When gossip was king

This month marks the tenth anniversary of the death of Nigel Dempster, once the world’s best-known gossip columnist. For three decades he was paid a fortune by the Daily Mail to provide juicy tittle-tattle about the royal family (he was a close friend of Princess Margaret), the aristocracy (particularly priapic minor baronet Dai Llewellyn), tycoons including Jimmy Goldsmith and racing figures such as Robert Sangster, as well as mainstream TV stars like David Frost and Robin Day.

Alas, by the time of Nigel’s death (from the awful effects of progressive supranuclear palsy) his Diary page was already an anachronism. His brand of gossip was in its death throes. His cast of characters had already been ousted by reality TV nonentities all desperate for their 15 minutes of fame. Mannequins Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell used their scrawny elbows to gain column inches, ‘artists’ like Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin shocked their way into the new encyclopedia of tittle-tattle.

By the time of his death, gossip had spread its wings from Diary pages. In his last years, the dapper, marathon-running, permanently thirsty Nigel increasingly bewailed the poaching of his stories for the news pages. But his principal gripe was the phenomenon of nobodies elevated to instant fame via shows like Big Brother.

A good gossip columnist, back in the day, was the keeper of a menagerie of half-invented creatures. He picked characters and followed them week after week, drawing a reader into what was a sort of drawn-out soap opera with its own regular villains and heroes.

Perhaps mercifully, Nigel had gone to the celestial cocktail party by the time the Kardashians exploded on to the public conscious. Singlehandedly, the large-bottomed bling princesses have become the staple of the modern gossip pages, and Dempster’s forte, the sexual shenanigans of the landed gentry, is passé.