Chris Williams: My life with Richard Desmond

Life is good on the 'warmer, gentler' Daily Express, insists its editor, Chris Williams. And the proprietor doesn't change things - he just 'makes suggestions'. In his first newspaper interview, Williams talks to David Lister

Unlike many of his predecessors as Daily Express editor, Chris Williams is not one for the limelight. In 10 months as editor he has not until now given a single interview to another newspaper. "I don't like giving interviews," he admits with some understatement. "I don't see the point of it. My profile is not important. The newspaper's is."

Well, he shouldn't be disappointed there. The paper has certainly not been without a profile. This week it is a year since Richard Desmond bought Express Newspapers. And the unlikely transformation of a pornographic magazine publisher into a successor to Lord Beaverbrook has given the rest of us plenty of material.

But since he succeeded Rosie Boycott in January, Williams has kept his head down. It is what he feels most comfortable doing. A production man whose favourite description of himself is "a professional", he has come up through the ranks of the Daily Mail and then the Express. "You once called me a carpet slippers editor," he said to me a little resentfully. I said it wasn't an insult; it meant he was happier in the office and on the back bench than as a semi-public figure. He does not demur.

In the traditional sense of the word he comes across as a very gentle man, softly spoken and courteous. Indeed, when he was telling me about the "climate of fear" at the Daily Mail that he loathed when he worked there, and I asked if there was one at the Express, he chuckled and replied: "It's not really me, is it?"

But that's not to say he lacks gumption. By rights, Chris Williams shouldn't even be in the building. One of Rosie Boycott's first acts when she took over was to sack him along with a number of other middle-ranking execs. Williams recalls, more in puzzlement than anger: "I marched into her office and asked her how she could do such a thing when she had never met me and knew nothing about my abilities." She relented immediately, little realising, as they say in the best pulp fiction, that he would one day be sitting in her chair.

Desmond and Boycott working together was eventually more than either of them could stomach. Williams seems to have no such problems. He is confident enough to make a joke at his proprietor's expense when I ask him quite what the phrase "award winning newspaper" means above the masthead. "The Richard Desmond award, probably," he replies, before adding, only marginally more convincingly: "Individuals on the paper have won awards."

So how is it working with Richard Desmond? "Er, we don't do dull. It's an experience like nothing else. I've been on the Express five years and I'd never have thought I would experience the proprietor who is seen here every day. And it's just extraordinary. And far from being the ogre he's meant to be, he's supportive. And the staff like the fact that he's visible.

"When I've done page one he comes down and he looks at it, and he says whether he likes it or he doesn't like it." What, every night? "Yes every night."

And you sometimes disagree with him? "Yes, I sometimes disagree with him. But he has never told me to change the paper. He has suggested things. He doesn't say, 'Change it.' But he says if he doesn't like it. So we have a discussion, and occasionally it's an argument." The real Desmond obsession, it seems, is more with the look of the paper, not least the front-page blurbs and puffs, rather than the content.

It is not just Desmond who has made media gossip for other papers. Williams too was castigated for his campaign on asylum-seekers. "Criticism of the asylum series irritated me," he says, "because some of it was internal and because I felt that the campaign was nothing to do with racism. It was a genuine campaign to get the Government to change a system which wasn't working, which it has done."

Williams's internal retort was even crisper. When he discovered that the NUJ chapel had discussed the campaign at the same meeting at which it discussed failings in the staff canteen, he wrote to them acidly, saying he was fascinated that they could equate the asylum issue with the state of the company meatloaf.

Ten months into the job, Williams has had more than enough time to think about where to position the Express, which continues to lose readers with worrying regularity. The latest circulation figures have it down 1.61 per cent month on month, and 7.57 per cent year on year. "It is disappointing that the figures haven't risen, but if you look closely you will see that our street sale for November has hardly gone down. What makes the figures look rather more depressing is that Richard [Desmond] stripped away the bulking operation. Previously the marketing operation had propped up the circulation and that didn't make any sense either morally or financially. I've been editing for 10 months and in six of those 10 months we have shown a street-sale increase on the previous month.

"Repositioning has been one of the main problems of the Express over decades. What I'm trying to do is, I want it to be honestly and steadfastly middle market. But I want it to pursue a different agenda to the Daily Mail. The Mail has clearly been a huge success in grabbing Middle England. But a lot of people in Middle England, including some readers of the Mail, don't like its bitter agenda. I have got to persuade people to try the gentler, warmer Daily Express. Of course, we still address the major issues such as asylum, but our paper is a more upbeat paper."

In terms of the paper's political outlook, Williams is not changing Boycott's Blairite approach, which came as a shock to traditional Express readers. "In essence, I've not altered Rosie's perspective," he says. "Rosie described us as critical friends of New Labour. I'm still proud of the fact that in the election I asked readers to vote Labour for the first time in 100 years of the Daily Express.

"My target readership, to be frank, is disaffected people who are tired of the hectoring tone of the Daily Mail, which in my view is misogynist, though bizarrely it is still viewed as a women's paper. It disapproves of working women; it disapproves of single mothers; it just generally disapproves. So I'm trying with a women-friendly agenda to persuade people to try us.

"We do health and fashion more than the Mail does. But also we accept that there are millions of working mothers, that there are hundreds of thousands of single mothers, and they play an important part in our society and they shouldn't be derided. I'll give you an example: there was a story about breast cancer becoming the biggest killer. And they splashed on it, and their headline was 'Breast cancer risk to career women'. That was appalling."

The Express is, he admits, still stronger in the North, although the age profile is getting younger. There will soon be a "promotional and ideological push" in the South.

So how does he want people to think of his paper? "I want them to think that we care about people, that we care about the issues, we cover politics where politics involves people's lives rather than policy debates. And we write about people they like. I have a greater celebrity content in the paper than the Mail because I think people are interested. If 15 million people sit down on a Saturday evening to watch Cilla Black, then people want to read about her too. I make no apologies for that."

The 50-year-old Everton-supporting Williams is not in awe of the Express's tradition. Indeed, he is fed up with hearing about it. "It is a handicap, to be honest, because people inside the industry and even in the Express itself remember only the Express of Beaverbrook. There are a number of wrong perceptions, including that the paper is still right-wing. Altering those perceptions is quite difficult."