Richard Desmond

Richard Clive Desmond (born 8 December 1951) is a British publisher, businessman, and former pornographer.

According to the 2021 Sunday Times Rich List, Desmond was the 107th richest person in the United Kingdom.

He is the founder of Northern & Shell, a publisher known for running The Health Lottery and for having owned a variety of pornographic titles and of celebrity magazines (including OK! and New!), Britain's Channel 5, pornographic television network Portland, and Express Newspapers.

In the mid-1970s, Desmond combined his interest in music and advertising to found, with Ray Hammond, International Musician and Recording World, a monthly magazine for musicians which expanded to have editions in the UK, US, Australia, Japan and Germany.

This was followed by the publication of Home Organist, whose editor contributed the old-school motto Forti Nihil Difficile ("Nothing is difficult for the strong" – it was Benjamin Disraeli's motto), still used by the Northern & Shell publishing group.

Desmond eventually bought out Hammond.

During the 1980s, Desmond ran a premium rate phone sex company until 1988 when he sold the business after British Telecom raised concerns about the content.

In 1982, Northern & Shell began to publish the UK edition of Penthouse, although the licensing deal ended in the 1990s.

The company soon began to publish a range of pornographic magazines itself including Asian Babes, Readers Wives and Barely Legal, numbering 45 such titles in all when they were eventually sold.

According to The Guardian, Desmond had made a deal in 1991 with Norman Chanes for running advertisements in his pornographic magazines for telephone sex lines run by Chanes' mafia associate, Richard Martino of the Gambino crime family.

Northern & Shell began publication of the celebrity OK! magazine as a monthly in 1993, later becoming a weekly in March 1996.

It is the largest weekly magazine in the world, with 23 separate editions from the US to Australia to Azerbaijan and with a readership in excess of 31 million.

It was originally an imitation of Hello! magazine but now outsells its rival.

Desmond's Northern & Shell launched The Fantasy Channel in 1995.

It was one of the first pornographic channels available on satellite television in the UK, competing against other channels available on cable.

The channel was later rebranded as Television X.

A headline in the Evening Standard in 2000 said "Porn Publisher to Buy Express" in reference to Desmond.

Desmond put the magazines up for sale in 2001 in an attempt to distance himself from pornography and employed a spin doctor to try and rebrand himself.

In a 2002 interview for BBC Newsnight with Jeremy Paxman, Tony Blair was asked if it were appropriate to accept a controversial £100,000 donation from Desmond due to Desmond's links with the pornography industry, to which Blair replied "if someone is fit and proper to own one of the major national newspaper groups in the country then there is no reason why we would not accept donations from them".

By 2003, Desmond's company had expanded to broadcasting seven channels, with plans to launch six more and the business was described as "extremely lucrative", generating £17m of the £60m operating profits of Northern & Shell.

A website, fantasy121.com, was also launched.

He said in 2003 in a television programme, The Real Richard Desmond (Channel 4): "Would it be better to be a former pornographer rather than a pornographer? I'm probably being more honest by keeping them. They serve a need."

In February 2004, in a move that some media outlets interpreted as an attempt to improve his image in view of his bid for The Daily Telegraph.

Desmond sold the pornographic magazine business to Remnant Media for approximately £10 million.

Desmond was apparently "wounded" by references to himself as a pornographer.

Desmond has emphasised that his material has been available through WHSmith and Freeview, saying that: "If it was pornography you would end up in prison because pornography is illegal".

Northern & Shell's business interests in pornography ended in April 2016 when Portland Television, established in 1995, the broadcaster of Television X and the Red Hot channels, was sold for under £1 million in a management buyout.

Desmond has often been referred to as "Richard 'Dirty' Desmond", or "Dirty Des", in Private Eye magazine due to Northern & Shell formerly owning pornographic magazines and television channels.

In November 2021, The Guardian reported that Desmond was upset at his Wikipedia entry using the word "pornographer" and had instructed lawyers to get the term removed because, in his opinion, the phrase "only refers to publishers of illegal or obscene material".

In 2020, Desmond was involved in controversy after pressuring Robert Jenrick, the then Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, to overrule the Planning Inspectorate and approve a housing development for Desmond's company.

The timing of the decision saved the company £40 million but was later overturned.

Desmond was born in Hampstead, London, into a Jewish family, the youngest of three children, and was raised in Edgware, in north west London.

His father was descended from Latvian Jews, and his mother was of Ukrainian-Jewish descent.

His father, Cyril, was at one time managing director of cinema advertising company Pearl & Dean.

An ear infection caused the sudden loss of Cyril's hearing and, according to Richard, he used to take him along, when he was no more than three years old, to act as "his ears" in business meetings, where he ostensibly acquired his "first taste of business dealings".

After Cyril lost a significant amount of family money to gambling, his parents divorced, and 11-year-old Desmond moved with his mother, Millie, into a flat above a garage; he has described his impoverished early adolescence as a time when he was "very fat and very lonely".

Desmond was educated at Edgware Junior School and Christ's College, Finchley.

Desmond left school at 15 and started working in the classified advertisements section of the Thomson Group, while playing the drums at gigs after a day's work.

After moving to another company, he became the advertising manager for the music magazine company Beat Publications, the publisher of Beat Instrumental.

Desmond owned two record shops by the time he was 21.