It is an extraordinary indictment of how a once all-powerful newspaper group has been marginalised. To be fair, the committee’s time was limited and it also failed to invite Sir Anthony O’Reilly, boss of the small-selling Independent titles. But one cannot escape concluding that the absence of Desmond — who may or may not have agreed to be quizzed — signifies the view of chairman Lord (Norman) Fowler, a former Times journalist, and his committee members that the once-great Express titles are now relatively insignificant and the views of their proprietor relatively irrelevant.

Desmond’s editors, the highly-respected Peter Hill of the Daily Express, Martin Townsend of the Sunday title, Dawn Neeson of the Daily Star or Gareth Morgan, who edits the Sunday edition of the red-top, were equally ignored. No surprise, perhaps, that those struggling to keep the Star afloat were overlooked. But the Daily Express, once Lord Beaverbrook’s pride and joy and the paper he wielded like a bludgeon to hammer home his pro-Empire propaganda? What does that tell us about Mr Desmond’s stewardship of the group since his flamboyant £125million purchase eight years ago? He breezed into the Express HQ , then on the south side of Blackfriars Bridge, vowing to take on the might of the Daily Mail and eventually restore the dominance of the Daily Express in the middle market. Staff at the time, of which I was one, were stunned by the arrival of this brash outsider. His most respectable title was the weekly feelgood celebrity magazine OK!. But his fortune had been made in soft porn titles, such as Asian Babes, and unsavoury extra-terrestrial TV outpourings on Television X. How, we wondered, had Tony Blair’s Government allowed their well-connected toady Lord (Clive) Hollick — he dumped the paper’s traditional pro-Tory line to support New Labour — to sell to someone like Desmond?

Those of us who had survived Hollick’s cost-conscious regime braced ourselves for further codswallop from the new man on the block. His Lordship had bought the title from Lord (David) Stevens, widely recognised within the industry as a disastrous proprietor, more interested in property than ink. In one curious twilight aberration Stevens had appointed new editors Richard Addis, for the daily title, and Sue Douglas for the Sunday. Trumpets sounded from the top floor of Ludgate House. The Mailwas to be assaulted and overrun. Money would be spent, talent hired and all the resources of the still-formidable Express harnessed to restore pride and greatness. Less than three years later Stevens retired to look after his money and Hollick assumed power. Addis was soon to learn of his sacking and replacement by Rosie Boycott in the media pages of Mohamed al-Fayed’s now defunct Punch magazine.

Seven-day merger failed

By day’s end Desmond was in situ. Hollick somewhat bizarrely rewarded “key staff ”, including me, with £40,000 each. I had met him twice. Far more deserving and longer serving staff were ignored. Boycott was on her way out but did the beleaguered staff no favours by holding on for three months as editor, refusing to confer with Desmond as she negotiated a substantial payoff. In that interregnum Desmond rarely ventured on to the editorial floor. One of his first moves was to appoint leading paparazzo Jason Fraser as an executive director. Fraser outranked newly-appointed editor Chris Williams yet knew little about the function of a newspaper. Desmond’s logic was that Fraser would guarantee a feed of exclusive pap pictures from around the world. As a snapper and agent for foreign photographers, Fraser’s appointment might have made sense. Unfortunately neither Fraser nor Desmond legislated for other titles, the Mail, Sun and Mirror, banding together and collectively offering more than Desmond would pay for exclusive pictures. Fraser’s resignation after just six months was partly precipitated by a promise of more than £70,000 to one of his paps for exclusive pictures of the Billie Piper-Chris Evans wedding in Las Vegas. Unfortunately a tourist with the equivalent of a box Brownie was lurking and his blurred pictures appeared in rival publications. Desmond declined to sanction Fraser’s agreed fee to his Vegas snapper.

In the meantime, Desmond’s only assault on the Daily Mail took the form of snide references to a newspaper called the Daily Snail. Oh how we all laughed. The man who was supposed to be mounting an awesome financial challenge to Lord Rothermere was reduced to running a tired series on the Rothermere dynasty’s one-time flirtation with fascism and, heaven help us, regurgitated information about the consequences of a pre-marital affair of Jonathan, the relatively new Lord Rothermere.

Coupled with this were Draconian cut-backs on expenses. Notebooks and pens were rationed. Those perceived to have high salaries were made redundant — 150 of 400 journalists went and some departments were slashed by 85 per cent. The hiring of cheap labour in the form of graduate trainees, a practice encouraged previously by Lord Hollick, was accelerated. On the eve of my departure I congratulated one of the graduate trainees who had previously worked for me and had been subsequently promoted to foreign editor. An outstandingly bright chap, he deserved his promotion. I asked him if he had been looked after financially. “Oh yes, they’ve doubled my salary,” he said. As he had been earning £13,000 as a trainee, he was now on £26,000. His predecessor was on more than £80,000.

