Media Forum: Will Desmond pay for Nazi comments?(Richard Desmond)

Are advertisers likely to punish Express Newspapers for its proprietor's recent Nazi outburst, Alasdair Reid asks.

He's a character and no mistake, that Mr Desmond. The Express Newspapers proprietor is the source of more tales than any press baron since the days when Robert Maxwell cast his gargantuan shadow the length of High Holborn.

The one about his extraordinary performance at a recent meeting with senior Telegraph Group management (the two groups share ownership of a print plant) is clearly far from apocryphal.

Provoked by stories that the Telegraph Group is to be sold to the Berlin-based Axel Springer Verlag, Richard Desmond launched into a tirade about all Germans being Nazis, proceeded to goosestep around the room and then encouraged his staff to sing Deutschland uber Alles.

The irony of all of this is that Axel Springer, the German company's founder, now no longer with us, was a prominent anti-Nazi.

Small details such as this rarely impinge on newspaper proprietors; nor do groundswells of moral disapprobation, however widespread or strongly felt. What does tend to focus this sort of mind, however, is a widening hole at the bottom of the balance sheet.

Could some advertisers now seek to punish Desmond for his lack of judgment?