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.”.

In practice, he tends to leave the assasination to others.His rather is a contrarian approach to investment, diligently researched and perfectly executed. Can the success of the funds outlast the man?It will be interesting to see, but I wouldn’t put money on it. Investors in the Fidelity Special Situations Fund are investing in Mr Bolton, and his seeming powers of clairvoyancy. To sugar the pill, Mr Bolton will continue to run both funds until the end of next year, and one of them for a further year after that, before moving off into the ether to provide mentoring for Fidelity’s various research teams. That particular investment rotation may now have run its course, so it makes eminent sense to split the fund into more manageable chunks.Only one problem. Fortunately for him, this has coincided with a period when big caps were out of favour, and therefore provided better value for money than they have in the past.

As the fund has grown, he’s moved progressively into larger, FTSE 100 companies. Mr Bolton is perhaps acting pre-emptively before the same thing happens to him.Mr Bolton made his reputation and fortune from investing in small and mid-caps. The bigger it gets, the more difficult sustaining such a high level of investment churn becomes.We’ve been here before. Even the mighty George Soros was forced eventually to split his Quantum fund up to answer charges of poor performance, and today, few hedge fund managers will take on any more than $500m because of the difficulty of investing it profitably. There are just not enough special situations or obviously undervalued companies out there for the billions to pour into, or to be more precise, not enough for a single investment team to be able to get their heads around. Unusually for a fund manager as successful as he, Mr Bolton tends to turn his entire fund over every 18 months.

As all investors know, the bigger an investment pot becomes, the harder it gets to invest the money successfully. There were also measures to deter new investors.With £5.4bn of funds under management, the special situations fund is already far and away the largest UK equity fund of its type. Over the last few years in particular, a period in which many fund managers have struggled to win any new funds at all, there has been a monumental inflow of capital.Put simply, Mr Bolton has become a victim of his own success. Yet even Mr Bolton seemed to admit that his success was unsustainable yesterday when Fidelity announced proposals to split the fund in two. Just occasionally, however, a fund manager will make it into orbit. And for a very, very rare few – Anthony Bolton of Fidelity’s Special Situations Fund being a case in point – there is the chance to escape gravity altogether.An investment of £1,000 in his special situations fund when it was founded in December 1979 would today be worth £100,000. Not even property prices in north London has done as well as that.

Police confirmed the men were arrested for allegedly trying to sell items stolen from Sotheby’s auction house. But the Crown Prosecution Service’s case collapsed in court in June 2003. One of the alleged gang unsuccessfully sued the newspaper for libel.. Up to 250 schools which have failed inspections will be told today they have a year to improve or face closure.

The move will be spelt out in a speech by the Education Secretary, Ruth Kelly, her first of the new school year. She will tell an audience of local government officials in London: “We must not allow our children in our weakest schools to suffer too long before we intervene and begin turning things round. Being [declared to be failing] for more than a year must be a thing of the past.”. Derek Anthony Aylward, actor: born Maidenhead, Berkshire 29 October 1922; died 9 July 2005. The curious career of Derek Aylward encompassed the sophisticated, long vanished world of pre-Osborne West End theatre, the formative years of television drama in Britain and hard-core pornography.

Disturbing news for Vermouth manufacturers, tuxedo fanciers, prominently attributed starlets and admirers of plots involving loose-mouthed megalomaniacs intent on world domination, but not before revealing their plan: there are problems finding the new James Bond. In the last three years, I have paid to go to a series of cell biology meetings in the USA where the lecturer has given some fascinating news about how a particular molecule he or she is studying seems to change cell growth or differentiation. There is a very serious danger that commercial activity could change the public perception of science. Once the pursuit of science becomes heavily geared to profit, scientists may be perceived as having vested interests and not working merely for the public good.And with increasing commercialisation may come increasing secrecy amongst scientists. Funding of science to make our respective countries “competitive” is to be welcomed – but it has its downside.

Science is no longer seen as an essential part of our culture or as an important expression of essential human inquisitiveness. This has grave dangers for science, though scientists often forget this. It means some expensive scientific subjects – for example, astronomy – may be increasingly underfunded because they are perceived as useless or not producing sufficient economic returns.
But my most important concern is the risk of public trust. Yet we don’t fund the study of the literature and theatre of Shakespeare, O’Casey or James Joyce at universities because these subjects will increase British or Irish invisible earnings, and courses in archaeology, Gaelic and Tudor history are not supported because they are good money-spinners. And it should not be forgotten that in China itself, economic growth is lifting millions out of poverty The bra wars are a distraction from this bigger picture. Narrow protectionism in the face of the rise of China is unsustainable as well as wrong.. We have recently seen that the UK Government is committed to scientific research because it is convinced that it will make Britain more economically competitive.Economic reasons seem almost entirely the only stated reason for the increased funding – science is seen as a financial investment.

