His detractors paint him as a boorish idiot who got lucky. But Richard Desmond's business acumen is in little doubt. Having amassed a personal fortune of £950m enough to put him 44th on last year's Sunday Times Rich List the Daily Express proprietor added a television channel to his portfolio last week with his £104m acquisition of Five. Sources close to the pornography tycoon claim this is just the start, say James Robinson and Maggie Brown in The Guardian. As he closed in on the deal last Friday, he allegedly led his board in a rendition of the Carpenters' classic, We've Only Just Begun.
Desmond, now 59, was never academically inclined and recalls being 'very fat, very young and very lonely' at his grammar school in Finchley. He started working at a local jazz club as a coat-checker when he was 13 and left school at 14 when he talked himself into a job flogging classified advertisements at Thomson Newspapers. By the age of 21 he owned his own house, a couple of record shops and some property. In 1974, he set up Northern & Shell and launched his first magazine, International Musician. It was a hit.
Eight years later Desmond secured his first big deal when he won the rights to publish the British edition of Penthouse, marking the beginning of a magazine empire that went on to include Asian Babes and Readers' Wives, says Tim Luckhurst in The Independent. He launched OK! in 1993, a "characteristically cheeky" imitation of Hello!, which eventually overtook its rival, and in 2000 he acquired Express Newspapers, enlarging the group to include the Daily Star and Daily Star Sunday (a "commercial triumph"). Although he sold his adult magazine titles in 2004, to his annoyance he has never been able to shake off the pornography magnate sobriquet.
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Other labels stick too. Desmond deserves "sickly praise" for his success, but he owes it to "hard salesmanship, humiliation of employees and rivals and draconian cost-cutting", says Tom Bower in The Guardian. Desmond says he's just cost-conscious. He has relocated sub-editors to Lancashire to save money, but he has also spent huge sums on aggressive advertising and buying the rights to celebrity weddings. He also gives hundreds of thousands of pounds to charity. His personal spending habits reflect a combination of natural subversiveness and a childish sense of humour there are few other ways to explain his insistence on being served a banana at exactly 11am and 5pm each day by a liveried butler.
Desmond's volcanic temper is legendary. He is reputed to have locked one of his own executives in a cupboard. A Daily Express editor, Ted Young, claimed Desmond punched him in the stomach after he failed to run an obituary on an obscure musician. He's certainly not a man who likes to be crossed. While he is said to be fiercely loyal, as also he told one close associate, "As good a friend as I am, I'm also the worst enemy you'll ever have."
A case of millionaire menopause?
Desmond might have sold his pornographic magazine titles, but he still owns several lucrative pay-TV sex channels. So there is every reason to fear for what our children may now be exposed to on Five, says Stephen Glover in The Independent. When he bought the Daily Express, many thought he "might not be a proper person to own a national newspaper" and there was a "terrific hullabaloo". Yet the purchase of Five took place with "barely a murmur of protest", in spite of the greater public-interest issues.
There are reasons for the "easy ride" Desmond has received. Now that Sky is a platform for Desmond's sex channels, the Murdoch-owned titles are "hardly in a position to throw stones". An embarrassing spat with the Daily Mail nine years ago ended in a "non-aggression pact" and other newspapers appear to be too frightened by Desmond to engage with him.
True, says Tom Bower in The Guardian. But it's not just the media who are to blame. That Ofcom has allowed a man like Desmond to control a potentially lucrative franchise "beggars belief". "Protected by Britain's libel laws and a pact among newspaper proprietors not to attack each other, he has become a major media player Next stop the House of Lords."
This feels like a case of "millionaire menopause", says Peter Preston in The Observer. The Daily Express is increasingly irrelevant, Desmond's fellow newspapers barons "curl a lip" and "politicians don't bother to ask him for tea". Surely he just wants to be "up there in lights"?
The truth is he doesn't care what people think, says Chris Blackhurst in the Evening Standard. By applying past strategies to Five, my bet is he'll make it work and "add to his fortune. And the fact we might not like it won't concern him a bit."
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