Billionaire Richard Desmond is poised to sell his Express and Star newspapers and celebrity magazine OK! in a £130m deal, ending a 43-year publishing career that had its roots in music and pornographic magazines.

Trinity Mirror, the publisher of the Labour-supporting Daily and Sunday Mirror titles has made an offer to take control of the Brexit-backing Express titles.

The National Union of Journalists immediately expressed concern about the looming deal between political opposites.



“The merger of national media titles would have implications for media plurality and diversity,” said Séamus Dooley, acting general secretary of the NUJ. “We would want a clear understanding of how the editorial independence of the titles will be managed.”

Desmond donated £1m to Ukip ahead of the general election and appointed Ukip peer Lord Stevens as his deputy chairman.

For Desmond, who has a fortune estimated at £2.5bn just a few notches below his good friend Sir Philip Green, the sale marks the end of a publishing empire and the departure of one of the media industry’s most ruthless operators.

His ownership of Express newspaper titles has focused on severe cost-cutting. The number of staff has been slashed and workers’ pay was frozen for nine years.

He also rapidly established himself as one of Fleet Street’s most controversial and outspoken proprietors of the modern era. In one colourful episode he launched a tirade against Telegraph bosses, at the time his joint venture partners in printing, involving a string of abuse and goose stepping around a boardroom. He branded the then Telegraph chief executive, Jeremy Deedes, a “miserable little piece of shit” and said Germans were “all Nazis”.

The Telegraph executives were so outraged by Mr Desmond’s four-letter outburst that they walked out of the meeting . Desmond then told other Express executives to sing “Deutschland über Alles” and made “sieg heil” salutes.

Boardrooms have proved to be fertile ground for Desmond tirades. Another outburst included the “bust up of the billionaires” with Lord Alan Sugar at a meeting of TV service YouView’s shareholders, which involved an expletive-laded outburst end with the exclamation “You’re fired!”, stealing Sugar’s catchphrase from BBC show The Apprentice.

More recently he set Twitter alight after ordering a £580 bottle of wine at a lunch interview with the Financial Times – at the newspaper’s expense.

Desmond – a jazz drummer who co-founded the self-proclaimed “super group” The RD Crusaders with The Who’s Roger Daltrey – started publishing in 1974 at the age of 23 with two music titles.

In 1983, he won the UK licence to publish Penthouse and then a raft of other pornographic titles, including Asian Babes and Horny Housewives.

The launch of OK! in 1993 shook up the celebrity magazine world thanks to a willingness to fork out £1m-plus for deals such as the exclusive on the Beckham’s wedding and an interview with Michael Jackson, his then bride, Debbie Rowe, and their baby, Prince Michael Junior.

The sale of Express Newspapers, which he acquired for £125m 17-years ago, will be subject to a probe by competition authorities. But it is the last publishing asset owned by Northern & Shell, the parent company he controls and chairs.

The deal is predicated on huge cost savings and Trinity Mirror is likely to want all editorial staff under one roof at some point. However, neither Trinity Mirror’s headquarters in Canary Wharf nor Desmond’s in Lower Thames Street have the necessary space.

Trinity Mirror is expected to consider sharing editorial content across papers as it has done with the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and Sunday People, and as Desmond has done at Express Newspapers.

There are also big savings to be made in areas including, commercial, finance, HR and especially printing with Desmond owning a huge operation in Luton.

The loss-making magazine operation, which includes the profitable OK!, could be trimmed, with the ailing Star the most likely candidate.

The two companies held talks about a potential deal over two years ago. The negotiations fizzled out, however, over disagreements about price and the pension deficit at Desmond’s paper.

Given the deterioration in the market since the last talks more than two years ago – and Desmond’s new focus on property development – observers believe there is a good chance the deal will be done this time.

“The fundamentals of the deal have been agreed,” said a source with knowledge of the talks. “You don’t walk away from a deal that was on the table and tell the market about a new one without having things pretty much agreed.”

In recent years Desmond has been shedding his media assets to focus on property development, including a £1bn development of his old Westferry print works site in London’s Docklands area.

Last year, Desmond sold his adult TV business, including Television X and Red Hot Channels, in a management buyout that severed his last link with the adult entertainment industry that helped make his fortune.

Desmond sold his adult magazine titles for some £20m in 2004.

In 2014, he sold Channel 5 to Viacom, the owner of channels including MTV and Nickelodeon, for £463m – having bought it four years before for £103.5m.