NoW caught in own trap

Nobody comes out well from the alleged plot to kidnap Victoria

It's hard to avoid the impression that the police were bounced into
prosecuting the case by the News of the World. It is inexplicable that the
CPS decided to proceed with the case, given that the main witness was so
fatally flawed. But the person with the most questions to answer is Mazher
Mahmood, the NoW's investigations editor.

He used to work for me at The Sunday Times: I regarded him as a
resourceful and courageous reporter - but he needed to be kept on a tight
leash or you could end up in all sorts of trouble. The NoW has now learned
that the hard way.

It is far from clear that the planned kidnap would ever have surfaced if
Mahmood had not started waving the NoW's large chequebook. Consider the
sequence of events.

A Kosovan car-park attendant with a criminal record and debts tries to
sell Mahmood a story about a plan to steal a bejewelled turban from
Sotheby's. In the words of the prosecution counsel, Mahmood makes "it clear
to him that the story would not sell newspapers". The Kosovan comes back with
an altogether juicier tabloid prospect: a plot to kidnap the Spice Girl half
of Britain's most famous celebrity duo.

The more the details of the story unravelled, the more important became
Mahmood's chequebook in facilitating the kidnap - so much so that it now
looks as if the Kosovan was essentially the instigator of the plot - the
agent provocateur - and that there would never have been a kidnap plot if
the NoW had not been prepared to pay him.

Entrapment was a powerful defence for the so-called kidnap gang - and
they had it courtesy of Mahmood, who has a record of entrapment (or
nearentrapment). He has some formidable scalps on his belt, from Prince
Edward's wife, the Countess of Wessex, whom he enticed to boast about the
royal PR she could deliver to an Arab prince (Mahmood dressed in robes), to
DJ Johnny Walker, who took cocaine in a classic Mahmood sting.

But he has also sailed close to the wind: the Earl of Hardwicke was
recently given a lenient sentence after a court decided that, had he not been
offered cocaine by Mahmood's team of journalists, he would not have committed
an offence. In the Beckham kidnap case the court ruled that the whole thing
was "a put-up job".

Mahmood and the NoW insist that the story was true. But even if it was,
they rode roughshod over the entrapment issue. According to Archbold, the
bible for criminal lawyers, "the right to a fair trial will be violated where
police officers [and journalists, by extension] have stepped beyond an
'essentially passive' investigation of a suspect's criminal activities and
have 'exercised an influence such as to incite the commission of the
offence'."

Rather than merely asking "Is the story true?" the NoW should have asked
"Why is the gang doing this?" An honest answer would have raised at least the
possibility that it was because Mahmood was paying them. So the issue goes
far beyond so-called chequebook journalism, about which the superior media
are far too sniffy.

It is about trying to create or even manipulate the news, a temptation to
which all newspapers sometimes succumb but one which is bound to end in tears
when it involves a reckless reporter under pressure to produce a bigger scoop
than the one before and a red-top tabloid in search of a manufactured "world
exclusive".

Fi's gone, but I shall still get my early morning fix I SHALL miss Fi
Glover's morning phone-in on Radio 5 Live when she departs for New York in
July to write a book. Even though she has the usual tendency of broadcasters
to give those on the Right a tougher time than those on the Left, she
combined serious purpose with a lightness of touch.

Above all, I'll miss the rancorous 9am handovers from Nicky Campbell, who
used to present the phone-in and now presides skilfully over the breakfast
slot.

Glover's departure leaves 5 Live too much of a boys' club: the station's
only other main female talent is Victoria Derbyshire, who co-presents the
breakfast show with Campbell.

The good news is that he doesn't get on with her either - so at least,
even with Glover gone, there will still be an edge to mornings on 5 Live.

Fleet Street settles old war scores

Alone in a national newspaper industry
congenitally reluctant to correct its mistakes, The Guardian has an exemplary
record: its famous "corrections and clarifications" column has even been
turned into a book.

