Richard Desmond

Richard Clive Desmond (born 8 December 1951) is a British ex-publisher, businessman and former pornographer. He is the founder of Northern & Shell, a publisher that started by publishing music magazines in the 1970s, followed by variety of pornographic magazines in the 1980s. In the 1990s, it launched celebrity magazines (including OK! and New!) and Portland TV that produced pornographic television channels. In the early 2000s, the company sold the pornographic magazine titles and purchased the Express Newspapers, followed by Britain's Channel 5 in 2010. It launched The Health Lottery in 2011. Channel 5 was sold in 2014, Portland TV in 2016 and the Express Newspapers in 2018.

In 2020, Desmond was involved in controversy after pressuring Robert Jenrick, the then Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, to overrule the Planning Inspectorate and approve a housing development for Desmond's company. The timing of the decision saved the company £40 million but was later overturned.

According to the 2025 Sunday Times Rich List, Desmond was the 122nd richest person in the United Kingdom with a net worth of £1.3 billion.

Desmond was born in Hampstead, north London, into a Jewish family, the youngest of three children, and was raised in Edgware, in northwest London. His father was descended from Latvian Jews, and his mother was of Ukrainian-Jewish descent. His father, Cyril, was at one time managing director of cinema advertising company Pearl & Dean. An ear infection caused the sudden loss of Cyril's hearing and, according to Richard, he used to take the boy along, when he was no more than three years old, to act as "his ears" in business meetings, where he ostensibly acquired his "first taste of business dealings".

After Cyril lost a significant amount of family money to gambling, his parents divorced, and 11-year-old Desmond moved with his mother, Millie, into a flat above a garage; he has described his impoverished early adolescence as a time when he was "very fat and very lonely". Desmond was educated at Edgware Junior School and Christ's College, Finchley.

Desmond left school at 15 and started working in the classified advertisements section of the Thomson Group, while playing the drums at gigs after a day's work. After moving to another company, he became the advertising manager for the music magazine company Beat Publications, the publisher of Beat Instrumental. Desmond owned two record shops by the time he was 21.

In the mid-1970s, Desmond combined his interest in music and advertising to found publication company Cover Publication with Ray Hammond. Cover Publication launched International Musician and Recording World, a monthly magazine for musicians which expanded to have editions in the UK, US, Australia, Japan and Germany. This was followed by the publication of Home Organist, whose editor contributed the old-school motto Forti Nihil Difficile ("Nothing is difficult for the strong" – it was Benjamin Disraeli's motto), still used by the Northern & Shell group. Desmond eventually bought out Hammond.

In 1979, impressed by Gulf and Western's use of a name which drew association to a larger company, Desmond decided to change the name of Cover Publication to Northern & Shell, Northern for Northern Rock and Shell for Shell Oil. Desmond was the first investor in the London Docklands, having purchased land for an office space for Northern & Shell for £1 million. Northern & Shell were the first company to move to the area in 1982.^{[better source needed]}