How helpful is it, how meaningful, when the sleaziest reporter on the nation’s sleaziest paper sets up another victim in a completely implausible scam?
Mazher Mahmood is notorious for fabricating stories out of nothing, creating and casting scenarios that he hopes will make a front page splash in the News of the Screws – like he did with the non-existent Beckham “kidnap” story; like he did with the so called “Red Mercury” scare.
He often identifies victims, people in the public eye, who might have fallen on more difficult times, and tempts them with an opportunity to make some easy money.
The Duchess of York may have wondered why on earth some obscure businessman wanted to meet Prince Andrew but if he was offering £500,000 to her to make the introduction, it probably seemed too good a chance to pass up. She shouldn’t have responded, although she may have recognised that the introduction wasn’t going to help this punter in the slightest. There is no way in which meeting Prince Andrew could have made any money for an international businessman. The prince functions only as an ambassador at governmental levels, not as an entrepreneur or a trader in his own right; he doesn’t do deals, make or even influence anyone else’s business decisions. It was clearly a preposterous request that was never going to come to anything. In other words Sarah is being accused of taking part in a negotiation that could never have come to anything. Of course she should have turned him down, but maybe she just thought he was a rich businessman who wanted to upgrade his own self-esteem by rubbing shoulders with royalty. He would not, she would have realised, have been the first to suffer from that kind of pathetic aspiration.
As usual, Mahmood has created a non-existent misdemeanour for her to commit, and has done whatever he can to embellish the story in such a way as to make the biggest impact. The claims the paper’s story make are scarcely backed up in any visible way by the video they show online.
The quality of the pictures is deliberately bad, to obscure the detail. It is not at all clear that the pile on the table is a stack of $40,000. We see no transfer of this into the black bag with which Sarah leaves. (Mahmood claims they did this in another room – why didn’t they fill the bag on camera?) The reporter’s voice is obscured and, confident that the Duchess could never sue or go through the business of challenging their version, they may well have subsequently matched the words to their story. No single specific money-making deal is mentioned.
Since they were offering £500,000 for doing very little, and she evidently needs the money, Sarah went along with the idea that it would be helpful for this man to meet Prince Andrew, although there was no obvious way in which it could be.
While Sarah should not have agreed to meet the man, and she’s the first to admit that her judgement in these things is not good, no harm could have come because it was based on an entirely bogus premise, which is why stories acquired like this through entrapment are completely meaningless, other than making public figures look silly for the entertainment of those people dim enough to read the News of the World in a non-ironic way.
Mazher Mahmood has a long history of creating stories that cause a sensation for 24 hours before they then sink without trace. This could be another of them.

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