Desmond surrenders in his fruitless price war

So Richard Desmond has run up the white flag to end his hopelessly flawed price war strategy. That's hardly a surprise. Sales of his flagship Daily Express haven't improved since he introduced price cuts. He has tried to mask today's price increase to 40p by offering a TV-promoted French-language learning CD. But it will halt the downward slide only very slightly. There is no way of halting the Express slipping gradually away into the dustbin of media history.

It's not all Desmond's fault by any means. He inherited a basket case and it would have taken a super-human effort by an experienced newspaper owner to have turned it around. Desmond had no experience, carried too much unfortunate baggage - his pornography-based fortune - and added to the paper's woes by making it an uncomfortable place to work. He did make one wise move by switching his Daily Star editor Peter Hill into the Express chair. It is a tribute to Hill and his staff that they have managed to produce such a professional product in the face of so many obstacles. I think the paper's content is often ridiculous - especially the laughable obsession with Princess Diana - and sometimes very unamusing, such as the campaign against asylum-seekers. That said, given the relative shortage of staff, it looks enough like a paper to fool some of the people some of the time. What it lacks, inter alia, compared to its traditional rival, the Daily Mail, is the range of material, the attention to detail, the passion and the overall gloss.

In other respects, everything Desmond has tried since he foolishly announced in 2000 that he would trounce the Mail has failed in spectacular fashion. His CD and DVD giveaways were superseded by those of the Mail. His price-cutting and discounting made only an initial impact. His cutting of editorial resources has sapped morale, placing his journalists under too great a pressure. His attempt to clean up his own image by selling off his pornographic magazines in 2004 didn't work, partly because he has retained his "adult" TV channels. Then there is the fact of the huge sums he has taken from his company, Northern & Shell, amounting to £52m alone in 2004. He is so identifiably linked to the Express that negative publicity about him has a knock-on negative effect on the paper's credibility, and its sales.

Today's Express carries a front page boast about it being cheaper than the Mail, meaning that it sells for 5p less than its rival. But it is, like its owner, cheaper in every way. Look at the sales, dear departed Lord Beaverbrook, and weep in your resting place. In May, the Express, sold an average of 845,234 copies a day. Of those, only 711,000 were sold at the then full rate of 35p. The history of the Daily Express is one of extraordinary success until 1966 and then even more extraordinary failure. There is, I'm afraid, no hope for it now. Oblivion moves ever closer.

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