Connect: The News of the World's "fake sheikh", Mazher Mahmood, has struck again. Mahmood is the hack who has "stung" England football manager, Sven Goran Eriksson, former England rugby captain Lawrence Dallaglio and taxpayer-subsidised aristos Sophie Wessex and the gender-bending named Princess Michael of Kent. MP George Galloway was Mahmood's latest intended victim.
Two men invited Galloway to a meal at London's Dorchester Hotel. They introduced themselves as Pervaiz Khan and Sam Fernando. Though beardless, they described themselves as "Islamists". Their "driver" was Mahmood, recognisable by his "mouthful of gold teeth". Khan and Fernando made remarks about Jewish people and "invited me to agree with them", reported Galloway.
"For example, when I said the Daily Express was the worst pro-war, anti-Muslim paper in Britain, they asked 'because it's owned by a Jew?'," said Galloway. "No," I said, "because it's owned by a pro-war pornographer." Conversation later shifted to talk about the Holocaust. "You're not allowed even to quibble about the numbers," Galloway reported Fernando as saying.
("Quibble" sounds a most inappropriate verb to use in relation to an attempt at systematic annihilation. Whether the figure is higher or lower than the commonly quoted "six million" is not a matter for "quibbling". Millions of people were certainly shot, gassed and worked to death during the Holocaust so the notion of "quibbling" over figures is disgusting.)
Anyway, it's clear the News of the World wanted Galloway to spout pro-Islam, anti-Jewish guff. Since his appearances in front of the US senate and on Celebrity Big Brother, Galloway has been in the cross-hairs of many media outfits. During Big Brother, for instance, he behaved embarrassingly by pretending to be a cat drinking milk from veteran actress Rula Lenska's cupped hands.
The incident did Galloway no favours and left him ripe for entrapment. Meanwhile, in Britain the fake sheikh has become more than a mere tabloid device. Instead, he has become a kind of national media archetype. He is, after all, the man whose job it is to demonstrate the endless greed, vanity and folly of the world. His tactic is to show that the powerful and the famous are fools too.
Yet he deals in entrapment. There really is no other term for Mahmood's strategy. It's a pity the energy and financial resources of a huge newspaper are used to make people look and sound like fools. For instance, instead of making Eriksson, the unlikely Lothario, look like a clown, the paper could have chased crooked agents and tried to unravel aspects of football's eternal "bungs" blight.
But the more frivolous yarns sell more papers at much less trouble and expense. Thus they are desirable financially. They certainly appeal to human prurience, for nobody is without some degree of schadenfreude. "Exposing" the likes of Eriksson, Dallaglio, Sophie Wessex, Princess Michael and George Galloway appeals to readers but the base motivation is money.
A Gallup poll of 1,500 people in the US a few years ago showed that 79 per cent approved of investigative journalism. That's practically four out of every five people. However, when it came to techniques commonly used - unidentified sources, reporter misidentification, hidden cameras and mics and cheque-book journalism, the 79 per cent figure sank to an average 37 per cent.
Such findings are troublesome. They show that while almost four in every five people approve of investigative journalism just a little more than one in three approve of techniques commonly used in "sting" operations. The fake sheikh's tactic is not simply low-level reporter misidentification - "nobody asked who I was" - but rather the impersonation of somebody else entirely.
Furthermore, it's not really "investigative journalism" is it? Sure, it's undercover but the fake sheikh is hardly Watergate. Getting Sophie Wessex, for instance, to make disparaging remarks about members of the British government and to appear to use her status as a business tool to gain clients has a strong appeal to prurience. But these are not unexpected attitudes. Neither is that of the improbably named "Princess Michael". Renamed "Princess Pushy" because of her love of loot, "Michael/ Pushy", like Sophie Wessex, divulged to the fake sheikh her willingness to use contacts to flog her Cotswolds manor house.
But there's no revelation in that: after all, "Michael/Pushy" is well known to have said that she would "go anywhere for a free lunch".
As far as the News of the World is concerned, it is merely "carrying out wholly legitimate inquiries". That's the problem though. The, eh, "inquiries" are legitimate in that they are legal - but are they morally legitimate? Would you, for instance, feel justified in dressing like an Arab to trap a football manager, a rugby player, a politician or a pair of well-connected parasites? Maybe the answer is "yes", but you've still got to live with yourself. The problem with "undercover" journalism is that it's perverted by such "sting" operations. George Galloway, though he made a clown of himself on Celebrity Big Brother, was right to go on the offensive opposite US senator Norm Coleman. His performance in Washington deserved better than the fake sheikh treatment.