Richard Clive Desmond (born 8 December 1951) is a British ex-publisher, businessman and former pornographer. He is the founder of Northern & Shell, a publisher that started by publishing music magazines in the 1970s, followed by variety of pornographic magazines in the 1980s. In the 1990s, it launched celebrity magazines (including OK! and New!) and Portland TV that produced pornographic television channels. In the early 2000s, the company sold the pornographic magazine titles and purchased the Express Newspapers, followed by Britain's Channel 5 in 2010. It launched The Health Lottery in 2011. Channel 5 was sold in 2014, Portland TV in 2016 and the Express Newspapers in 2018.
In 2020, Desmond was involved in controversy after pressuring Robert Jenrick, the then Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, to overrule the Planning Inspectorate and approve a housing development for Desmond's company. The timing of the decision saved the company £40 million but was later overturned.
According to the 2025 Sunday Times Rich List, Desmond was the 122nd richest person in the United Kingdom with a net worth of £1.3 billion.
Early life Desmond was born in Hampstead, north London, into a Jewish family, the youngest of three children, and was raised in Edgware, in northwest London. His father was descended from Latvian Jews, and his mother was of Ukrainian-Jewish descent. His father, Cyril, was at one time managing director of cinema advertising company Pearl & Dean. An ear infection caused the sudden loss of Cyril's hearing and, according to Richard, he used to take the boy along, when he was no more than three years old, to act as "his ears" in business meetings, where he ostensibly acquired his "first taste of business dealings".
After Cyril lost a significant amount of family money to gambling, his parents divorced, and 11-year-old Desmond moved with his mother, Millie, into a flat above a garage; he has described his impoverished early adolescence as a time when he was "very fat and very lonely". Desmond was educated at Edgware Junior School and Christ's College, Finchley.
Desmond left school at 15 and started working in the classified advertisements section of the Thomson Group, while playing the drums at gigs after a day's work. After moving to another company, he became the advertising manager for the music magazine company Beat Publications, the publisher of Beat Instrumental. Desmond owned two record shops by the time he was 21.
Publishing career
Founding of Northern & Shell In the mid-1970s, Desmond combined his interest in music and advertising to found publication company Cover Publication with Ray Hammond. Cover Publication launched International Musician and Recording World, a monthly magazine for musicians which expanded to have editions in the UK, US, Australia, Japan and Germany. This was followed by the publication of Home Organist, whose editor contributed the old-school motto ("Nothing is difficult for the strong" – it was Benjamin Disraeli's motto), still used by the Northern & Shell group. Desmond eventually bought out Hammond.
In 1979, impressed by Gulf and Western's use of a name which drew association to a larger company, Desmond decided to change the name of Cover Publication to Northern & Shell, Northern for Northern Rock and Shell for Shell Oil. Desmond was the first investor in the London Docklands, having purchased land for an office space for Northern & Shell for £1 million. Northern & Shell were the first company to move to the area in 1982.
OK! Magazine Northern & Shell began publication of the celebrity OK! magazine as a monthly in 1993, later becoming a weekly in March 1996. It is the largest weekly magazine in the world, with 23 separate editions from the US to Australia to Azerbaijan and with a readership in excess of 31 million. It was originally an imitation of Hello! magazine but now outsells its rival.
Pornography In 1982, Northern & Shell began to publish the UK edition of Penthouse, although the licensing deal ended in the 1990s.Terry Kirby "From 'Penthouse' to penury? The man who would be King of the Centrefold" , The Independent, 14 August 2003 The company soon began to publish a range of pornographic magazines itself including Asian Babes, Readers Wives, Barely Legal, Horny Housewives, Mega Boobs and Posh Wives, numbering 45 such titles in all when they were eventually sold. During the 1980s, Desmond ran a premium rate phone sex company until 1988 when he sold the business after British Telecom raised concerns about the content. In 1994, Desmond ordered 250,000 copies of Penthouse to be pulped after it published a photoshoot featuring lookalikes of Charles, Prince of Wales, Diana, Princess of Wales and Camilla Parker Bowles.
Desmond's Northern & Shell launched The Fantasy Channel in 1995. It was one of the first pornographic channels available on satellite television in the UK, competing against other channels available on cable. The channel was later rebranded as Television X. These channels were regulated by Ofcom and the BBFC. By 2003, Desmond's company had expanded to broadcasting seven channels, with plans to launch six more and the business was described as "extremely lucrative", generating £17m of the £60m operating profits of Northern & Shell. A website, fantasy121.com, was also launched. His rivals in the business were David Sullivan and Paul Raymond.
Desmond put the magazines up for sale in 2001 in an attempt to distance himself from the adult content industry. Desmond sold the pornographic magazine business to Remnant Media for approximately £10 million. He said in 2003 in a television programme, The Real Richard Desmond (Channel 4): "Would it be better to be a former pornographer rather than a pornographer? I'm probably being more honest by keeping them. They serve a need."