And Western states must not turn a blind eye to China’s shameful repression of its own people for the sake of good economic relations with Beijing.But globalisation and the emergence of China is a process that also brings great benefits. In the West, it is depressing consumer prices and keeping a lid on inflation. It is also providing a myriad of new business opportunities – as witnessed by another deal yesterday for Europe to sell 1,800 Airbus aircraft to China over the next 20 years. The predatory targeting of markets supplied by other developing countries must cease.

Chinese state banks should not be providing cheap finance for favoured companies. If a country can perform an economic function more efficiently than the rest of the world, it is senseless to try to stop it. This is especially true in today’s global economy where the consumer is so powerful. The only viable option for European economies is to concentrate on where they can perform better than others. It is increasingly clear that this does not include making T-shirts.China is rapidly becoming the new workshop of the world It is the biggest manufacturer of televisions A Chinese firm owns IBM’s personal computer business This undoubtedly raises serious issues. It is simply pain postponed.The best interests of European economies would be served if the EU began to dismantle trade quotas entirely.

British exports lag behind the three top EU exporters – Germany, France and Italy. The UK exported goods worth £2.4bn and services worth £1bn last year but imported goods valued at £10.6bn from China.The Chinese premier said total EU-China trade would exceed $200bn (£108bn) this year, eight years ahead of his target. The changes that are happening around us are changes that I see not as a threat but as an opportunity.”Mr Blair said China would benefit from lower labour costs but as it moved further up the “value added chain”, China and Europe could gain from the opening up of markets. We must allow our companies to be subject to international market forces.”We must look to companies in other countries to do the same That is globalisation in action.

Much more effort needs to be taken to ensure intellectual property rights.”Mr Blair took a sideswipe at EU countries such as France who were seeking protectionism “There is a place for managing change,” he said “What there is no case for is resisting change. In a thinly veiled attack, Sir Digby said: “The importance of a level playing field and transparency is vital, but we in Europe must set an example We must open up our markets further. Tensions over trade between the EU and China surfaced in behind-the-scenes talks in Beijing yesterday over the growth of counterfeit goods flooding into European markets. The trade deal agreed last night by Peter Mandelson, the EU trade commissioner, to release impounded Chinese textile goods eased some immediate strains.

But the Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao admitted there had been “heated discussions” over the need for greater protection of intellectual property rights by European countries against piracy in China.The threat to EU companies seeking to protect rights over their expensive branded products was stressed by Tony Blair and Sir Digby Jones, the director general of the CBI.But there were clear signs that Britain is shaping up for a renewed battle with EU member states, including France, who want protectionism. The first half also faced tough comparison with 2004 when William Hill and its bookmaking counterparts won handsomely on Euro 2004.The second half of the year should be bolstered by a contribution from Stanley Leisure’s bookmaking business, which William Hill bought in June, a deal given the green light by the Office of Fair Trading.

Income from online poker rose 151 per cent as the bookmaker started to catch up with specialist sites.The company also reported average net profit per terminal, per week of £400 from its fixed-odds betting terminals, up from £396 in the first half of last year.. They were more concerned with interim results that showed operating profits 12.3 per cent lower, despite higher costs associated with longer opening hours at William Hill’s chain of bookmakers.Amounts staked by punters rose from £3.9bn to £5bn but a £1.2bn rise in the cost of sales left gross profits flat at £297.8m. Like those of other bookies, William Hill’s results were hit by a string of horseracing results in the first half that went in favour of punters. The company revealed profits hit by exceptional items, including £2.8m in bankers’ fees for an aborted return of capital and a string of poor horseracing results.
Even the announcement of a £200m-£300m share buy-back programme failed to impress investors. William Hill, the bookmaker, tried to cheer the stock market yesterday by reporting a winning start to the second half of the year, but its share price ended the day 3 per cent lower at 573.5p.

