A close-up of Richard Desmond that I wasn't ready for "I apologise again to the McCanns, etc, etc, etc..." he went on, that chillingly insouciant appropriation of Yul Brynner's catchphrase as the King of Siam confirming that he was paying purest lip service to the notion that callous cruelty in the cause of profit demands at least the pretence of contrition. A repulsive horror of the first order, you will say, and you would, of course, be right. But imagine what life must be like for someone to whom nothing but the bottom line (less the front bottom line now he has sold his porn mags, though he retains his saucy TV channels) has any meaning. Mr Desmond told Lord Justice Leveson that he doesn't understand the meaning of "ethical," but he is equally blind to the meaning of "moral," and it seems to me there are few clearer indicators of a grave psychiatric disorder than that. Now, admittedly, many of us take a guilty, vicarious thrill from observing the ways of human monsters. One needn't approve of the Mafia, from whom Mr Desmond has received death threats, to adore The Sopranos. Yet there is something ineffably poignant about such a weeny, cut-price monster, and nothing thrilling about such a preposterous puffball of bilious braggadocio. Twice each day, it is said, his butler brings him a banana on a silver salver. This seems apt. There is something about his desperation to impress a world this self-styled perpetual outsider affects to despise that brings to mind a psychotic version of the performing chimp. People who pride themselves on behaving with appalling rudeness and arrogance are often over-compensating for a cripplingly thin skin. Once, during talks with the executives of this newspaper group, who were also in discussions with a German firm, he accused them of consorting with Nazis before Heil Hitlering and doing the goose-step. I wrote that he, of all publishers, could take no umbrage if I speculated about the rare but recognised fetish whereby Jewish men are aroused by Gestapo fantasies. He did take umbrage. When I later teased him about something else, he rang the relevant title's proprietor, then resisting a hostile takeover bid, and threatened that if I wrote another syllable about him, he would buy £20 million of the company's stock and form an alliance with the corporate raider. Apparently, Desmond does have exquisitely refined sensibilities after all, if solely in regard to himself. It hardly needs stating that it is an abundant disgrace that such a man is permitted to own newspapers, Channel 5 or anything else beyond a basement emporium beneath blacked-out Soho windows (not to mention that Mr Cameron once hosted him at Chequers on the taxpayer's dime). The tragic irony for Desmond, if he thought that owning newspapers would launder a putrid reputation, is that it has done the reverse. Peddling porn may be an inelegant way to make a fortune, but next to cashing in on the grief of the McCanns, it assumes a patina of respectability of which he could barely dream now. If regarding himself as a lovably fearless buccaneer comforts Richard Desmond, so be it. But if he raises £1 billion for charity and quintuples his wealth to £5 billion, he will never inspire anything but the unnerving combination of nausea and wintry mirth that is his dubious gift to us all. He is nothing more or less than a sick joke.