
Horny Housewives,
Only 18,
Mothers-in-Law Desmond has a contrarian's taste for
simplicity. His business "genius" is widely attributed to two things: an
unrivalled relish for cost-cutting half of his newspaper group's staff
were dispatched on his arrival; the seven executives lost at Channel 5
are no doubt only the beginning of his television cull and an instinct
for "cross-fertilising" content across the various strands of his
empire, a philosophy that suggests that however thinly entertainment is
spread, it might still be spread thinner.
Over the course of Desmond's ownership, no one could accuse any of his
titles of a lack of trust in this formula. The
Express group stretched
the truism that "Princess Diana sells newspapers" for many, many years
after every other media outlet had given up on her ghost; its coverage
of the disappearance of
Madeleine McCann took obsessive
compulsive publishing to new extremes; the newspapers' defeat in the
libel courts, and payment of £550,000 to the
McCanns,
detailed "well over 100" front pages of the
Daily Express alone that
included entirely fictitious allegations.
"It's not work, this," Desmond likes to say, "it's fun." The story goes
that he learned his boardroom skills by accompanying his father, the
managing director of Pearl and Dean, the cinema advertisers, to
meetings. Clive Desmond had become deaf through illness and his
six-year-old son apparently did his listening for him. More formative
perhaps was the fact that when his parents divorced after his father
gambled the family savings away when he was 11, he moved with his
mother and lived in a flat above a garage in Finchley, north London.
According to Desmond, he was "very fat, very young and very lonely" at
grammar school, and when "the mothers and fathers would pick up the
other kids in the car, he'd be getting on the bus"; he left school at
15. The initial ambition was to take out some of his frustrations on a
drum kit he formed a blues band and still plays charity gigs with the
likes of Robert Plant and Roger Daltrey but he subsequently seemed to
discover that it was more cathartic to knock the heads of subordinates
together.
Unpredictability is the key to his management style. Desmond tends to
deny, with a grin, the more lurid stories the executive he locked in a
cupboard, the marketing man late for a meeting who was ordered to stand
on a table and drop his trousers and describe himself as a cunt though
he has suggested that his employees enjoy the "colour" these tales add
to the daily grind. His longer-term staff attest to an unswerving
loyalty from their boss and to his abiding sense of "mischief", his
employment of a duck horn, for example as a response to ideas he doesn't
like.
His real venom, they say, is reserved for the opposition. Desmond's bκte
noire, Lord Rothermere, the Daily
Mail chairman who inherited the job from his father, he
delights in calling "Little Johnny" and a "lucky sperm". Desmond has the
self-made man's loathing of dynastic wealth, though of course, when the
time comes, he plans to hand over his empire to his own fortunate
gamete, currently at Cambridge.
For a while, Desmond seemed to be at pains to try to recreate himself as
an establishment figure, troubled by questions such as: "Is it worse to
be described as a pornographer or a former pornographer?" These days, he
appears happy just to be talked about, even by
Private Eye, as "Dirty
Des", and making money. He has a paternal pleasure in the expansion of
his empire across the world, the bravura British export of Kerry Katona
and "upskirts" to "India, Australia and China". He has taken PR advice
from his friend Philip Green, the government's billionaire austerity
consultant, "that you shouldn't hold grudges. I used to get all hung up
on that bloke said this and another bloke said that..." As if to prove
the point, Stephen Pollard, whose
final leader for the Express
spelt out the words "Fuck off, Desmond" using the first
letter of each sentence, was offered his column back on the paper.
Desmond, when he talks about himself, takes pride in his honesty:
"Unlike them," he says of most of the rest of the world, "I am not a
hypocrite." He is a family man, an observing Jew, who cycles around
newsagents in north London on days off checking they have his headlines
"Now asylum if you're gay", "Brit kids forced to eat halal meat"
appropriately displayed. He is a generous patron of various charities,
including Moorfields Eye Hospital and Tower Hamlets Women's Aid. His
lucrative subscription porn channels, Red-Hot TV and Television-X, are
"proper adult entertainment"; he deals in "real" celebrities such as
Jordan, not "toffs on polo ponies".
When he discussed the philosophy of the
Express with his staff
they came to the conclusion that what they believed in was: "Justice for
the guys with a bit of get up and go who want to make something for
themselves and their families and look themselves in the mirror and say,
'Good, that.'" Pretty straight guys, like the "socialist" billionaire
who would have them believe they buy "the greatest newspaper in the
world".
THE DESMOND FILE
Born
In north London on 8 December, 1951. His parents divorced after his
father, the managing director of cinema advertising company Pearl & Dean
lost the family money by gambling. Desmond left school at 15 and joined
the Thomson group, selling advertising for trade publications while
playing the drums at night.
Best of times
In a word, now. The acquisition of Channel 5 is a new high point for his
self-made media empire
Worst of times
Following his parents divorce aged 11, Desmond moved with his mother
into a flat above a garage and has described his impoverished early
adolescence as a time when he was "very fat and very lonely". .
They say
"He does not walk around ordering things. He does walk around the
newsroom from time to time, as it happens, but he does not get
involved." Sunday Express
editor Martin Townsend
"He is a proprietor without propriety." - Don Foster, MP, former Liberal
Democrat culture spokesman
He says
"Running newspapers is the most fantastic fun you can have... it's just
the same as a band. Your editor is your lead guitarist, your bass player
is your number two, you've got the circulation manager at the keyboard,
and you're sitting there drumming, trying to add passion and sparkle and
keeping time." |