Watching Kieren Fallon being interviewed by Clare Balding on BBC1 on Sunday evening was a dramatic reminder of how much damage can be and has been done to many prominent individuals by a single rogue reporter on a Sunday tabloid.
Fallon, indisputably one of the world’s finest jockeys, was subjected in 2004 to a humiliating and harrowing attack as a result of a ‘sting’, based on subterfuge, misrepresentation and downright lies perpetrated by Mazher Mahmood, the News of the World’s notorious and utterly discredited “Investigations Editor”.
Mahmood has never let the truth or a subsequent waste of police time, court time and the public money to pay for them, get in the way of a splash on the front page of the lurid Sunday ShagRag. This was no exception.
     A string of his stories have ended with the disingenuous claim that his “dossier has been passed to the police”. And a number of those where the police – inexplicably sometimes – followed them up, arrested and remanded men in jail before bringing prosecutions which failed through the sheer inadequacy of the ‘evidence’ supplied by Mahmood, like the “Beckham Kidnap” story, and the “Red Mercury Dirty Bomb Scare”, in which three men were improperly imprisoned for two years.
    And so it proved in the case of Mahmood’s 5 page News of the World “exposé” of Kieren Fallon’s activities, headlined, “THE FIXER”.

As a result of a disturbing collaboration between the News of the World, the City of London Police (who took it on after the Met couldn’t see a case) and the Jockey Club (head of security – ex-policeman  Paul Scotney), Fallon was roped in and charged with a group of others of whom the Jockey Club had reason to be suspicious. Paul Scotney is widely on record as having expressed his almost obsessive desire to “get” Fallon. Thus Fallon had to undergo a long, gruelling trial for charges which, if provable, would have seen him in jail and his illustrious career in tatters, purely by association with some of the other parties on trial.
But as it turned out, Mahmood’s evidence against Fallon was so severely tainted by lies and manipulation of teh facts in his efforts to produce a big story, that the judge had little option but to instruct the jury to throw it out along with the somewhat shaky case produced by the Jocjey Club against the other parties.
Once the criminal trial was out of the way, Fallon was free to pursue the News of the World for the horrendous libel they had published about him. The paper settled at once and, not for the first time, Rupert Rumplechops had to watch as his inept newsmen handed out a few hundred thousand more from his coffers in damages and legal costs.

Worth Noting:
This was yet another example of bungling by former Screws editor (AND TORY HEAD SPINNER), Andy Coulson (since disgraced over the royal phone-tapping), and long-time managing editor Stuart Kuttner, sacked this year for his part in the Gordon Taylor phone-hacking debacle.

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