Since 1916 the column has provided readers with witty and mischievous insights into high society; from political scandals and literary feuds to the backstage gossip at fashion parties and film premieres.

Charles Wintour, who edited the Standard throughout the sixties, once declared: "To go to a decent London dinner party without having read the Diary would be to go out unprepared for proper conversation.

[5] With London still reeling from the horrors of the First World War, Beaverbrook was the first proprietor on Fleet Street to understand how eager his readers were to be entertained by glittering gossip.

Beaverbrook "regarded the nightly diary page in the Evening Standard as his own personal fiefdom … an armoury from which he could seize a weapon at will; bludgeon, cudgel and rapier lay at his disposal as he sought to fight his way to ever greater heights of power and influence in between-the-wars Britain.

"[6] The Diary provided a mischievous platform for political gossip and upper crust scandal, regaling readers with titbits on the private lives of London's high society: their excesses, their pets and their dinner-parties – but never their love affairs.

Before the Second World War, contributors to the column included Harold Nicolson, John Betjeman,[8] Randolph Churchill, Malcolm Muggeridge and Peter Fleming, brother of the 007 novelist Ian.

"[10] Other diarists were a little more serious about the task in hand and veteran Daily Mirror journalist Donald Zec recalled being in a certain amount of awe when dropping by the Diary as a rookie reporter.

"[11] In 1928 the Diary's editor was Robert Bruce Lockhart, a former spy known for his hard-drinking and semi-debauched lifestyle, who would later become a best-selling author with his Memoirs of a British Agent (1932).

Lockhart had been Britain's first spy in Moscow and, despite having been caught and exchanged for a Soviet agent, remained on unusually cordial terms with the Russian Embassy in London, from whom he received an annual gift of caviar.

[12] It was Lockhart who – having been promoted to a more wide-ranging role by Beaverbrook – suggested that his friend the aristocrat, ex-diplomat and writer Harold Nicolson might be the ideal man to take over the Diary.

Eager to be seen as one of London's glamorous 'Bright Young Things', in May 1932 he personally telephoned the Diary to provide them with advance details of his 21st birthday and its glittering society guest list.

[20] A few years later the young Churchill performed an amusing about turn, becoming editor of Londoner's Diary and one of the best-paid gossip columnists on Fleet Street.

This is how, improbably, the 64-year-old Winston Churchill – just two years before he would assume the role of Britain's wartime Prime Minister – became editor of the Londoner's Diary for a week, filing stories about the political career of Lord Longford and shooting at Balmoral with the King.

The drawling "Old Boy" attitude that Donald Zec had observed thirty years earlier was still very much alive; Kenny recalls that when she arrived "not only was I the only girl on the column, I was [apart from Max Hastings] the only person who hadn't been to Eton.

In the summer of 1963, while reporting for the Standard from Paris, he discovered that General de Gaulle had been avidly following the Profumo affair in the British newspapers, turning to an Elysée aide to remark: "That will teach the English to try and behave like Frenchmen.

After Sands, Rory Knight Bruce, who had come from The Spectator, edited the Diary in the 1990s, giving a start to many of today's leading journalists and authors, including Peter Bradshaw, Sam Leith, James Hanning, Vincent Graff, Nick Bryant, Philip Kerr, Imogen Lycett Green and Robert Tewdr Moss.

Knight Bruce broke many stories at a time when the Evening Standard was selling almost 700,000 copies a day, often changing the page in its entirety for the noon edition.

[32] "The Diary and its team of clever young writers were in a way Beaverbrook's spies, sending out signals to the world about the trivial details of great or celebrated people".