Leading from the trenches in the middle-market paper war.(Brief Article)

Chris Williams heads the Express's ongoing war of words.

Even by its own ferocious standards, the newspaper middle-market had a fairly exceptional few days last week. A temporary truce between the Daily Express and the Daily Mail may have been brokered over the weekend, but it will be hard for both sides to forget the unparalleled venom of the Daily Express' editorial broadside over the previous few days.

A series of three articles attacked the Mail's owners, the Rothermere family, for their historic Nazi sympathies and extra-marital affairs, contrasting these vices with their flagship newspaper's trumpeting of patriotism and family values. The first two pieces ended with the bannered request: "Show this article to a Daily Mail reader." The final article, listing celebrities with a loathing for the Mail, contented itself with: "Stick to the best, the Daily Express."

Of course, this explosion of editorial bile wasn't unprovoked. The Daily Mail circulated a mailshot in December forcefully reminding Express readers of Richard Desmond's soft porn connections and including vouchers for the Mail. Desmond is reported to have demanded instant retaliation.

The man tasked with that retaliation is Chris Williams, the former third in command to Rosie Boycott, who has occupied the editor's chair since her departure in January. The assault on the Mail has given him the chance to make his mark in dramatic style. "They are a warning shot that there is to be a serious campaign of opposition to the Mail," he says. "That professional campaign will continue."

Williams accepts that readers might be a little bemused by the war of words going on between the two rival papers. Media agencies appear even more sceptical: "They're talking to their readers about a paper that they don't read," one agency source says. "It could lead them to question the paper's editorial integrity."

"There's a kind of arrogance about the Daily Mail, this sense that its domination of the middle-market is complete and irreversible," Williams says, who himself spent eight years on the staff of his current opponent. "We're trying to show that it still has a fight on its hands."