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Nigel Dempster, gossip columnist. Died aged 65.
Nigel Dempster, the journalist who is considered to have created the genre of modern newspaper gossip columns - and who awarded himself the soubriquet of "Greatest Living Englishman" - has died after a long illness.
Dempster, whom Private Eye magazine referred to as "Dumpster", was one of the most colourful and high-profile figures of Fleet Street. As well as being the Daily Mail gossip columnist, or as he preferred to style himself, resident "social diarist", he made highly successful appearances in the Eye before falling out with that satirical magazine.
Throughout his career, particularly the 1970s and early 1980s, Dempster gathered a series of scoops, including Harold Pinter's affair with Antonia Fraser, which the playwright's wife first read about in Dempster's column.
He once said airily "there is a holiday in my heart when I discover another marriage breaking up". For many this just reinforced the view of him as a peddler of scandals gloating over private grief.
Some of his exclusive stories went beyond the remit of gossip. Dempster revealed, for instance, that Harold Wilson was considering resigning as British Prime Minister three months before it became public.
Some argued that a deliberately cultivated cynical exterior was not a true reflection of the man. He was capable of acts of great kindness and also had been known - on occasions - to pull stories because of the distress they would cause to those involved.
Another view was that Dempster was carrying out a seditious form of guerrilla warfare on his social surroundings, the showbusiness glitterati and minor aristocracy - the lifeblood of his column - which he secretly held in contempt.
Born in India of English and Australian parents, and educated at Sherbourne, Dempster started in journalism as a tipster for gossip columns after an indifferent career in the City. He was put in charge of the Mail's column by the then editor Sir David English and also began writing a column, "Lord Grovel", for Private Eye, a market for material he could not print in the Mail.
Richard Ingram, then editor of the Eye, recalls: "He had this knack of writing really unflattering things about people, yet still managing to continue seeing them socially."
Ingram felt the hierarchy at the Mail were apprehensive about Dempster's Eye links and pressured him to leave the magazine. The final straw was when he brought in the story of Tory party chairman Cecil Parkinson having an illegitimate child with his personal assistant.
After he left the Eye his work for the Mail fell off and included frequent references to himself.
Dempster took great pleasure in pointing out that what he had started in one column now permeated whole newspapers in a remorseless diet of showbusiness and trivia.
"When I started gossip was in gossip columns, now its on page one and page 100," he would chortle. Paul Dacre, editor-in-chief of Associated Newspapers and editor of the Daily Mail, described him as "one of the best diary writers Fleet Street has known. His scoops were the stuff of legend and his zest for life inexhaustible".
Dempster was married twice, first to Countess Emma Magdalen de Bendern, a daughter of Count John Gerard de Bendern. His second marriage in 1977 was to Lady Camilla Osborne, daughter of the 11th Duke of Leeds.
- Independent
