Diaries: Heard the gossip?

Newspaper diarists save their worst barbs for their rivals. So it's awkward for Nigel Dempster now that his rivals have become his colleagues.

Readers of Nigel Dempster's column in the Daily Mail may have been rather confused by an item the venerable diarist ran last Thursday. The story was that Donald Trump's daughter Ivanka was not going out with Nat Rothschild. While no doubt this is a missed opportunity for both parties, the fact that two people, not hitherto linked in the pages of the Daily Mail, are not an item is an unusual revelation for a gossip columnist to offer his readers.

The background to Dempster's story is that his former deputy, Adam Helliker, had claimed the opposite four days before in The Sunday Telegraph's Mandrake column. "The highly eligible Nathaniel Rothschild," wrote Helliker, "has fallen head-over-heels in love with the daughter of the brash American property magnate Donald Trump." But Dempster was not only rubbishing his former deputy; Helliker is shortly moving to the Mail on Sunday, where his picture by-lined diary column will be in competition with Dempster's long- established page.

How will they get along? When Helliker left Dempster's employ a few years ago, their farewells became physical, and when I saw Helliker at a drinks party that evening he was sporting a fat lip. For his part, Dempster has said: "I do not remember punching him, but in self defence it is possible that his mouth came into contact with my body in some way." However, such affectionate gestures have a long and honourable tradition among diarists, "especially," as one senior columnist points out, "after lunch".

Because of his prominent position and unrivalled longevity, Dempster has been part of many of these disputes, particularly with his opposite numbers at the Daily Express. For many years in the Eighties and Nineties, he traded insults with Ross Benson, then diary editor at the Express. Dempster referred to Benson, quite a peacock, in his column as "the pompadoured poltroon", while Benson called the balding Dempster "the tonsured traducer". Despite this seeming levity, the rivalry was taken seriously. When I worked for Benson I noticed that Dempster's page was cut out and kept in a scrapbook every day as well as his own column, although Benson's scribblings were preserved in a smarter book, naturally.

Brutus, a more recent column in the Express started by Christopher Silvester, also raised Dempster's blood pressure by calling the Greatest Living Englishman "a vile jelly". Dempster was so angry that he attacked Silvester eight times in a month, labelling him variously a "lickspittle", a "fawning creature" and "an anonymous creep". At the same time Dempster informed his readers that the Express "sold 3.4 million copies a day more when I worked on it for the late Lord Beaverbrook". He also took pains to mention that Silvester's grandfather was the late bandleader Victor Silvester, a fact which Dempster evidently thought counted against him.

Dempster's biggest explosion of recent years was against John McEntee, Benson's successor as the Express diarist. McEntee had already annoyed Dempster by inventing a fictitious character, "my oily under-butler, Nigel". He went too far though, when he wrote a jokey piece about the death of Tulip, one of Dempster's beloved Pekinese dogs, lamenting the passing of "the diary ferret, Nigel". A furious Dempster complained to Lord Hollick, then the Express's proprietor. McEntee has since apologised, but the incident still rankled, and when McEntee moved to the Mail, Dempster grabbed him by the arm and inquired "What are you doing here, you bastard?", rolling up his sleeve to reveal cufflinks bearing miniature pictures of Tulip.

Roderick Gilchrist, deputy editor of the Mail on Sunday, thinks that such displays of emotion show character. Of the altercation between Dempster and Helliker, he says: "I respect them for standing and fighting. I'd rather have people who do feel so strongly than not." Dempster has certainly never been afraid to vent his feelings, as many can testify.

There have been diary editors known for their tyrannical ways – one thinks of one former editor of the Evening Standard's Londoner's Diary who used to summon staff by asking them to "come and kiss the rod of correction", and who threatened to sack one of his reporters unless he cut his hair. This same man also used to instruct reporters to do his shopping for him, and even to wash his car.

When Max Hastings occupied the same position at the Standard, he used to crack a rhino-whip to keep his staff on their toes, sending one reporter running with a flick to the ankles. Mischief is generally tolerated, even encouraged, on diaries. The diary reporter on the Daily Telegraph's Peterborough column who bombarded Ted Heath with silent calls because his deputy editor hoped to help the former PM with his autobiography was eventually found out. After he was disciplined he then retaliated by switching his attentions to his boss's home phone-line instead. But for full-on spats, Dempster is in a class of his own, not least because he is notoriously thin-skinned. In person he can be great fun, and certainly convivial. He finds it hard to take a joke at his expense though, and wasn't best pleased a couple of years ago when posters were pasted up in Chelsea featuring an egg-like dome and the words "Nigel Dempster is bald". The old joke among gossip columnists has Dempster saying: "I'm an institution, I'm an institution!" To which the reply goes: "You should be in an institution!"

But as Gilchrist says, "His is a magic name, known by everybody from taxi drivers and dustmen to baronets and dukes." Even if his page is increasingly filled with racing figures and obscure plutocrats, and is generally thought to be "cold potatoes" (said to be the late Lord Rothermere's opinion of his star columnist's efforts), one thing is for sure. Dempster will be around to write – and fight – another day, however many rivals his editors sign up.