Sorry, I'm out to lunch

Nick Ferrari is the editor chosen by Richard Desmond to destroy the Evening Standard's monopoly in London. So why does he think he can stroll into the office at 1pm? Vincent Graff seeks the answer

Nick Ferrari did not ask to be made editor of Richard Desmond's putative free London evening newspaper. When the phone call came initially, it was to see if the hack-turned-radio presenter would be prepared to play a rather smaller part in the Daily Express publisher's latest attempt to humiliate Lord Rothermere and Associated Newspapers. He was asked if he fancied writing a column - but the conversation meandered, and the former Sun and Mirror man instead found himself suggesting stunts that might publicise the free paper.

Ferrari, once editor of The Sun's Bizarre gossip column, suggested sending a reporter to march up and down in front of the Evening Standard's office wearing a sandwich board declaring: "The end is nigh." "So of course he found this hilariously funny," says Ferrari, "and he suggested I should be the editor."

Ferrari, however, already has a day job. For the past two years, he has been presenting the mid-morning phone-in on LBC 97.3. So Desmond asked him if he'd "come in and be a figurehead".

Ferrari told him that wouldn't work. Instead, he says, they have reached a compromise: "When the paper launches, of course I will be there all the time. But when we get it absolutely right, I will be able to throttle back a little bit and get some key people around me [to run the paper]."

There is only one problem with his explanation: the more Ferrari describes the deal, the more it sounds like he will be a figurehead. Being there "all the time" translates as being there "all afternoon" - he will not be giving up his LBC job, even in the short term. "I am not going to pretend that I will have my sleeves rolled up and be [at the newspaper] at 6am. I won't be. But I will be able to get exactly what I want, where I want it."

Instead, he will leave his home in southeast London at 7.15am to be driven, along with the morning newspapers, to the radio studios. He'll use the hour-long journey to catch up on the news, and to speak both to his producer at LBC to discuss his show, and to his news and features desks.

Then - bang! - at 9am he will be out of contact for the next three hours, cocooned in a soundproofed studio, talking to his listeners. God help you if you are a news editor looking for some guidance from your boss on the day's splash. Perhaps you'd be best advised to call into Ferrari's radio show.

Purdah will end at noon, prompt, when his mobile will be switched back on, he'll jump into another waiting car, and speed off to the Daily Express building on the other side of London. He'll be lucky to be there by 1pm.

No worries, says Ferrari. "The presses won't start rolling until 2pm." He does admit that the newspaper will be "virtually done" by the time that he walks through the door. "But the minute I am out of the studio I will be able to talk to them on the phone." I shouldn't worry myself, he says, about the fact that Veronica Wadley, his opposite number at the Standard, tips up at her office at 6am, a full seven hours before her new rival. Doing the show will mean he will be in tune with Londoners' opinions, he says - and his callers will even hand him scoops (though these will be as readily available to anyone else who listens to the show).

Ferrari's hands-off approach is but one of the factors that doesn't quite make sense about the new freesheet. Its name, for instance. An attempt to call it the London Evening Mail - a deliberate and obviously doomed attempt to annoy Rothermere, who owns the Daily Mail - was halted by the High Court, as an infringement of Associated Newspapers' copyright. Throughout our interview, Ferrari refers, a little irritatingly, to his newspaper as "the London Evening Paper Project", though he concedes that colleagues are using the name "PM", seen on some of the inside pages of an early dummy, as a working title.

Never mind the name, though: a far bigger problem looms. The paper was originally to have launched last March, then in "late spring or early summer". We are now in mid-summer, and Ferrari won't say how far away we are from seeing the paper on the streets.

It's getting it on to those streets that is the problem. Some time ago, London Transport signed contracts with Associated Newspapers guaranteeing Rothermere's company exclusive newspaper distribution rights at Tube stations for Associated's own morning freebie, Metro. So, as things stand, Desmond is barred from giving away his paper, which is aimed squarely at commuters, at the only viable points of distribution. No distribution deal, no paper.

Ferrari admits that this could scupper the whole project, yet he sounds curiously casual about such a fundamental problem. Distribution "is being resolved", he says, refusing to go into any further detail. "Obviously if you can't give [the paper] away there is no point in doing the thing." Desmond is not bluffing: the paper will appear. "They wouldn't have committed this far down the line unless they felt it was going to happen."

Yet Ferrari's laid-back attitude is disconcerting.When I ask what sort of paper he is planning, he offers few clues - largely, of course, because he does not want to alert Associated to his plans. But I am left wondering, too, whether Desmond has decided what sort of paper he wants. The last dummy was produced a full two months ago.

Here are the few specifics that Ferrari mentions. His paper will carry "far more features and campaigns than Metro"; it will probably call for the scrapping of the congestion charge; it won't be party political; it will be suburban in outlook; and it will be more "accessible, friendly and brighter" than the Evening Standard. He won't lead on items from that day's nationals; the features pages will display a light touch, include lots of gadgets and gizmos, and the paper will include men in their fashion shoots. None of this sounds like groundbreaking stuff.

He won't (I suspect can't) reveal how many journalists he'll employ, beyond saying that if you add the number of reporters to the number of features executives, you end up with "more than a football team". The daily print run will, he thinks, be around the 500,000 mark.

His major criticism of the Evening Standard - that "it is more for the Islington set than anybody" - suggests, to my mind, that he has not noticed the sweeping changes its editor Wadley has imposed at the paper, switching the emphasis of her features pages to showbusiness stories, women-friendly health pieces and first-person tales of "I was a crime victim".

To be fair, Wadley's crime victims are all presented as thoroughly middle class - and it seems that Ferrari's might be a little lower down the social scale.

Most of all, his paper will reflect the lives of ordinary working people, he explains. "It sounds so bloody hokey but I genuinely have an affinity there," he says. "I don't go to the Groucho, I am not the first in line for the Edinburgh TV festival - I genuinely just want my kids to be very safe when they go to school, and for my mum to be safe."