When gossip was king

This month marks the tenth anniversary of the death of Nigel Dempster, once the world’s best-known gossip columnist. For three decades he was paid a fortune by the Daily Mail to provide juicy tittle-tattle about the royal family (he was a close friend of Princess Margaret), the aristocracy (particularly priapic minor baronet Dai Llewellyn), tycoons including Jimmy Goldsmith and racing figures such as Robert Sangster, as well as mainstream TV stars like David Frost and Robin Day.

Alas, by the time of Nigel’s death (from the awful effects of progressive supranuclear palsy) his Diary page was already an anachronism. His brand of gossip was in its death throes. His cast of characters had already been ousted by reality TV nonentities all desperate for their 15 minutes of fame. Mannequins Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell used their scrawny elbows to gain column inches, ‘artists’ like Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin shocked their way into the new encyclopedia of tittle-tattle.