Obituary: Nigel Dempster, who has died at the age of 65, was the foremost gossip columnist of his day; a journalist who was loved and loathed in equal measure.

Gosspi columnist; Born November 1, 1941; Died July 12, 2007.

Nigel Dempster, who has died at the age of 65, was the foremost gossip columnist of his day; a journalist who was loved and loathed in equal measure and whose name was better known than those of many of his society subjects.

During his unusually long tenure at the Daily Mail (from 1971 to 2003), he often broke front-page stories, such as the prediction of Harold Wilson's resignation, and he kept the paper's lawyers busy dealing with the writs, which he regarded as proof that he was doing his job well. Stories that he deemed unsuitable for Mail readers found their way into Grovel, the long-running column which he established and secretly wrote for Private Eye magazine.

The son of a well-off Australian mining engineer, Dempster was born in India in 1941 but grew up in England: he was packed off to boarding school in Devon at a young age. He saw his Scottish mother once a year, and his father even less frequently, and he was expelled from Sherborne school in Dorset at 16 for being "a disruptive influence".

After stints as a broker at Lloyd's, a hospital porter and a vacuum cleaner salesman, he stumbled into the media scene in 1960 when he met the Earl of Kimberley who ran a Mayfair public relations company. Dempster immediately felt at home with the company's upper-class clients and learned valuable lessons about how important reputation and image are to those in power.

In 1963 he joined the Daily Express as a junior reporter on the William Hickey gossip column, and in 1971, by now extremely well-connected - not least through his marriage to Emma de Bendern, daughter of Count John de Bendern - he began his reign at the Daily Mail.

His immensely popular column featured a cast of regular characters that included Princess Michael of Kent (whom Dempster famously christened Princess Pushy) and Sir James Goldsmith (who sued the paper regularly), and was designed to appeal to middle England.

To anyone who posed the obvious question "who cares?" about the tangled domestic life of the likes of Goldsmith, Dempster could point to his paper's circulation and the fact that it was paying him the biggest salary on Fleet Street at the peak of his career. Dempster often said that he regarded his role as being "to provide insights of the workings of those who are above us in terms of power and privilege, position and money".

His long-suffering deputy, Adam Helliker, said: "He saw himself as society's moral policeman. The rest of us thought we were in the entertainment business. He thought he was doing a public service."

At his peak, when he was so well-known that a snake at London Zoo was named after him, he regularly broke stories that were of broader interest. His most famous scoops included the prediction of Harold Wilson's resignation in 1976, the revelation that, at the height of the Buy British campaign, the House of Commons' catering committee had spent £13,000 on German crockery, and the announcement that Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson were to be married, in 1986. However, by 2003, when he retired from the Mail, his society column was dated and he had long lacked his old enthusiasm.

His life seemed to fall apart as, in quick succession, he lost vast amounts of money on race horses he owned and his second marriage - to Lady Camilla Osborne, with whom he had his only child, a daughter - ended. He also appeared in court accused of drink-driving. Now, of course, it seems likely that much of what happened to him in recent years was a result of the progressive supranuclear palsy, a brain disorder, which killed him.