• When Richard Desmond has an autobiography to promote, the treatment of the press baron by his Northern & Shell empire is increasingly reminiscent of the cult of personality encouraged by the late Mirror group proprietor, Robert “Cap’n Bob” Maxwell. Last week N&S employees turned up to find the entrance to their offices completely dominated by a blown up version of the book’s jacket, itself dominated by Desmond’s face. On three consecutive days, that face also loomed over the front page of the Sunday or Daily Express, either trailing a extract from the memoir or reflecting Tuesday’s story, “Stars turn out to toast mogul’s book launch” (more photos illustrating that crucial news story, including four of the mogul, appeared in an all-Desmond spread on pages 2 and 3). It was then the turn of Friday’s Books and Music section to make its contribution, and it didn’t disappoint: reviewer Virginia Blackburn, who is apparently on “Richard” terms with the author, awarded Desmond’s The Real Deal five stars.
• When not basking in praise from his own toilers and OK!-friendly celebs, Desmond spent last week slating media industry figures and others in a series of interviews. Channel 4 boss David Abraham was called “a Jew that doesn’t want to be a Jew” on the basis of having turned down a Conservative Friends of Israel invitation (as a further punishment, his name is spelt Abrahams in the book). In an apparent Desmondian confusion over the roles of owner and editor, his old feuding partner Paul Dacre was accused of having no “balls” and so missing a chance to buy the Express titles. Lord Sugar, Desmond disclosed in an account of their celebrated row when YouView colleagues, is “a short person” and when angry, pushed him and employed “a large number of expletives which I myself, naturally, would never use”. Tony Blair was “not all that good” on guitar when they jammed together. As for media journalist, Henry Mance, who revealed that Desmond ordered a £580 bottle of wine for their Lunch with the FT interview, he asked the mogul at the book launch what he thought of the piece, whereupon Desmond (according to the Evening Standard) “turned to his security guard and said ‘use nice concrete, yeah?’”
• With Rupert Murdoch stepping down from his role as chief executive of 21st Century Fox, and his replacement in that post (after a curious hiatus) by his son James, there have been lazy claims that this is a “Shakespearean” succession struggle. In fact, the obvious parallel is with Empire, the TV series originally shown on, yes, Fox and centred on the terminally ill head of a music-based entertainment conglomerate, currently flourishing (despite the aggressive scheduling against it of No Offence by, er, Channel 4) on E4. Of the sons contending to be Lucious Lyon’s main heir, James – who set up his own hiphop label as a student, and is seen as the most vulnerable to scandal – corresponds to Hakeem the rapper; Lachlan matches all-about-business Andre; and Elisabeth’s counterpart is Jamal, as like him she spent a long time estranged from the empire and its boss before a reconciliation. All that’s needed for the mutual mirroring of fact and fiction to become positively eery is for the ostracised Wendi Deng-Murdoch to make a forceful comeback as a succession contender, just like Lucious’s ex-wife Cookie.
• Relations between Sarah Montague and James Naughtie sounded somewhat frosty when they co-hosted Today on Wednesday, particularly after Montague interrupted her colleague to read out the time herself at 7.40 when Naughtie was slowly getting round to it (his only task between two of her items). By the time the Scot ended the show by glumly reciting the producers’ names – just after a wordy Montague interviewee had been permitted to nearly crash the pips – he gave the impression of being thoroughly cheesed off and glad it was over. With her straight-ahead style contrasting with his more circumlocutory approach, they may be Today’s least compatible mixed doubles team; and yet, intriguingly, they’ve been perversely paired again on Monday morning. Will they play nice?
• Another “Heff Shuttle” between the Mail and Telegraph titles has happily been completed, with curmudgeonly columnist Simon Heffer (as Monkey foretold) defecting to the latter group for the third time. He will be delighted to find the Style Guide he authored (in his then additional role as grammar supremo) still in force and in its place at the foot of telegraph.co.uk’s homepage, but probably appalled to discover how routinely it’s disregarded. The very first words or phrases in his legendary list of banned words, for example – ahead of, as of now, autopsy, bid (when meaning attempt), bloodbath – have all been used in the past month, with bloodbath appearing on the front page in a report on Greek debt. Mere verbal anarchy was evidently unleashed on the Torygraph world before the Heff’s Third Coming.
• Things you may not know about Jesse Norman MP, the new chairman of the culture select committee.
(a) He was four years above David Cameron at Eton and, at 6ft 5in, is four inches taller.
(b) In a rare, shaming spell of toadyism, he produced a book celebrating the Big Society after the 2010 election (now available used for £0.01p on Amazon; current sales rank 321,888th); but the ex-don later redeemed himself with a well-received study of Burke.
(c) Only their near-identical names (she is Jessye, not Jesse) have encouraged false rumours that he leads a double life in drag as an African-American opera diva.
(d) Though never a lawyer, he may be the Commons’s most deadly cross-examiner (post-Paxo Newsnight could do with him): he reduced Lord Grabiner QC to table-thumping and furious harrumphing while on the Treasury committee.
(e) Had Labour done better, and the SNP less well, he might have been single-handedly responsible for the Tories losing the election (he led the rebellion on Lords reform that resulted in the Lib Dems’ tit-for-tat blocking of boundary changes seen as likely to shift around 20 seats to his own party).
(f) The Hereford and south Herefordshire MP was briefly investigated by police during the campaign over “Muffingate”, after he was seen carrying packs of sweets – gifts to voters are forbidden – when canvassing. He successfully protested that there weren’t many muffins, and were only offered to children.
(g) Chris Bryant, the shadow culture secretary, calls him General Von Klinkerhoffen, which sounds nasty – he was the Nazi general in ‘Allo ‘Allo – but is apparently meant to suggest he’s surprisingly amiable.
(h) The New Statesman’s Kevin Maguire has relayed a contact’s memory of the young Norman as a member of the Woodcraft Folk, a children’s organisation associated with the left. This partly pinko past is usually attributed to his mother, who was an artist.
(i) His entrepreneurial father, Sir Torquil Norman, made his fortune from Polly Pocket toys, but also turned London’s Roundhouse into an arts venue.
(j) Norman, an amateur jazz trumpeter, may be good news for Radio 3. Whereas Whittingdale is an unlikely metalhead, his successor enthuses about the social role of music and has named Louis Armstrong (as well as Lincoln) as a political hero.
• Hopes that Top Gear could become feminised, or at least less laddish or blokeish, with Chris Evans in the driving seat – raised by radio interviews in which Evans enthused that a female co-presenter was a “definite” or “100%” prospect, although he and BBC2 controller Kim Shillinglaw were later more cautious – could well be disappointed. What Evans said next, after all, was that the presenting team should reflect the fact that “there are some fantastic girls in and around the motoring world”. Uh, oh.
• Perusing Evans’s car reviews for the Mail on Sunday (actually idiosyncratic mixes of autobiography, family news and seemingly reluctant vehicle notes) would also give concern to anyone optimistic about a de-blokefied Top Gear, because he routinely treats the cars he’s testing as female (eg in a recent review of the Alpina XD3: “On the move she munches up the miles like a starving wolfhound at a finger buffet ... She has effortless acceleration and she fears nobody.” No change, there, you might think, but Jeremy Clarkson, in his Sunday Times reviews, actually normally goes for “it”, saving equating cars with women for occasional lefty/feminist-baiting flourishes: it was the exception not the rule when he recently said of an Alfa Romeo Coupe: “will it go wrong? Probably. But so will your girlfriend from time to time. And you’re not going to swap her for a librarian, are you?”