That story encapsulates Desmond’s hugely successful financial stewardship of the Express. The daily’s circulation, once well above four million, now stands at 740,000 and drifting. The paper has ceased to be relevant. Opinion-formers ignore it. The Sunday Express, which under the editorship of John Junor was a must-read big Fleet Street beast, sells around 675,000. Sales of the relatively fledgling Daily Star and its Sunday spin-off are also declining, although, amazingly, in a good month the daily sells about a similar number of copies as the Daily Express. Yet Desmond was at one point paying himself £1million a week, including a hefty pension top-up. Now he gets less, but has set aside £17m of his company’s money to buy a corporate jet. Meanwhile, my successor as diary editor is on half what I was paid in the job and her down-table journalists are earning circa £20,000.

The one-off cull that continued

Sadly, what Desmond has proved is that national newspapers can be produced on a shoestring that gets more slender by the month. But a successful freelance insists that the Northern & Shell proprietor could produce them even cheaper. “The Daily and Sunday Express still look like proper newspapers, which says a lot for their dedicated editors and for Desmond’s knack of exploiting the ingenuity and talent of journalists who remain proud to work in the business. And even if they have no real clout, the papers are important to Desmond for two reasons: they give someone who made a fortune basically from TV porn a feeling of legitimacy, and also allows people who do business with him to think of him as a newspaperman. That’s important to him. For all the bluster and foul language, he’s socially very awkward and rather shy and he’s quite frightened of what people say about him, which is why the Express titles are rather dull.”

Life on a Desmond title is anything but, however. Having previously complained to the Press Complaints Commission that they were “coming under pressure to write anti-gypsy articles”, in August 2001 NUJ members at the Express group passed a motion “expressing disapproval at the sustained campaign against asylum seekers in pursuit of circulation”. The NUJ has blamed Desmond for interfering with editorial decisions on the titles, which it says prompted the recent £550,000 payout to the McCann family after his the newspapers turned hostile to the family when the Portuguese police named the parents as suspects. And earlier this year, staff from all four Desmond papers took part in the first full-day strike by national newspaper journalists in 18 years. Desmond cheerily crossed a picket line manned by union members who opposed moves by the company to outsource work over the past few years. The strike ended swiftly when management agreed to discuss bringing work back in-house.

But the fact remains that resources are slim, bordering on invisible. The daily title has no foreign correspondents and few specialists. On a cosmetic level it resembles its “rival”, the Daily Mail. In content it falls far short of the editorial juggernaut in Kensington. The freelance, who spoke to the BJR only on the understanding that he was not named, observed that when he writes for the Mail “loads of people will see it and call or email me. But when I’ve written for the Express nobody, as far as I could tell, even saw it”.

Yet still the profits roll in and the modus operandi adopted earlier by David Montgomery at the Mirror group and Hollick at the Expresses and honed to perfection by Desmond has entranced bean-counters at other titles throughout the industry. The philosophy of paying less and caring less has spread. Apart from those paid to editors and high-flying executives, salaries across Fleet Street have actually gone down since the rise of Desmond. In the mid-1980s I was paid £34,000 a year as a humble hack on the Evening Standard Londoner’s Diary. Now, aspiring newspaper reporters are lucky to be offered a short-term contract in the high 20s. The latest National Union of Journalists survey shows that nearly half of all journalists earn less than the average wage in the UK, and 75 per cent of journalists earn less than the average wage of “professional” workers. Journalists’ starting rates are, overall, at least £7,000 lower than the median starting salary for all graduates. But it is Desmond, a proprietor who placed little value on journalism or journalists, who has elevated cost-cutting — lower salaries, fewer staff, reduced resources — to an art form.

The trade has been diminished by the Desmond revolution. Stealing pens from hotels to write into notebooks that are rationed does not enhance the respect of journalists at the start of the 21st century. And the sorry decline of a once-great group has done nothing for Desmond’s standing within the industry. Nor, despite having abandoned his early support for New Labour and reverted to the Expresses’ traditional pro-Tory stance, has he achieved the political credibility he desires. In the recent publication of the Media Guardian’s 2008 top 100 movers and shakers, he tumbled 20 places to number 55. Still, there’s always that jet to console him.