The man himself cannot have failed to see the writing on the wall. Additionally, four years ago he lost his long-serving deputy Adam Helliker, to The Sunday Telegraph, which led to a reported bout of corridor fisticuffs. Several years ago, it employed Dempster's old friend and rival, Peter McKay, to create the Ephraim Hardcastle diary, which has gone for the politics and cultural end of the market, while more recently starting a 3am Girls-style slot, Wicked Whispers, aimed at the showbiz market.Significantly, both of these columns are further forward in the Mail - Dempster yesterday was on page 47. It's about politics and celebrities as well," said another Daily Mail insider.None of this has gone unnoticed by the ruthless executives at the Mail, where the editor-in-chief Paul Dacre must have agonised long and hard about the gains and losses from ending the Dempster era, while watching the success of the celebrity- and showbiz-filled, gossip-driven pages of the red tops, particularly The Sun's Bizarre and the Mirror's 3am Girls.What the Mail has done is to try to have it both ways. But it's a trap that you fall into," said another former colleague."Dempster has failed to re-invent himself, as so many of us need to. Gossip has moved on and it's about all kinds of things, not just the ageing aristocracy.

It's very tempting never to write anything bad about people, and it allows you a very easy life. Ascot, Henley, Wimbledon and other highlights of the season are meat and drink to Dempster.Yesterday's diary - not edited by Dempster, although his 20-year-old photograph appeared as always on the masthead - featured a lead story on Christine Hamilton's success in selling the family home in Cheshire, together with items about the 40th birthday party of Annabel's nightclub (very much a Dempster kind of place), the London mayoral candidate Steve Norris and the actress Cate Blanchett "I think he just slipped into PR for these people. I mean, if you stopped somebody in the street and asked who are the most famous journalists in the land, then Dempster would have to be among them. I think he will be missed by readers, who, unlike journalists who like to keep changing things, like the familiarity."While there was an air of warm tributes to a long-serving Fleet Street character - part of the old-school, long-lunching, pre-hi-tech era of journalism - there was also a general recognition that Dempster himself, and his style of diary column, had just about run their course.Dempster's diary page - for anyone unfamiliar with its contents - is often concerned with the comings and goings of a largely irrelevant group of people - part perma-tanned Eurotrash, part luvvie nobility (Roger Moore and Sir John Mills are staples) and the minor aristocracy normally only seen inside the pages of Harpers & Queen and Tatler.

"Well, we've heard nothing official, of course," said one long-serving corridor colleague yesterday, who preferred to remain anonymous "It is the end of an era, of course, if it's true He's an institution. But while there has been no confirmation from Daily Mail towers, Fleet Street was talking about little else yesterday. Forget Hutton, Gilligan and whether the BBC got it wrong - there's nothing like gossip, particularly when it's about a gossip columnist.And of course, being gossip about colleagues, "off the record" was the preferred means of discourse. Discerning what it is actually all about is another matter.What we know is this: yesterday, The Daily Telegraph reported that Dempster, who is said to be suffering from Parkinson's disease, has decided to quit. The above spoof is, of course, a mixture of familiar Dempster themes - out and out snobbery, the obsessions with minor aristocracy, the marital status of everyone in those circles, a largely sympathetic treatment of the subject and a certain economy when it comes to other facts. After several years of speculation, the one-time king of the gossip column is about to lose his crown, finally leaving the Daily Mail after 30 years, to general relief all round.

Those who have always hankered after his job can now get on with the real business of gossip - what the latest cast of Big Brother are up to.Well, as they said in Evelyn Waugh's great Fleet Street fiction, Scoop, up to a point, Lord Copper. It took hundreds of rehearsals because there were no special effects used. It got a lot of free publicity because people were so interested in how it was made that in the end it paid for itself."Others picked out from the past 12 months included an advert for Levi's featuring the heads of mice superimposed on humans, and Marmite's "lifeguard" commercial.A panel of experts from the advertising world reviewed 450 commercials submitted by agencies, producers and directors in Britain.. This was chosen because of its ability to surprise the viewer. A month after it was first screened the agency Wieden & Kennedy was accused of copying it from a two-minute Swiss film called Der Lauf Der Dinge (The Way Things Go), filmed in 1987.Mr Davies said: "It is difficult to say it was plagiarised because we are all influenced by something else.