Express Newspapers proprietor, Richard Desmond, has responded to his criticism from Daily Mail editor-in-chief Paul Dacre at the Leveson Inquiry in a predictably colourful way, reports Press Gazette.
The media magazine recalls that addressing the Leveson Inquiry seminar in London, Dacre said:“But let’s not forget that it was the political class in the form of the Blair Government –in the risible belief that he’d turn the Express Labour – which decided that Richard Desmond, the businessman who’d made his money from porn, was a fit and proper person to own a newspaper. And it was Ofcom, itself a statutory regulator, which recently judged Mr Desmond a fit person to buy Channel 5 – this after he’d quit the PCC, effectively holing self-regulation below the line.”
Press Gazette points out that Desmond was somewhat less erudite in an interview with The Guardian’s Dan Sabbagh: “Asked about rejoining the Press Complaints Commission he says:‘I’m not sitting there with Dacre…Dacre goes out slagging me off; he can go fuck himself. I’m not worried about statutory regulation. I’m regulated by Ofcom for TV. I’m happy with that’.”
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