Deadlier than the Mail

This is an effervescent, elegantly written and faultlessly researched romp through the life and times of someone whose name in Britain was spoken with genuine fondness by an urbane few, with self-righteous anger by some and with disdain or fascination by almost everybody who can read — as, like it or not, very few people don’t enjoy gossip.

This is an effervescent, elegantly written and faultlessly researched romp through the life and times of someone whose name in Britain was spoken with genuine fondness by an urbane few, with self-righteous anger by some and with disdain or fascination by almost everybody who can read — as, like it or not, very few people don’t enjoy gossip.

Tim Willis has caught the atmosphere of the Dempster decades with uncanny precision. What now seems fascinating is that those not-far-off years, and whatever Nigel wrote all through them, suddenly seem so distant, archaic almost, and oddly innocent.

The title’s ‘Death of Discretion’ exactly sums it up. If the war and its aftermath removed the awe with which aristocrats and heroes were regarded, and the stifling of upper-class scandal by patrician press barons (it seems incredible, now, that the public were ignorant of Mrs Simpson and the King until a few days before he abdicated), it was the arrival of the Sixties that meant everything was up front and allowable. Circumspection went down the toilet with the pill, free love-making, stigma-less illegitimacy, Lady Chatterley and the end of censorship, leading to porn, drugs and the demise of our insularity.

Indiscretion, and the emerging spectre of instant celebrity, was the new tendency, though Dempster did not originate this. Rather, he realised that, to his readers, the formerly sacrosanct peccadilloes of elite and establishment figures were grist to a newspaper’s mill.