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He is confident enough to make a joke at his proprietor's expense when

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He is confident enough to make a joke at his proprietor's expense when I ask him quite what the phrase "award winning newspaper" means above the masthead. "The Richard Desmond award, probably," he replies, before adding, only marginally more convincingly: "Individuals on the paper have won awards."So how is it working with Richard Desmond? "Er, we don't do dull It's an experience like nothing else. I've been on the Express five years and I'd never have thought I would experience the proprietor who is seen here every day And it's just extraordinary. And far from being the ogre he's meant to be, he's supportive. And the staff like the fact that he's visible."When I've done page one he comes down and he looks at it, and he says whether he likes it or he doesn't like it." What, every night? "Yes every night."And you sometimes disagree with him? "Yes, I sometimes disagree with him But he has never told me to change the paper He has suggested things. He doesn't say, 'Change it.' But he says if he doesn't like it.

So we have a discussion, and occasionally it's an argument." The real Desmond obsession, it seems, is more with the look of the paper, not least the front-page blurbs and puffs, rather than the content.It is not just Desmond who has made media gossip for other papers. Williams too was castigated for his campaign on asylum-seekers. "Criticism of the asylum series irritated me," he says, "because some of it was internal and because I felt that the campaign was nothing to do with racism. It was a genuine campaign to get the Government to change a system which wasn't working, which it has done."Williams's internal retort was even crisper. When he discovered that the NUJ chapel had discussed the campaign at the same meeting at which it discussed failings in the staff canteen, he wrote to them acidly, saying he was fascinated that they could equate the asylum issue with the state of the company meatloaf.Ten months into the job, Williams has had more than enough time to think about where to position the Express, which continues to lose readers with worrying regularity. The latest circulation figures have it down 1.61 per cent month on month, and 7.57 per cent year on year.

"It is disappointing that the figures haven't risen, but if you look closely you will see that our street sale for November has hardly gone down. What makes the figures look rather more depressing is that Richard [Desmond] stripped away the bulking operation. Previously the marketing operation had propped up the circulation and that didn't make any sense either morally or financially. I've been editing for 10 months and in six of those 10 months we have shown a street-sale increase on the previous month."Repositioning has been one of the main problems of the Express over decades. What I'm trying to do is, I want it to be honestly and steadfastly middle market. But I want it to pursue a different agenda to the Daily Mail. The Mail has clearly been a huge success in grabbing Middle England.

But a lot of people in Middle England, including some readers of the Mail, don't like its bitter agenda. I have got to persuade people to try the gentler, warmer Daily Express. Of course, we still address the major issues such as asylum, but our paper is a more upbeat paper."In terms of the paper's political outlook, Williams is not changing Boycott's Blairite approach, which came as a shock to traditional Express readers "In essence, I've not altered Rosie's perspective," he says "Rosie described us as critical friends of New Labour. I'm still proud of the fact that in the election I asked readers to vote Labour for the first time in 100 years of the Daily Express."My target readership, to be frank, is disaffected people who are tired of the hectoring tone of the Daily Mail, which in my view is misogynist, though bizarrely it is still viewed as a women's paper. It disapproves of working women; it disapproves of single mothers; it just generally disapproves.

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