But I believe if he had been wearing the hammer and sickle there wouldn’t have been so much fuss made

“But I believe if he had been wearing the hammer and sickle there wouldn’t have been so much fuss made,” she said.During negotiations over the purchase of the house, Mahmood claimed the Princess attempted to convince him that it was on a par with that of Prince Charles’s at Highgrove and then pleaded poverty, despite having rooms at Kensington Palace. This time the Princess, the daughter of Baron Gunther von Reibnitz, rode to the defence of Prince Harry over the wearing of Third Reich insignia to a fancy dress party. Donning the trademark robes, Mahmood assembled his entourage. He hired a helicopter to convey him to the Princess’s £6m pile where he apparently found his quarry “falling over herself to flaunt her royalty”.The ease of it all constituted a “shocking security lapse”, Mahmood wrote, while her “deeply offensive revelations” constituted an “appalling act of betrayal” to the Royal Family.A second meeting was convened at Claridges hotel in London. All it took was a tip-off and a couple of calls to the estate agents Savills for the fake sheikh to set in place his latest sting. Prince William, meanwhile was still “too young” to marry his girlfriend Kate Middleton, as was his younger brother Prince Harry and his South African girlfriend Chelsy Davy.Although anyone with a passing interest in the Royal Family might not view these insights into the inner workings of the Windsors as particularly outrageous, the News of the World had little doubt what it thought of the woman dubbed Princess Pushy’s thoughts: Treachery!The newspaper exploited the opportunity to get to the 60-year-old Princess afforded by the sale of her 17th-century Cotswolds manor house Nether Lypiatt. The Prince of Wales’s wife Camilla would one day be Queen, despite the monarch and the public’s ambivalence to her son’s second marriage.

What might make an entertaining read might not necessarily prove to be an investigative triumph,” he said. Princess Michael of Kent SEPTEMBER 2005Princess Michael of Kent apparently needed little encouragement to share her views on the Royal Family with the stranger she thought was a wealthy Arab prince.Diana, Princess of Wales was a “bitter” and “nasty” woman, her former husband Charles was “jealous” of her popularity He had merely married a “womb”, she said. And I’m saying that as someone who has had 150 front pages in the last 18 months. But according to Mr Clifford, courts are right to treat the reporter’s stories with caution “A good story often has very little to do with reality. In the case of Rhodri Giggs, the brother of Manchester United star Ryan, the trial judge took the unusual step of asking prosecutors to consider bringing charges against Mahmood for supplying drugs and illegal possession.Most spectacularly, the case against a gang allegedly plotting to kidnap Victoria Beckham was dropped The News of the World was outraged. Radio 2 disc jockey Johnnie Walker, exposed by Mahmood as a cocaine user, was treated with unusual leniency because the court disapproved of the “sting” technique used to gather the evidence. He regularly boasts of having helped secure the convictions of 134 criminals (though the Arabic disguise was rarely required to land the grim procession of low-rent paedophiles, people traffickers and villains).His work is not without danger.

Forced to inhabit a twilight world of aliases and cover stories, he refuses to be photographed His stories are typically accompanied by a silhouette There have also been very real threats to kill him. Colleagues who worked with him at the Sunday Times, from where he was sacked in 1989, recall him as a remote figure. Some at the News of the World who admire his results privately question his no-holds-barred approach.It is an approach that has come under increasing scrutiny in the English courts. Then there is a special black and gold robe, only worn by members of the 25,000-strong House of Saud. Expensive shoes and a Rolex watch complete the routine, along with a Ferrari or a helicopter. He also likes to puff away on a hubble-bubble pipe as he coaxes the story out of his victim.If the non-smoking, teetotal son of a Midlands magistrate had been a police officer, Mahmood would have a proud record. Sophie was a far more difficult target.”The sheikh routine is well rehearsed.

The white jalabia is accompanied by a flowing robe and the agal, or headdress. “Who are the kind of people who have got that amount of money and who might want to buy a bit of the aristocracy? They were sitting ducks. According to publicist Max Clifford, Princess Michael was the perfect target.Mahmood’s cover was that of a potential buyer for the couple’s country home, Nether Lypiatt. “If you look at their situation, they were desperate to sell,” said Clifford. It is an astonishingly successful device and has helped him net some of the most talked-about stories in recent years.
The Royal Family are not the only ones to succumb.

So too have actors, criminals and – until Princess Michael – most recently Carole Caplin, the friend of Tony and Cherie Blair. The inventor of the role, the shadowy Mahmood, has ambivalent feelings about his creation “Real sheikhs have my deepest sympathies. When I display the wealth they live with every day, it exposes greed and hypocrisy,” he told his own newspaper in 2001 after tape-recording a catalogue of hugely embarrassing opinions aired by the Countess of Wessex, the former Sophie Rhys-Jones. What was somewhat more surprising, however, is how Mazher Mahmood, the News of the World’s investigations editor, pulled off his scoop armed with a disguise that has become the most celebrated cover in the modern media: that of the fake sheikh. The less-than-revelatory gossip coaxed from Princess Michael of Kent on the subject of the Royal Family will have cost The Firm very little lost sleep. “However, some specific remarks were inappropriate and ran the risk of calling into question John’s own impartiality and, by extension, that of the BBC We’ve made it clear to him that this must not happen again. “BBC presenters should be free to discuss topical issues in journalism in public, but they must do so in a way which does not risk undermining our audience’s confidence in their – and our – objectivity, impartiality and courtesy.”.