Richard Desmond on rejoining the PCC: ‘I’m not sitting there with Dacre’

Express Newspapers proprietor has responded to his criticism from Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre at the Leveson Inquiry in a predictably colourful way.

Addressing the Leveson Inquiry seminar in London on 12 October, Dacre said:

“But let’s not forget that it was the political class in the form of the Blair Government –in the risible belief that he’d turn the Express Labour – which decided that Richard Desmond, the businessman who’d made his money from porn, was a fit and proper person to own a newspaper. And it was Ofcom, itself a statutory regulator, which recently judged Mr Desmond a fit person to buy Channel 5 – this after he’d quit the PCC, effectively holing self-regulation below the line.”

Desmond was somewhat less erudite in an interview with The Guardian’s Dan Sabbagh:

Asked about rejoining the Press Complaints Commission he says:

“I’m not sitting there with Dacre…Dacre goes out slagging me off; he can go fuck himself. I’m not worried about statutory regulation. I’m regulated by Ofcom for TV. I’m happy with that.”