Nigel Dempster, the doyen of diarists, dies aged 65

Nigel Dempster, the journalist who is considered to have created the genre of the modern newspaper gossip column, has died at the age of 65 after a long illness.

Dempster, who awarded himself the soubriquet of "Greatest Living Englishman", and who Private Eye referred to as "Dumpster", was one of the most colourful and high profile figures of Fleet Street.

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• Nigel Dempster

As well as being The Daily Mail's gossip columnist, or as he preferred to style himself, resident "social diarist", he made highly successful appearances in the Eye before falling out with the satirical magazine.

During his decades at the Mail Dempster gathered a series of scoops, of its type, including Harold Pinter's affair with Antonia Fraser, which the playwright's wife first read about in Dempster's column and the separation of the singer Bryan Ferry from his wife Lucy.

Dempster once said airily "there is a holiday in my heart when I discover another marriage breaking up". For many, that just reinforced the view of him as a peddler of scandals gloating over private grief.

However, some of his exclusives went way beyond the remit of gossip. Dempster revealed, for instance, that Harold Wilson was considering resigning as Prime Minister three months before it became public.

Colleagues would say that the 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, somewhat revisionist, view was that Dempster was carrying out a seditious form of guerilla warfare on the milieu, 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, educated at Sherbourne, Dempster started off in journalism as a tipster for gossip columns after an indifferent career in the City.

In a short space of time he was put in charge of the Mail's column by the editor Sir David English.

Dempster also started writing a column "Lord Grovel" for Private Eye. Richard Ingram, then editor, recalled yesterday " He was very good at it and he basically got in the stuff with us that he could not get into the Mail. He had this knack of writing really unflattering things about people yet still managing to continue seeing them socially."

After stopping his Private Eye column, Dempster insisted that he was continuing to expose the foibles of the rich and powerful, although critics say that the "legendary" status increasingly slipped into "in his own lunchtime" category, with repeated references to himself in the column.

Dempster also made the news in other newspapers on a few occasions, such as when he hit his deputy, who had announced he was leaving for another newspaper. Dempster apparently raged: "You are nothing but a bastard. You are a fucking nobody. I fucking made you".

It was reported that a brawl ensued and only the intervention of another executive and a passing nurse averted serious bloodshed.

That was lucky because Dempster apparently could not stand blood, as he had declared when he had refused a blood test on a drink-driving test, avowing a horror of needles.

Heoften took pleasure in pointing out that what he had started in one column now permeated whole newspapers. " 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, said: "Nigel was not only a treasured friend and a brilliant colleague but also one of the best diary writers Fleet Street has ever known. His scoops were the stuff of legend and his zest for life inexhaustible. We will all miss him."

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. He has a stepdaughter, Emily Kate Godolphin Harris and a daughter, Louisa Beatrix.