Nigel Dempster - master of gossip dead.

Nigel Dempster is dead. In his prime as the Express' and then Mail's society uber-goss I could admire him as one might a Great White Shark, an awesome but dangerous creature, utterly ruthless and blessed with an unreconstructed snobbishness that was the glint off the jagged edge. He completely dominated his rivals in the '60s and '70s but was cursed with a long, long career decline - booze and illness robbing him of acuity and tenacity - that turned him into a Fleet Street fable for the joys of an early death or a premature brutal sacking. His own slow senescence graphed the decline in importance to the media of the royal family and its satellite titled parasites. Private Eye called him Dumpster. There was something personal going on there. He was the queerest hetero I'd ever come across.