Let the street fight begin

Come on, Mr Desmond, if you think you're hard enough. The Evening Standard is no stranger to London turf wars, says Victoria Summerley

When I heard the news that Richard Desmond was planning to launch a new London evening paper, my reaction was: "Here we go again."

It is a sad fact of newspaper life that launching a new London evening does not depend solely on talented journalists, buoyant advertising revenues, clever marketing campaigns and big-name columnists. If that were the case, the London Evening Standard, owned by Associated Newspapers, would have had far more competition than it has had over the past few years. The main problem is more prosaic. You have to be able to guarantee to get your product to the punter as quickly and efficiently as possible. And if you can't do that, you might as well not bother.

I was on the Standard when Robert Maxwell announced the launch of his London Daily News in 1986. The LDN presses rolled in spring 1987, and the paper closed six months later. The entire project was reported to have cost Cap'n Bob £50m. Maxwell gave himself an extra handicap by announcing, in typically grandiose style, that the LDN would be not just an evening publication, but a 24-hour newspaper. What the point of this was no one has ever been sure, but it sent costs rocketing and complicated what was always going to be a logistical nightmare: distribution.

Maxwell had the Daily Mirror's distribution network in London, but distributing a daily in early morning is very different from distributing an evening paper in the rush-hour chaos. Meanwhile, the Standard had not only an existing evening-paper distribution network, but a management that cut its teeth on the turf wars between the Standard and the Evening News, which had closed six years earlier. (If you valued your career – not to mention your front teeth – you didn't inquire too closely into the tales of fisticuffs and dirty tricks.)

Even before the LDN launched, there were Associated moles on the Maxwell payroll who ensured that every dummy found its way to the Standard, as did details of the circulation strategy. We even knew how many LDN copies would go to each outlet.

When the LDN finally hit the streets, Maxwell's van drivers would leave piles of papers on street corners, ready for the vendors. The Standard management instantly set up a competition for its van drivers, in which a cash prize was offered to the driver who brought in the biggest number of LDNs. As another former colleague now recalls drily: "We had more copies of the LDN than we did of the Standard."

One mole was almost caught out when he went to get a copy of Maxwell's "innovative" LDN Saturday classified edition at the old Daily Worker print site in Farringdon Street. "You're the first person to buy a Saturday classified edition in London for 20 years," the overseer told him. "Would you like to have your picture taken with Robert Maxwell?" The mole had to think fast. "Sorry, I've just left my wife for another woman and I don't want her to find out I'm still in London," he said.

I was in charge of features production at the time and one of the biggest of our many Maxwell teases was a new arts section. It may not sound much of a weapon, but it blew a sizeable hole in the LDN. One of the Maxwell moles had brought in a dummy edition of the LDN with a huge arts and listings section, which was called Metro. John Leese, then the editor of the Standard, remarked that this was a terrific name. It is newspaper etiquette not to pinch names of sections or columns from other papers (not knowingly, anyway), but in this instance it was decided that, as the LDN hadn't launched yet, it wasn't a real newspaper.

Two days later, we went to press with the first Standard arts section and I listened as a colleague rang a mate on the LDN. "Tell me," he said, "that arts section you guys are so proud of: what's it called?" "Metro," said a voice at the other end. "Funny," said my colleague, "that's what ours is called. Have a look, it's out today." I could hear the howls of outrage.

But the Standard's most devastating blow was the relaunch of the Evening News. The brainchild of Vere Rothermere himself, it came out with a cover price of 15p, and an irate Maxwell stupidly cut his cover price to match it. The Evening News then cut its price to 10p while the Standard sailed merrily on with no price cut. It was a master stroke, right down to the splash headline on the first edition, which read: "To the rescue." The actual story was about an opera singer flying in at the last minute to take over a role at Covent Garden when someone fell ill. But we all knew what the real story was.

Victoria Summerley is editor of 'The Independent Magazine'