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.

Popularity: 5% [?]

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.

Popularity: 5% [?]

It would be surprising if Rupert ‘Rumplechops’ Murdoch did not have a soft spot for the News of the World; after all, the old tart gave him his first big break in international newspaper publishing, which he now dominates from the offices of the Wall Street Journal – a very long way from the seedy Bouverie Street newsroom he took over back in 1969. Nevertheless, when he first made her acquaintance, buying the notorious ShagRag from under Robert Maxwell’s acquisitive hooter, she was, at least, an honest old tart, with great earning potential.
The tales of rapacious vicars, strippers at policemen’s balls and philandering politicians were more or less true. But over the last 25 years, under the evil influence of men like Stuart Kuttner, recently sacked managing editor, backed up by truth-hating hacks like Trevor Kempson, Mazher Mahmood and Neville Thurlbeck, the paper has utterly abandoned the principles expressed in its 1843 founding mission statement – “Our motto is the truth; our practice is the fearless advocacy of the truth,”  perhaps to be replaced by a quote from former news editor, Greg Miskiw: “This is what we do; we go out and destroy other people’s lives.”
Now the culture of lying and fabrication which is endemic in the newsroom is beginning to alienate a better educated public and lose sales. And it’s costing enough in damages and legal fees to make a big dent in the paper’s formerly impressive earnings.
          Tom Crone, head legal honcho at Fort Wapping must be getting nervous, sharpening his pencils and checking the emergency exits in preparation for a long campaign in the trenches. Will his new boss, Rebekah TestaRossa come and hold his sweaty hand? Or will she, along with her boss, Master James, be glad to see the back of the liability and steaming pile of ordure that the tacky little ShagRag has become?
          In the last year or so, the paper’s had a lot of big bills to pay for damages and legal fees. The Max Mosley fiasco cost them somewhere between £500k and £1m. They settled getting on for £1m with Gordon Taylor and two of his colleagues at the Professional Footballers’ Association for hacking into their voicemails. A writ from Max Clifford and Sky Andrew for more phone hacking and invasion of pivacy is hovering. In Paris a judge d’instruction is preparing a prosecution against the paper, its editor, Colin Myler, the reporter, Neville “Onan the Barbarian” Thurlbeck, and their lawyers, Farrers for publishing and sending copies of the paper containing details of Max Mosley’s private life to the FIA in Paris, which is a criminal offence in France.
          The paper is a source of a great embarrassment to James Murdoch, who must feel that the corporation which publishes the WSJ and wants to be taken seriously shouldn’t be messing about in the gutter with an organ at least as disreputable as the National Enquirer in the US.
          Kuttner has had his marching orders; Mazher Mahmood’s by-line is a rare sight these days; even Thurlbeck’s not getting the space he used to.  Following the paper’s admission that they had paid off Gordon Taylor (with a far bigger sum than Max Mosley was awarded in the High Court), the extraordinary display of dissembling put on by Crone, Myler, Kuttner and former editor Andy Coulson for the Commons Culture, Media, Sport Committee must have shoved the Screws public image even deeper into the Wapping mud.
          Don’t be surprised to see more changes; young Murdoch won’t want to live with his father’s old flame for ever.

Popularity: 4% [?]

 The Screws royal editor hit the jackpot last weekend. Busy Robert “Bob-a” Jobson revealed the astonishing news that a charitable foundation set up by the late Princess Diana had dropped in value, from c£1.4m to c£1.08m over the last year.

          This “25%” decrease was due, apparently, to the global stock market crash. To discover this, one can only surmise that his investigative skills took him as far as perusing the charities’ records open to anyone who cares to see them, as advised by the Charity Commission on their website. The money was left by Diana to her sons to “give to good causes”.

          This fatuous, insignificant non-story (for there can barely be any charitable foundation or indeed invest portfolio of any sort that hasn’t taken a hammering in the last year), was his only visible contribution to the great purveyor of truth – “Our motto is the truth; our practice is the fearless advocacy of the truth” – since September 17^th. This isn’t much for a week’s wage – maybe half an hour’s work, and another half an hour to churn out less than 100 words.

          No wonder the old paper’s profits have dwindled to bugger all. Added to that, the evil and highly mendacious Mazher Mahmood is still on the pay role – and he’s not bringing in much these days, due no doubt to Master James’ intention to see the tacky rag heave itself out of the quagmire of ridiculous grimy fantasies in which it has got immersed. The involuntary departure of Machiavellian Managing Editor, Stuart Kuttner in July (after Gordon Taylor was paid £700,000 out of court) may be the first clear indication of the changes young Murdoch wants to see.

          But the culture of untruth and fabrication is so rife at the News of the World that he’ll have a long, long task cleaning out that Augean Stable.

Popularity: 2% [?]

This morning, below absurd and dangerously alarmist headlines and with characteristic disregard for the security of the Queen and this nation, the News of the World’s so called “Investigations Editor”, Mazher Mahmood has once again attempted to bolster his putrid reputation.

Under the outrageous pretence that he is helping national security he has produced a story of how he bribed a man to show him around the Royal Mews and allow him to sit in one of the Queen’s cars.

Popularity: 1% [?]