Porn baron eyes ultra-respectable Telegraph

RICHARD Desmond is known to detest the “porn baron” title afforded him, but porn baron is exactly what he is.

Pornography allowed him to make a conservatively estimated personal fortune of over €800 million.

It funded his purchase of Britain's Express Newspapers stable, and has now allowed him make a serious challenge for another set of titles those of the Telegraph Group.

These include the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Telegraph, and the Spectator magazine.

If Mr Desmond succeeds in his bid to add those titles to his portfolio, it will make him one of the most powerful newspaper proprietors in the world.

And it will leave conservative Middle England reeling that their beloved Telegraph would be under the control of a man who made his money from magazines such as Asian Babes and Readers' Wives.

Mr Desmond, of course, has now ditched his magazines - selling them en bloc to Remnant Media.

But his company, Northern & Shell, is holding onto its highly-lucrative adult television channels, which include Britain's most popular one, the Fantasy Channel.

One theory for the sale of the magazine division is that Mr Desmond is trying to smarten up his image as he bids for the ultra-respectable Telegraph titles.

But Mr Desmond is not known for being particularly image-conscious or bashful. So it may just have been a sensible business decision: the adult-magazine sector is in decline while demand for soft-porn television channels is increasing.

While the sale of his magazines seemed a relatively straightforward deal, getting his hands on the Telegraph titles will be a much more difficult affair.

For a start, he is facing intense competition: several rivals are expected to make offers to Hollinger International, which owns the Telegraph titles.

Most, if not all, of those rivals will be deemed to have eminently more suitable "backgrounds" than Mr Desmond.

But that is unlikely to deter a man who has become a serious player in the worlds of both media and politics through a mixture of hard work, aggression and abrasiveness.

Upsetting people is something Mr Desmond seems to delight in.