I couldn’t help feeling nostalgic when I heard that Nigel Dempster, the ex-diary editor on the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday died on Thursday June 12th aged sixty five. He had been suffering from a crippling wasting disease called Progressive Supranuclear Palsy.

When I first became a gossip columnist on David Bailey’s ‘Ritz Newspaper’ in the late Seventies, he was one of the first people I went to interview - in his office in the Daily Mail. We got on so well, that from then on, we became ‘best friends’. He even got me into the National Union of Journalists. In those days, a journalist couldn’t work on Fleet Street unless he or she was a paid up member of the union. Nigel offered to propose me and after he had signed my NUJ application form, told me to meet him in Private Eye’s office. ‘The ‘Greatest Living Englishman’, as Auberon Waugh called him, wrote a scurrilous column called ‘Grovel’ for the satirical rag. Just before I went to meet him in the office, the zip on my jeans broke, and I ingeniously pinned the zip together with a giant safety pin.

‘Punky,’ Nigel quipped.

Richard Ingrams who was Private Eye’s editor at the time offered to second me for the NUJ, but I declined his offer. In retrospect, it was rather stupid of me. It would have been hilarious to have had ‘Lord Gnome’, Ingrams’ byline on Private Eye as my seconder. I turned him down as I thought it would be more sensible for a friend to do it. I asked Maggie Koumi, then editor of ‘19′ magazine to second me. (She later became editor on ‘Hello’ magazine). I was a film critic at the time and Maggie and I sat next to each other every night in screening rooms viewing new movies three months before their release date.

I used to see Nigel Dempster day in, night out as we were both invited to the same events. Once, (Sir) Dai Llewellyn invited all the Fleet Street gossip columnists and myself to a dinner at Wedgies, a Kings Road club which he ran. I was the only woman, but I still don’t understand why Dai greeted us in fancy dress: a corset, black stockings and suspender belts when we arrived. Nigel didn’t show. My fellow hacks, which included ‘William Hickey’ on the Daily Express were so jealous, they spent the entire evening bitching about him, accusing him of being too grand to show. Yes, Nigel and I were friends for years and he was always incredibly kind to me, until he turned on me. But, he seemed to do that with a lot of his associates. A story was ultimately more important to him than friendship, and many a bewildered friend of his couldn’t understand why he betrayed them in his columns in the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday. He was the consummate gossip columnist. For him, a scoop always came first.

Frances Lynn is a professional writer and journalist. Her two novels, “Frantic” and “Crushed” are published by Eiworth Publishing. Her personal website is http://franceslynn.org

Tags: daily mail, david english, gossip, gossip columnist, Lord Rothermere, mail on sunday, nigel dempster

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