What next? Will Richard Desmond soon be lecturing us on declining moral standards?

When Richard Desmond acquired the Daily Express four years ago there was an outcry. That committed Christian, Tony Blair, immediately had the pornographer turned press baron round for tea, but perhaps that was only to be expected. Almost everyone else was appalled that a man who had made his fortune out of such publications as Spunk Loving Sluts should have acquired a national newspaper. Foremost among Mr Desmond’s critics was the Guardian, which ran a magnificent series of articles about him. It discovered that a company owned by him had registered a website which promised live heterosexual sex, live lesbian sex, as well as other images too disgusting to mention in the first paragraph of a magazine article. In an editorial at the time, the Guardian remarked that Mr Desmond had ‘made his money out of what — in any sensible use of the English language — can only be described as hard porn’.