The Daily Express has announced that Rosie Boycott has agreed to resign as editor of the paper ending two years in charge.

The revelation on Thursday came as no surprise as her views over the future direction of the paper were in direct odds with those of the new proprietor Richard Desmond, the owner of the Northern and Shell publishing empire which bought the paper last year.

Desmond is known to want to bring the paper closer to another of his titles, the celebrity magazine OK!.

A former editor of the feminist magazine Spare Rib, Boycott was unlikely to have remained working for Desmond who made his fortune with a raft of pornography titles. Chris Williams, the paper's executive editor, has been announced as her successor.

She was previously editor of The Independent, the first woman to edit a national broadsheet newspaper, and had also been editor of men's magazine Esquire.

Boycott left the Express with an estimated £200,000 pay-off and is being tipped as a future Labour working peer.