Interview with Nigel Dempster

I = Interviewer

D = Nigel Dempster

I: You're by far Britain's best-known and most widely read gossip columnist. Is there a serious purpose in what you write in the Daily Mail or are you chiefly concerned simply to entertain your readers?

D: We're basically concerned with informing our readers. Obviously if we entertain them at the same time that's an added bonus. But information is why people buy newspapers, because they want to find what's going on in places where they cannot be and they rely on me and my staff and my colleagues in the Daily Mail to bring them what actually happens in places of power and privilege, places where they would like to be but obviously can never get inside.

I: Do most of the people whose names appear in the Mail Diary spend their time trying to avoid getting their names in the Diary or are there more people who are actually on the telephone to you trying to get you to print their names in the Mail Diary?

D: The very nature of a gossip column is that people do not enjoy featuring in it because when we write a story it is not to the subject's advantage usually, because they've done something wrong, something silly, something sexual, financial mis­demeanours, something along that line or treated someone very badly like a member of their staff, and they don't enjoy being in the Daily Mail Diary.

I: Is gossip something people in Britain seem to enjoy more than people in other countries, as far as you can tell, is goss ... is there a special taste for gossip in Britain?

D: You've got to have the basic ingredient, which is a homogenous society, and of course we've all lived cheek by jowl with each other for nine hundred years, more or less, and therefore we all know who we are, whether it's the rich man in his castle or the poor man at his gate. Also we've got a very strictly structured class system, which starts with the Monarchy at the top and goes all the way down to the lower classes at the bottom. And everyone within that class system is totally aware of where they are on that class ladder, and of course they want to climb, and to climb they need to know who's above them and who's below them.

I: The Royal Family is very widely featured in the press in Britain. There seem to be stories about them in the British newspapers, especially stories about the younger and more glamorous members of the Royal Family, every day. How do you go about finding new information out about the Royals?

D: There are, of course, about thirty-five members of the Royal Family if you take the oldest, the great Queen Mother, down to the youngest. And all of them are doing something every day, and if they're not, they should be. And it's very easy to find out stories because the people around them tend to tell you what's happening, so therefore you’ve got a filter of information coming all the way through. The Royal Family have got many staff, many people around them, from detectives, from household staff, who do gossip wherever they have time off, and stories do tend to come out.

I: You often see much more outrageous and explicit stories about the Royal Family in foreign newspapers and magazines. Do you have any particularly extreme examples of inaccurate reporting of the Royal Family by foreign journalists?

D: All reporting of the Royal Family by foreign journalists is inaccurate, and in fact it's a total invention. France Dimanche, which is a Sunday newspaper in France, based in Paris, has a gossip column which is one hundred per cent invention. And the Queen, who reads French, of course, extremely well, and is fluent in French, has great fun reading it out to her family. There is an amusement value as long as you start with the initial presumption that nothing is ... is true.

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