Is he the most repellent of newspaper proprietors? From porn to the Beckhams’ wedding – a cut-price Citizen Kane
The conventional wisdom among most of the candidates who want to succeed Ed Miliband as Labour leader is that he just wasn’t business-friendly enough. What can that phrase mean? Even the candidates themselves seem hard-pressed to know how friendly the party needed to be and to what kind of business. Are there to be limits? Blairite precedent suggests not, especially when the business is the media. Let the witness here be Richard Desmond, who by November 2000 had made enough money from specialist periodicals, pornography and OK! magazine to buy Express Newspapers for £125m; or, to be more exact, enough assets to secure a loan from Commerzbank in Frankfurt that enabled the purchase.
Moments after he walked into the Express building for the first time as its owner, he took a call from Tony Blair inviting him to come to Downing Street that evening “to celebrate”. Desmond demurred – he wanted to meet his staff – but went round the following night to find Blair “very relaxed, very hospitable and very charming”. Desmond, who thought of himself as a Tory, found himself disarmed by a prime minister who could chat about rock and pop music of an earlier period, when Blair was a student guitarist and Desmond an aspiring young drummer. He was also flattered by Blair’s keen interest in his porn magazines. Asian Babes has since become the most celebrated of these – the one his detractors liked to mention – but he had another called Forty Plus. Desmond takes up the story: “Eventually Blair moved on to other matters. ‘One thing I want to ask you, Richard, is – can you tell me something? Forty Plus. Is it women aged 40 plus, or is it, like, 40 plus in measurement?’
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Moments after he walked into the Express building for the first time as its owner, he took a call from Tony Blair inviting him to come to Downing Street that evening “to celebrate”. Desmond demurred – he wanted to meet his staff – but went round the following night to find Blair “very relaxed, very hospitable and very charming”. Desmond, who thought of himself as a Tory, found himself disarmed by a prime minister who could chat about rock and pop music of an earlier period, when Blair was a student guitarist and Desmond an aspiring young drummer. He was also flattered by Blair’s keen interest in his porn magazines. Asian Babes has since become the most celebrated of these – the one his detractors liked to mention – but he had another called Forty Plus. Desmond takes up the story: “Eventually Blair moved on to other matters. ‘One thing I want to ask you, Richard, is – can you tell me something? Forty Plus. Is it women aged 40 plus, or is it, like, 40 plus in measurement?’
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