Nigel Dempster

Nigel Richard Patton Dempster, journalist: born 1 November 1941; PR executive, Earl of Kimberley Associates 1960-63; staff, Daily Express 1963-71; columnist, Private Eye 1969-85; columnist, Daily Mail 1971-2004, editor, Daily Mail Diary 1973-2003, editor, Mail on Sunday Diary 1986-2003; editorial executive, Mail Newspapers 1973-2003; married 1971 Emma de Bendern (marriage dissolved 1974), 1977 Lady Camilla Osborne (one daughter; marriage dissolved 2002); died Ham, Surrey 12 July 2007.

Gossip about the personal lives of celebrities became an integral part of the British tabloid press in the last quarter of the 20th century. For most of that period, Nigel Dempster's diary in the Daily Mail set the pace and the standard. It became one of the features by which the paper was identified and played an important role in its consistent growth in circulation and market share.

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Although gossip writing is not regarded as a heroic branch of journalism, Dempster's strength was that he approached it with great seriousness and took pride in doing it better than anyone else. He recognised that it was necessary to bring to his stories the disciplines of hard news reporting, paying attention to accurate detail - especially when the people involved would have preferred to keep matters private.

Not that he always managed to steer clear of trouble. The millionaire Sir James Goldsmith, the politician Cecil Parkinson and the tycoon Robert Maxwell were just three of those who undertook or threatened legal action because of something that appeared in his column. Goldsmith in particular was a long-time enemy, whom Dempster would wound with his sharp, jaunty and often acerbic prose. He preferred the direct, full-frontal approach to the nudge-and-wink techniques adopted by some of his rivals (or "so-called rivals" as he would dismissively term them when rubbishing their stories).

Born to a middle-class family in 1941 in India, where his father was a manager for the Indian Copper Corporation, Nigel Dempster went to Sherborne School in Dorset but, showing no great academic ability, left soon after he was 16, with the intention of taking up a career in the City. He had jobs with Lloyd's of London and on the Stock Exchange, but in 1960 joined an up-market public relations firm, the Earl of Kimberley Associates. This was his introduction to the world of wealth and privilege to which he would become greatly attached. After three years he switched from gamekeeper to poacher, joining the William Hickey gossip column on the Daily Express to write about the circle of people to whom his job had introduced him. He soon gained a reputation as a provider of good exclusive stories.

His marital history shows how alluring he found the notion of aristocracy. His first marriage in 1971 was to Emma de Bendern, daughter of Count John de Bendern and a granddaughter of the 11th Marquess of Queensberry. They divorced in 1974 and three years later he married Lady Camilla Osborne, daughter of the 11th Duke of Leeds. They produced a daughter and stayed together until 2002.

The first marriage coincided with a move from the Daily Express to the Daily Mail. David English, who had just taken over as the Mail's editor, was aware of Dempster's input into the Hickey column and urged Paul Callan, then the Mail diarist, to hire the ambitious young man as his deputy. Before long, to Callan's chagrin, Dempster had been given his job.

Although the daily column bore his byline, it was the work of a team of four. To his three colleagues he was a demanding and often ill-tempered taskmaster, as he goaded them to make that one last, difficult phone call to nail down a compelling story. He would send his staff to run-of-the-mill book launches and the like, attending only A-list parties in person.

In his 1998 book Dempster's People, he confessed that 99 per cent of his gossip-gathering was done on the phone, and wrote: "After a long day, including a lot of exercise [he was keen on squash], it takes a particularly appealing function to drag me out for the evening - I cannot remember when I last went to a dinner party." This was partly because his wife Camilla did not much enjoy such events, and did not drink.

Overall, he preferred the company of his close friends - including colleagues from Fleet Street - to that of the people he wrote about. He could be a witty, sometimes uproarious drinking companion and had a taste for champagne, which he would occasionally consume to excess: three times he was arrested for drunken driving, but convicted only once. Drinking sprees, though quite rare, could sometimes lead to unpleasant scenes in bars, but he was in no sense loutish. His habitual manner was suave and self-assured, and he dressed immaculately.

He enjoyed travel and would regularly find reasons to take the column to agreeable parts of the world. New York and Los Angeles were fertile ground for show-business gossip. There would often be a late summer trip to Gstaad in the Swiss Alps and in dank February he would make for Cape Town - for a time the home of Earl Spencer and Mark Thatcher, two recurring names in the diary's cast of staple characters.

Often the travel was related to horse-racing, his favoured spectator sport. (He owned three horses, all notably unsuccessful.) Thus he might find himself in Deauville for the August meeting, Paris for the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe and even Australia for the Melbourne Cup. Back home, Royal Ascot was the highlight of his social season. Invitations to his champagne picnic parties in the car park were greatly coveted by celebrities who featured in his column.

Between 1969 and 1985 Dempster was also co-author of the "Grovel" column in the satirical fortnightly Private Eye. He and Peter Mackay, then the diarist for the Sunday Express, produced what was stylistically a send-up of their own diaries but contained genuine stories - often those thought too risky or otherwise unsuitable for mainstream papers.

Just after he broke with Private Eye, Dempster began to write the gossip column in the Daily Mail's sister title, The Mail on Sunday, which made him one of the rare columnists to appear seven days a week. Some thought that his work began to lose some of its spark at around this time and certainly most of his best-known scoops - they included Princess Margaret's romance with Roddy Llewellyn and Harold Wilson's impending retirement as Prime Minister - date from the first half of his career. But he continued to command the loyalty of the readers and editors of both papers.

Early on, his journalistic ambitions had extended beyond diary writing. He spent a short time in the Daily Mail's office in New York and was attracted by the idea of being a foreign correspondent. Had he made the switch, his sharp observation and disciplined approach would have served him well, but David English convinced him that his undoubted gift for gossip gathering and the growing reputation of the column made it sensible to stick with it. He would have liked, as well, to establish himself as a television personality, but despite two years as a panellist on ITV's Headliners in the 1980s, he was never able to make a decisive breakthrough.

He wrote five books, including biographies of Princess Margaret in 1981 (HRH The Princess Margaret: a life unfulfilled) and Christina Onassis in 1989 (Heiress: the story of Christina Onassis). But essentially he remained the consummate gossip columnist throughout a notable career that, sadly, ended prematurely when his health began to fail him. On a golfing trip to Le Touquet in 2002, he stumbled and fell over twice, for no detectable reason. On his return he was diagnosed with a disease of the nervous system with some of the characteristics of Parkinson's. Soon it began to affect not only his balance but his concentration and memory, and he retired in 2003.

Michael Leapman