All the more mysterious, therefore, that it has yet to correct or clarify
its Saturday page one splash, which alleged that Jack Straw and US
counterpart, Colin Powell, met in New York's Waldorf Hotel just before a
crucial UN session on Iraq on 5 February and moaned to each other about the
poor quality of their intelligence on Saddam's weapons of mass destruction.

Some sort of clarification, at the very least, is surely in order because
no evidence has yet been produced to show that the alleged meeting between
Powell and Straw ever took place, much less that they said what The Guardian
alleges. The foreign secretary denies it; The Guardian now says it might have
been a telephone conversation.

The paper claims there is a transcript of the conversation - but it has
yet to produce it, admits it has not seen it, but hints mysteriously that one
is doing the rounds of "Nato capitals", called the "Waldorf transcripts".
Such circulation means that, if it does exist, it will no doubt emerge soon.

The story's provenance is not helped by the joint byline: Richard
Norton-Taylor is an experienced correspondent on intelligence matters, but
his name comes after Dan Plesch, who is not even a journalist but a "defence
expert" who was opposed to the Iraq war and whose commentaries at the start
of hostilities have not stood the test of time.

There is no question, of course, that the failure, so far, to find weapons
of mass destruction in Iraq is a crisis of credibility for Tony Blair. I also
suspect that WMD intelligence was flammed up in places to make the case for
an unpopular war more powerful.

But the media lynch party currently pursuing the Prime Minister has its
own agenda: antiwar papers and broadcasters given a bloody nose with the
speedy and relatively simple fall of Baghdad are seeking revenge on a
Government which defied them by going to war and often proved their direst
predictions wrong.

The Guardian is not alone. The equally antiwar Financial Times now tells
us, in grandiose terms, that it "always suspected" Iraq had no WMD. I doubt
it does so now on the basis of its own search party returning to Southwark
Bridge empty-handed - there is something absurd about papers making
themselves sound omniscient on these matters. Curiously, the very antiwar
Mirror has been less triumphalist about the PM's WMD problems than you might
expect - maybe new boss Sly Bailey now has editor Piers Morgan firmly under
control.

Another dog that has failed to bark is The Daily Telegraph: it should be
scrutinising the flood of WMD stories with forensic intensity, if only to
justify its own pro-war stance. But it had little to say on the matter.

Yesterday's Times editorial brought some much-needed balance to the
current WMD feeding frenzy, arguing there should be no official inquiry (for
which much of the media are now baying) until "a comprehensive search is
completed". Fair enough: but that search will need a cut-off date, and if it
produces nowt, Mr Blair will face a press in full cry against him like he
never has before.

Saddam's not-so-cheeky chappie

The Mail on Sunday cleverly discovered
Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, aka Comical Ali, Saddam's ex-information minister,
in a Baghdad suburb. Now there's a plan by Revolver to distribute some of his
biggest whoppers on DVD. I appreciate that Comical Ali provided us with light
relief in the midst of hostilities, but we're in danger of taking the
harmless cheeky chap image too far. You don't get to be information minister
without being something of an evil bastard with blood on your hands.

Revolver says 10 per cent of profits would go to the Red Cross. It hardly
compensates for the mass graves now being discovered, the product of a regime
for which al-Sahhaf was the front man.

There's more than one way to tell a story at The Times

"The failure of German unions or his [Gerhard Schröder] party's Leftwing to embrace his
make-or-break reforms, despite his urgent appeals at the weekend," opined a
Times editorial on Monday, "has left him fighting for his political life." It
was a typically magisterial judgment from The Thunderer, spoiled only by the
failure of the editorial writer to read a story from Berlin in his own
newspaper two pages before, headlined "Schröder swings party behind welfare
reforms", which reported that the German Chancellor had won the "overwhelming
support of his Social Democratic party for a package of economic and social
reforms".

Serious American newspapers operate strict Chinese walls between the news
and opinion pages - they even have separate editors so that opinion does no
contaminate news - and maybe The Times is going that way, too.

But the opinion editors usually keep abreast of what the news editors are
running, something The Times clearly has not yet mastered. Or it might simply
be further confirmation that Sundayfor-Monday editing of our national
newspapers is always the sloppiest of the week.