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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You can’t blame Prince Charles’ press secretary, Paddy Harveson for advising the Royal Family to write, through their solicitors, to the editors of Britain’s national newspapers and magazines with a request that they respect the Law, the Press Complaints Commission Editors’ Code and the privacy of the Royal Family by not sending their own photographers to Sandringham (other than for the traditional Christmas Day church shots) and by refusing to buy speculative, free-lance paparazzi shots from the army of shameless, opportunistic wannabe snappers that will surround and trespass on the family’s private grounds at Sandringham over the Christmas holiday.
          There’s not much chance of the editors complying, though.
          They’ll justify their publishing of intrusive shots with the excuse that public have a ‘right to know’, and will buy their papers if they offer shots of the hapless Kate Middleton caught like a fawn in a pair of car headlamps.
          Prince William deserves some understanding for not wanting to see a repeat of what happened to his mother. It would be heartening if the public refused to be seduced by these low appeals to their prurience, and refused to buy the papers that try it on.
         Sadly, there’s not much chance of that either.

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It’s heartening to see that a young Tory hopeful, close to Cameron, has his priorities in order and the fact that he’s jolly rich shouldn’t, in itself, be a cause for ignoring him, and he claims – more than likely truthfully – that he does pay tax on his UK income (and, I dare say, like a lot of rich people he pays a lot in VAT on his bills in London restaurants; people forget that every time an overpaid investment banker goes on a bender, for every £1k he spends on Bollinger, £150 in VAT goes straght to HMR&C [soon to be £175] + a quid or so per bottle in duty.) And, by the way, that fat geezer in South Wales who was given $45m by the Euromillions Lottery for doing absolutely FA, hasn’t paid a sou in tax on it, and no-one – not even the Guardian – is complaining about that.
   Zac Goldsmith, like many other Conservatives, is sensitive to the nasty bogusness of Cameron cosying up to ol’ Rupert Rumplechops, Master James and the Wapping Testarossa. He’s quite right to suggest that there is something deeply malodorous in the relationship between young Dave Cameron and Ol’ Rupe’s boys, especially as this was promoted and is pushed along by the deeply tainted, chronically mendacious (or, at best, dangerously forgetful) former News of the World editor, Andy Coulson. As long as Cameron spends time with Andy and Andy’s former(?) employers, the nasty smells that still emanate from the cauldrons in the Wapping kitchen will continue to contaminate the odour of freshness he seeks to impart to the electorate. And, as has been widely noted, his standing in the polls has dropped since the Sun donned its bloodied gloves on his behalf.
   To save his credibility, he must sack Coulson, and walk away from the Sun, holding his nose and as fast as possible.

Popularity: 1% [?]