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- guardian.co.uk, Tuesday October 23 2007 11.07 BST
Amanda Platell: arrived in Fleet Street from Australia in the 1980s. Photo: David Hartley/Rex Features
The Sunday Mirror is targeting Daily Mail columnist Amanda Platell as a potential successor to outgoing columnist Carole Malone.
MediaGuardian.co.uk understands that Sunday Mirror editor Tina Weaver has made a number of personal entreaties to Platell, a former editor of the Sunday Express, in a bid to snatch her from the Mail where she has written the Saturday column Platell's People for the past year.
It is thought that the Sunday red-top also considered Carol McGiffin, a presenter on the ITV1 daytime show Loose Women and the former wife of radio DJ Chris Evans.
But Weaver can wait a while to make her decision because Malone has most of her six-month notice period to work before she joins the News of the World. Malone was lured to the rival tabloid by editor Colin Myler, a friend and her former editor at the Sunday Mirror.
"They are slightly panicking about the decision but they have a lot of time," a Mirror source said.
Platell arrived in Fleet Street in the 1980s from her native Australia and rose through the industry after stints at Eddie Shah's defunct Today, the Daily Mirror and the Sunday Express.
She became editor of the Sunday Express and was sacked in 1999 after the paper exposed Peter Mandelson's relationship with his Brazilian partner Reinaldo Avila da Silva.
The story gained a massive follow up and her sacking was widely attributed to the Labour connections of then Express owner Lord Hollick.
Platell was then appointed press secretary to William Hague and helped in his efforts to revive the Conservative party's fortunes. She quit when he resigned as party leader after the Tories' disastrous showing in the 2001 general election and returned to journalism.
In 2004 she quit her columns in the Times and the Evening Standard to write exclusively for the Daily Mail, becoming a fully-fledged Daily Mail columnist last year.
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