One of his musicals was written for children, two others are based on children’s literature; his brother Julian believes that Phantom has its roots in a childhood visit to the cinema “Andrew has never lived in the real world. He has created his own,” says Jonathan Mantle, a biographer.Newspapers, however, are very much the real world – an apparently declining industry, in which struggling titles are harder to turn around than supertankers. They can be turned, but only given time, money and talent; it is a labour of love. For some would-be proprietors – those with political ambition – it is worth doing. What the Really Useful Group wants out of newspapers is expansion befitting its ambitions for a multimedia approach to entertainment.

Whether Sir Andrew is right in thinking that good old-fashioned newspapers are the right way of moving on to the info-tainment superhighway is a moot point. And whether the Express titles are a good investment is another one.Still, he has been right before. He was right about Victorian art, when everybody else thought it was unfashionable, and he has been uncannily right about what will play in Peoria (and Tokyo, and San Diego, and Amsterdam, and Hamburg). He also once invented a board game, Calamity, about the insurance business.

The winner is the one who best calculates the risks and ends up with the most money.. WITH only 12 months to go before the next presidential election, Americans are once again displaying a dangerous predilection for candidates who know little or nothing about politics. It’s the same distrust of politicians that turned the absurd Ross Perot into a contender three years ago; for an alarming moment, it seemed that people were prepared to vote for a man whose best-known policy was a disinclination to employ men with beards. I’m not fond of facial hair myself but it doesn’t strike me as the germ of a coherent political programme. Yet the practice of courting popularity by saying as little as possible strikes deep chords on both sides of the Atlantic, as evidenced by the dismay that greeted the announcement that General Colin Powell had decided not to run for president.
A leader in the Times regretted Powell’s choice: “The notion of a black Eisenhower, riding back to save the political establishment from itself, had resonance beyond nostalgia.” Yet the general’s politics are so opaque that it only recently became clear that he would have been a contender for the Republican nomination, rather than an independent candidate.We know he’s pro-choice on abortion and in favour of affirmative action to promote black people, positions that would endear him to more Democrats than Republicans. But what he thinks on major issues, such as the economy, is an unknown quantity.

Indeed his dignified admission that he lacked “a commitment and a passion to run the race” could be read as a coded acknowledgement that he hasn’t got any policies; there isn’t much point fighting your way into the White House if you haven’t a clue what to do when you get there.”THE future is the future,” Powell remarked gnomically when asked whether he was ruling himself out of presidential contests after 1996. What’s amazing about the adulation he inspires is that it’s all too obvious what happens when you pick a leader for negative reasons. There was widespread relief in Britain when the relatively unknown John Major succeeded Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister in 1990, largely on the grounds that he was not perceived as an ideologue, but it didn’t last long.We’ve now been saddled for five years with a man whose one Big Idea is an increase in the number of motorway toilets. He’s also turned out to be vulnerable to any barmy scheme pressed upon him, from railway privatisation to supporting President Chirac’s undeclared nuclear war on harmless Pacific atolls. Millions of Americans are distraught about General Powell’s decision not to enter politics but they may have had a narrow escape.I DON’T have a television so I missed the moment on Sunday evening when the actress Isla Blair, in her own words, took her “kit off on screen” in The Final Cut. But I couldn’t avoid the excited discussion that followed including a detailed description in one newspaper of the state of her nipples. Blair has tried to distance herself from the episode, declaring that it wasn’t really her on screen – she meant she was playing a role, not that she used a body double – and insisting that her family is more important than her career.The excitement is, naturally, all to do with Blair’s age.