Tom Bower Vs Desmond

This was a really interesting Libel trial that finished last week and exposed a lot about the way Express/ Star owner Richard Desmond works. Tom Bower is a journalist who has worked for Panorama and written books about Robert Maxwell, Conrad Black and, er, Richard Desmond.

Read Tom Bower's account in this excellent article- written for The Observer.

EXTRACT: On my left, fiercely clasping his wife's hand, sat the permatanned and constantly smiling Desmond. Over the past 30 years, the former advertising salesman's outrageous behaviour while becoming a billionaire has been concealed from public scrutiny by Britain's draconian defamation laws. To prevent the publication of Rough Trader, my unauthorised biography of Desmond which was completed and printed in 2006, Desmond devised a libel complaint gleaned from a passage about himself in my biography of Conrad Black published in 2007.