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’.

Four years on it is very difficult to find anyone with a harsh word to say about Mr Desmond. He has been assimilated into English life, and is regarded as almost respectable. The Guardian, his former persecutor, has become his friend. On Monday the newspaper allowed him to write a self-serving article in its pages in which he blew his own trumpet. The Daily Express, so he informed us, had been turned into a triumph under his guidance. (In fact it has lost sales, but is more profitable as a result of ferocious cost-cutting.) I particularly admired the way in which Mr Desmond described the magazines that had made his fortune — and enabled him to buy the Daily Express — as ‘adult and other specialist titles’. This was a notably coy reference to unambiguously pornographic magazines such as Horny Housewives, Big Ones and Asian Babes.

We can only speculate as to why the Guardian should have clasped Mr Desmond to its bosom, if that is the appropriate image to use of a man who has made a fortune out of bosoms, and a lot else besides.