In the “boxes from my mother’s attic” were some back issues of Private Eye from the mid 90s. In Eye 861 (16th December 1994) there’s this amusing feature on the Daily Express:
The Express turned its gaze on “The Barrons Making Huge Profits From Sleaze” and focussed on “seedy empires built on dirty money” (acompanied, purely to illustrate the nature of the problem, by photos of nine scantily dressed young women) with the emphasis on the activities of Paul Raymond, Ron Davey, and Richard Desmond.The latter came in for particular scrutiny with his picture captioned “market leader” and the text explaining that “he lives in a London mansion near Hampstead Heath, drives a Bentley, sports a fat cigar and has rubbed shoulders with the Duke of Edinburgh”. But, the paper warned its readers, despite the shoulder rubbing, “just under the veneer of respectability is a story of women being exploited and degraded.”
Funny how things turn out in the end…