Naked couples walking through cornfields ' anything else is evil

As the days pass, more and more people are assuming that Hollinger International will be forced to sell the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Telegraph and The Spectator. Of the home-grown suitors, the favourite remains the pornographer, Richard Desmond, owner of Express Newspapers. Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT) is another potential bidder. Let me declare an interest. Although I write a column for the Daily Mail, I would be perfectly happy if a benign foreign publisher such as the Washington Post group acquired the Telegraph newspapers. My aversion to Richard Desmond is based on this simple fact ‘ that he has made his fortune partly out of publishing hard-core pornography.

Last week my colleague Matthew Parris disclosed that he is ‘rather relaxed about pornography’. Many people seem to be these days. Is Matthew really aware of the darker side of some of the things Mr Desmond has published? When the pornographer bought Express Newspapers in December 2000, the Guardian ran a magnificent series of articles about Desmond. The paper discovered that a company owned by him had registered a website which promised 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 went by the name of Anal Annie. This is hard core, as the Guardian acknowledged in an editorial at the time. ‘[Richard Desmond] has made his money,’ the paper wrote, ‘out of what ‘ in any sensible use of the English language ‘ can only be described as hard porn. His magazines and websites are explicit and frequently repellent in their depiction ‘ in both words and pictures ‘ of women.’