Northern & Shell's business interests in pornography ended in April 2016 when Portland Television, established in 1995, the broadcaster of Television X and the Red Hot channels, was sold for under £1 million in a management buyout. Desmond has often been referred to as "Richard 'Dirty' Desmond", or "Dirty Des", in Private Eye magazine due to Northern & Shell formerly owning pornographic magazines and television channels.
Desmond has disputed references to himself as a pornographer. Desmond has emphasised that his material has been available through WHSmith and Freeview, saying that: "If it was pornography you would end up in prison because pornography is illegal". In November 2021, The Guardian reported that Desmond had instructed lawyers to get the term "pornographer" removed from the Wikipedia article about him because, in his opinion, the phrase "only refers to publishers of illegal or obscene material".
Alleged involvement with New York mafia According to The Guardian, Desmond had made a deal in 1991 with Norman Chanes for running advertisements in his pornographic magazines for telephone sex lines run by Chanes' mafia associate, Richard Martino of the Gambino crime family. According to the BBC, Martino was "widely reported" to be linked to the mafia, but Desmond did not know. The deal reportedly left the Americans out of pocket and after Desmond refused to pay compensation, his employee was kidnapped and assaulted in New York. Desmond called this account "a fantasy", but encouraged his employee to report the incident to the police and hire a bodyguard to protect himself.
In February 2005, The Guardian reported that the claim Desmond had received death threats from the New York Gambino mafia family was contained in affidavits from FBI agents released during Martino's trial relating to the fraudulent use of the telephone lines. Desmond has denied the whole episode; he asserted there was no evidence he knew about the fraud perpetrated by Martino.
Express Newspapers In November 2000, Northern & Shell acquired Express Newspapers from United News & Media for £125 million, enlarging the group to include the Daily and Sunday Express titles, the Daily Star and Daily Star Sunday (which Desmond started), and the Irish Daily Star (owned jointly with the Irish Independent News & Media group). In August 2024 the Daily and Sunday Express each sold around 120,000 to 140,000 copies per issue.
After buying Express Newspapers, Desmond became embroiled in a feud with Viscount Rothermere, publisher of the Daily Mail, the rival to the Daily Express, largely derived from stories relating to Rothermere's private life. The Evening Herald reported in 2003 that Desmond was using the Express as a vehicle for his racist views. Once, when asked if he was racist, he commented "No. I just don't trust darkies or poofs". In 2003, an investigation by the Financial Times found that Desmond had registered his business in Jersey to avoid paying millions of pounds in tax in the UK. They also reported that his publishing businesses were not profitable with most of the groups profits coming from pornographic TV channels.
In 2004, Desmond put in a £500m bid for The Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph national newspapers and The Spectator magazine.
In April 2004, the Daily Express reverted to supporting the Conservatives, after a period backing Labour. On the same day, Desmond attacked The Daily Telegraph (with which he was a joint venture partner in the West Ferry newspaper printing plant), then considering accepting a takeover by the German Axel Springer group, and asked if they were keen on being run by Nazis. According to Desmond, in an exchange at the meeting, all Germans are Nazis. Desmond reportedly harangued The Daily Telegraph chief executive and associates in faux German at a business meeting and imitated Adolf Hitler. Executives from The Telegraph walked out of the meeting. This incident was described as a form of institutionalised racism prevalent among newspaper proprietors. Previously, in August 2001, the National Union of Journalists' chapel at the Express & Star also condemned Desmond for the newspaper's "hysterical and racist" campaign against asylum seekers; this campaign was also criticised by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, writing for The Independent in June 2002.
In August 2005, the former Daily Express executive editor Ted Young made an out-of-court settlement with Desmond's company ahead of an industrial tribunal. This related to an incident with Desmond in the newsroom in September 2004, during which Desmond was said to have hit the journalist. Desmond has repeatedly denied the claims. In 2008, Northern & Shell reported a turnover of £483.9 million.
Libel case Litigation began at the High Court on 6 July 2009 over claims in journalist Tom Bower's joint biography of Conrad Black and Barbara Amiel, Conrad and Lady Black: Dancing on the Edge, that Desmond had made a "humiliating climbdown" over an Express story at the end of 2002 on the state of Lord Black's finances, which it was alleged Desmond had ordered to be written. This claim of a weakening of Desmond's "super-tough" reputation as a businessman was viewed as defamation by Desmond. Bower denied libel on the grounds of the story being "substantially true".James Robinson "Tom Bower book damaged Richard Desmond's 'super-tough' reputation, court hears" , The Guardian, 7 July 2009 The following day, the presiding judge The Hon. Mr Justice Eady, discharged the jury as "fundamental" evidence and legal submissions had emerged. The new jury later found in favour of Bower.Foster, Patrick (24 July 2009), "Richard Desmond loses libel case with Tom Bower over Conrad Black claims", The Times. , A biography of Desmond, titled Rough Trader, was written by Bower and printed in 2006 but never published.
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