Hundreds of journalists, admin and advertising staff can pay their mortgages, put food on the table and shoes on their children’s feet thanks to him.”If the Desmond paper ever does see the light of day, the eccentric proprietor’s initial choice of editor must give a strong hint as to what editorial content Londoners can expect. That’s despite Desmond’s own recent vow to go ahead with the project as soon as the Office of Fair Trading rules on whether it can be distributed on London’s transport system.”It was definitely ‘a go’,” recalls Ferrari “I’d been involved in four different dummies They took on a number of staff There was a real, real sense that it was going to launch. Ferrari was censured by the Broadcasting Standards Commission for encouraging racism against asylum-seekers in a programme that aired in March last year. He dismisses the press baron’s erratic behaviour during a meeting with Daily Telegraph executives – in which he reportedly goose-stepped around the room and called all Germans “Nazis” – as frivolity “Sometimes he does get over-excited.
“If I was going to make a success of the breakfast show I had to give the commitment to the folks at Chrysalis that I wasn’t going to stay involved with the newspaper,” says Ferrari, choosing his words carefully.Ever the canny freelance, Ferrari refuses to burn his bridges with Desmond. But it became absolutely obvious to all concerned that I really couldn’t do both.”Sources say Chrysalis (which owns LBC) gave him an ultimatum that boiled down to a flat choice between the breakfast show and the evening paper. Richard Desmond, who is a bloke I admire, decided that I was one of London’s opinion-makers and he wanted my name as part of the paper. Certain people had hinted at the fact that it was ludicrous that I would be on the wireless for three hours every morning while supposedly editing an evening paper.”But although I would have been the editor and would have gone into the office every day, I was really hired as much to be the figurehead and to put my – in that horrible expression – imprimatur on it, as anything else.
Ferrari, who was hosting the station’s mid-morning phone-in at the time, says: “It was transparently obvious I couldn’t do both the radio show and the newspaper. Most of the other Stelios ventures, from internet caf?to budget cinemas have been a flop. He would like nothing better than to take his airline private again and prove how wrong the City was ease him out in the first place. Could he raise the finance? Apax for one might be willing to back Stelios again, and with the shares now significantly lower than they were when floated four years ago, the company would be a steal on its present valuation. Fasten your seatbelts for some major turbulence.Marks & SpencerWhen Philip Green started sounding out the City a little while back about its appetite for a Marks & Spencer bid, it was made clear to him that any such endeavour would only be acceptable if shareholders were left with a share of the upside. City institutions were said to be fed up with selling businesses to Mr Green, only to look on enviously as the retail entrepreneur proceeded to make huge sums of money out of them.
