Members of staff at Express Newspapers have been receiving hate mail after the front-page apology to the McCanns on Wednesday. It appears that some members of staff working for Richard Desmond’s newspapers, guilty or not, are being penalised for the defamatory remarks.

I hear that unsavoury e-mails were sent by members of the public to staff working in departments outside of home news, the department responsible for the offending articles.

The newspapers, which include the Daily Express, the Sunday Express, the Daily Star and the Daily Star Sunday had to apologise for more than 100 articles alleging that the McCanns were responsible for the disappearance of their eldest daughter, engaged in orgies and sold her to child traffickers. If such as backlash gathers strength, could this dent circulation figures further? The Daily Star recorded a 7.08 per cent year-on-year fall last month, while the Daily Express fell 3.28 per cent.

Cadbury to bring more gorillas out of the mist

Cadbury is set to launch a second Dairy Milk “Glass and a Half Productions” advert following the success of its drum-playing gorilla, with its seven million hits on YouTube, the creation of more than 70 community groups on Facebook and 250 online spoofs.

I hear the new advert, which will be launched on national TV on March 29, will feature dancing trucks. While no decision has yet been reached on the backing music, Cadbury is in talks with a record label and is hoping to sign off a track that sources say will be the perfect accompaniment to moving HGVs.

Considering the boost that the gorilla advert gave to the career of Phil Collins – he moved up the charts from 172 to 12 – one can only shudder at the thought of another superannuated crooner licking his lips at the prospect of this particular sugar rush?

— Senior officials at Unite are all off to Cuba for the May bank holiday. The trade union will pay for six of its executives to fly out for a trade union conference. Defending concerns that the brothers will be wining and dining at the union’s expense, a spokesman yesterday assured that this was in no way a jolly. “They will definitely not be staying in luxury hotels and they’ll be there for just a couple of days,” he splutters. That said, Derek Simpson, the general secretary of Amicus, is not afraid of spending union cash. He reportedly took a £4,000 helicopter trip to Glastonbury Festival at the union’s expense.

— So farewell then, Doug Flynn, former chief executive of Rentokil. I suspect that Mr Flynn will use some of his £1.2 million payoff to ease his passage home. A new yacht, perhaps, would take away some of the sting of his failure at Rentokil. After all, the Australian has made no secret of his desire to return to the beach and some sailing. He was pretty much there, following his time at Aegis until Rentokil came calling. He called the rat-catching job his “last big challenge”. As it turns out, he has gone overboard before the harbour was reached.

— Perhaps a coincidence but, as concern mounted about HBOS’s plunging share price on Wednesday, some customers are understood to have had difficulty accessing their Halifax accounts. One customer tells us that he was unable to withdraw money from three cash machines using his Halifax card, but successfully used a card from another bank. He claims Halifax told him its systems were down. Halifax, however, insists there was no systems failure.

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