Media : The Talk of Fleet Street Is in the Diaries : * When certain reporters feud, their battle becomes news in the British press.

They refer to each other as “The Tonsured Traducer” and “The Pompadoured Poltroon” as they routinely blast each other in the gossip columns they write, respectively, for the Daily Mail and the Daily Express.

Nigel Dempster, the traducer, and Ross Benson, the poltroon, are the best known and most widely read columnists in the fiercely competitive British daily press--where the “diarist” is a newspaper tradition going back to Samuel Pepys in the 17th Century.

Ordinarily, diarists do not deign to recognize one another’s existence, let alone devote space to their competitors.

That’s one reason the current Dempster-Benson feud is the talk of Fleet Street, where the sophisticated men-about-town have been slugging it out, gutter-style, with nasty references to each other at least once in each writer’s output of five columns a week.

In one sample exchange, Benson, who has a mop of hair, accused the bald-spotted Dempster of virtually reprinting a Benson scoop regarding actress Julia Roberts. “The Tonsured Traducer is clearly losing his marbles as well as his hair,” the Daily Express diarist commented.

In reply, Dempster wrote: “With stunning duplicity, the so-called diarist on the Daily Express claimed yesterday to have scooped the world with a tale about Julia Roberts. Dross is unable to distinguish between truth and fiction, so my commiserations to Paul McCartney about whom the Pompadoured Poltroon has been attempting to assemble a biography for the past year or so.”

“What does his own newspaper think? They’ve just dropped his ludicrous Saturday scribblings--and not before time,” Dempster added, referring to a regular weekend feature Benson had been writing in addition to his Monday-through-Friday column. (In addition to his daily diaries, Dempster also writes a column for the Mail on Sunday.)

Another Dempster attack on his rival: “Just one day after the Pompadoured Poltroon ‘diarist’ of a down-market newspaper ‘revealed’ that (British actress) Felicity Kendal and (theatrical director and producer) Michael Rudman had overcome their marital difficulties and were back living together, guess what?--it was announced that the couple had ended their eight-year marriage in the Divorce Court.”

Benson’s counterattack: “Better late than never--yet again--for a so-called rival newspaper. The second-class Mail and its desperate diarist have limply recycled my revelation that Olympic horsewoman Lucinda Green has parted from David, her husband of 10 years. The Mail has included every detail of my exclusive. The only new detail is the declaration ‘I can reveal’ by the Tonsured Traducer.”

Both men insist that the feud is for real and not a trumped-up battle to boost circulation. On the other hand, it’s clear that the Mail and the Express have been locked in a struggle for the audience that prefers to read a semi-serious tabloid to a quality broadsheet newspaper.

So far, the Daily Mail has been winning the numbers battle, with a recent published circulation of 1,691,789, to the Daily Expresses’ 1,550,357. The two papers are well behind the equally competitive down-market tabs: the Sun, with 3,687,455, and the Daily Mirror, at 3,656,549.

It’s also clear that gossip columns are taken very seriously in Britain, both within the profession and by British readers.

Top British journalists such as Daily Telegraph editor Max Hastings, the Scotsman editor Magnus Linklater and Hastings’ predecessor, now Lord William Deedes, have been diarists. The ideal column, Deedes has said, “should include one fact, one generalization, and one very slight inaccuracy to generate correspondence.”

Even Britain’s top quality newspapers have gossip columns of sorts. The Financial Times has its Observer column, the Times has The Diary, and the Daily Telegraph has upgraded its Peterborough column with photographs and livelier items.

Frank Johnson, deputy editor of the Sunday Telegraph, declared: “Our column, Mandrake, is a gentleman’s diary. We don’t have our eye to the keyhole from the servants’ quarters to the ducal bedroom. On the other hand, like everybody else, we like to read Dempster and his gossip. I’m just too proud and snobbish to do it myself.”

Indeed, Dempster’s position as Britain’s leading gossip columnist makes him perhaps the most valuable journalistic property in the country.

As Nicholas Coleridge, the polished editor of The Tatler magazine, put it: “No question about it, Nigel Dempster is required reading. . . . He’s like the bush telegraph of London society.”

At 50, Dempster, educated in a private school, is a veteran of the social scene. He’s written a gossip column for 30 years and prides himself on being married to Lady Camilla, the daughter of a duke. “It is a little known fact that my wife’s great aunt is the Queen Mother,” the Daily Mail diarist has boasted.

Once while based in New York, Dempster rushed to Richard Burton’s rented house on Long Island to interview the famous actor on his latest breakup with Elizabeth Taylor, shared a pre-lunch bottle of vodka, put Burton to bed and then told the crush of later-arriving reporters that their quarry was indisposed--thus guaranteeing his own worldwide exclusive.

Of rival Benson, Dempster says sneeringly that he does not see the Daily Express columnist socially: “He lives at the back of Victoria coach (bus) station, and I imagine that’s his mode of transport.”

Dempster maintains that he simply questions Benson’s accuracy as a journalist, needling: “It is a second-hand column, full of reprints, and I object to the way he prances around, a preening peacock. I suggest he start doing what he is paid to do: investigative reporting

“This poor fellow doesn’t even go to proper parties to glean information: His idea of a good party is an opening of Gucci.”

Benson, 43, who also went to a private school, is a relative newcomer to the diarist scene, having previously been a general news reporter, a feature writer and an award-winning foreign correspondent before taking on The Diary.

Regarding Dempster, Benson says: “I called him a moral coward. He said I didn’t give him credit for exclusively revealing that Fergie (the former Sarah Ferguson) would marry (Britain’s Prince) Andrew. Of course, he also revealed that Fergie wouldn’t marry Andrew. He uses half truths to justify himself. He speaks behind people’s backs--not a manly way of going about things. The medical definition of him is a homophobic paranoid.”

According to Benson, Dempster began the feud simply because he hates competition and attempts to intimidate his journalistic opponents.

“I’ve known Nigel for 25 years,” said Benson. “He seems to be driven by extraordinarily strange demons, which fuel his obsessions. You never know what provokes him. He’s like a goaded nanny-goat. Within 24 hours of my appointment to the column, he was heaving buckets of abuse at me.

“He’s a bully. And with bullies you have to fight back. Besides, I produce a better column than he does. I think he is supported by Sir David English, his editor who was once passed over for the editorship of the Daily Express and has never forgiven us for that slight.”

One thing both columnists do agree is that the “diary” is a vital part of British journalism.

Dempster points out that serious bits of news appear in gossip columns that would not find their way into print any other way.

“We are not a notably open society,” added Benson, “and gossip columns provide a way of getting stories into the public area.”

That common ground notwithstanding, Fleet Street observers expect that the continuing circulation battle between their respective employers guarantees that there will be no letup in the printed war of words between the Tonsured Traducer and the Pompadoured Poltroon.