Express owner Richard Desmond is hardly an ornament to the national press, or indeed anything else (he still runs pay-TV porn channels), but he had the effrontery to try to sue author Tom Bower for suggesting in a book about the jailed former Telegraph owner Conrad Black that he had been worsted in a business deal with the aforementioned Conrad.
So what? You win a few and you lose a few and Conrad certainly lost his argument over his company and he’s now in a Florida penitentiary.
Anyway Dirty Dickie sued and lost, mostly because he claimed in court that he never tried to influence what Express journalists wrote.
All proprietors influence what their journalists write. Why is The Times going so hard after Silvio Berlusconi?
One, because he’s a randy old git who shouldn’t be running a piss-up in a brewery; two, because he opposes Rupert Murdoch’s pay-TV ambitions in Italy.
And any Express hack will tell you that what Dickie wants, he gets.
Although in this case, obviously, he didn’t.