Other British soldiers have been killed in the more volatile area of Amarah or north of the British-controlled sector.Yesterday, the Ministry of Defence said details of names or regiments would not be released until all next of kin had been contacted.”We can confirm that two soldiers from Multi-National Division South-East died this morning at 11.30 local time from injuries sustained in a roadside bomb explosion in Basra province,” said an MoD spokesman.John Reid, the Secretary of State for Defence, said: “I would like to offer my sympathy and personal condolences to the families of the two service personnel who lost their lives in Iraq.”It is deeply tragic that they have been killed whilst carrying out their duty.”Tony Blair was told of the deaths while attending an EU-China summit in Beijing. “If you need a metaphor for failure, this is as good as it gets,” he said “Everybody should be buried [This is] an insult to our humanity.”. Two British soldiers were killed when their armoured Land Rover was hit by a roadside bomb in southern Iraq. The deaths bring the British military toll in the Gulf to 94 since the beginning of the war in Iraq in March 2003. The soldiers were travelling five miles east of Shaibah – the British logistics headquarters south-west of Basra – when the explosive device went off at 8.30am British time yesterday.
They are the first soldiers killed by hostile action near Basra for almost a year.

The couple had survived the storm and, knowing they would face days with out electricity or water – or any assistance from the authorities, Vera was on her way to the local store for supplies when she was knocked down.Patrick McCarthy, a retired electrician, was one those who helped bury her. Now, veterans of hurricanes will always put an axe in their attic.”Vera, of course, was not killed by the hurricane – as Max Keene stresses. The rescue workers have had to leave them and instead concentrate on those who are alive.Harold Brandt, a doctor from Baton Rouge who has been assisting rescue crews as they search the still flooded areas of the city for survivors, said the biggest concerns was the number of bodies that may be discovered in attics.”One of the things with Hurricane Betsy [in 1965] was that people climbed into their attics to avoid the rising water and then they had no way to escape and they drowned. Every now and then it happens that way,” said Mr Keene, tears in the corners of his eyes “We used to lie in bed. I’d drink bourbon, she’d read books.”Who knows how many other stories there are like Vera’s; how many other bodies lie scattered across this besieged city? Local officials refuse to predict a total but one thing is certain, the city is littered with abandoned corpses.

They are left in the street, in buildings, in the backs of trucks wrapped in sheets with a name tag attached. One woman’s body was discovered sitting upright in a chair at the back of a dental surgery. It was dark and they were clearing the streets.”Max and Vera were not married in the formal sense but they had been together for 25 years. They had met when she was working as a waitress in a bar and he was working off-shore for one of the many oil companies that operate in the Gulf of Mexico.There was nothing particular that struck Max about Vera, he recalled, but he liked her sense of fun, her spirit. Smith was her name from her first marriage; she was originally from Mexico.”She was married, her old man left her I had a different girlfriend then, she left me It was the right time We just got together. She liked clothes and shoes and shopping and – like many people in this city – sometimes she liked a drink.

She also liked books and every Sunday she went to the local Catholic church, St Mary’s Assumption. Vera, aged 65, was apparently killed by a hit-and-run driver as New Orleans descended into chaos and anarchy the day after the storm struck. Nothing better underlines the breakdown in the civic ability to respond to this disaster than those police officers who shrugged their shoulders helplessly when they were asked to remove Vera’s body.”She had gone out to the shop to get something We knew it was going to close. It was me that went and put the tarp over her.”He added: “I spoke to the police and asked them to take her away but they just told me to get the hell out of there. A guy came round to say she was lying by the side of the road with a piece of cardboard over her. We did not want to run out of anything,” Vera’s husband, Max Keene, 59, told The Independent yesterday, standing outside the couple’s humble rented home in the neighbourhood known as Irish Channel “I did not know what had happened to her. These were the people unable to evacuate, who had nowhere else to go or else no means of getting there.

The holiday costs from £718 including flights to Venice, rail transfers, accommodation, most meals, route instructions and maps.Staying ThereLocanda Al Castello, Via del Castello, Cividale del Friuli, Italy (00 39 04 32 733 242; www.alcastello ). B&B from €110 (£73).Hotel Hvala, Trg svodoge 1, Kobarid, Slovenia (00 386 538 99 300; www.topli-val-sp.si). B&B from €68 (£49).Hotel Alp, Trg Golobarskih zrtev 48, Bovec (00 386 5 388 4000; www.alp-chandler.si). Doubles from €54 (£39), including breakfast.Visiting ThereLeaflets on the historical walk are available from the Kobarid Tourist Office, Gregorieva 10, (00 386 5 380 0490; www.kobarid.si).Kobarid Museum opens Monday-Friday 9am-6pm, weekends 10am-5pm; SIT800 (£2.20).Further InformatioNBovec Tourist Office, Trg gologarskih zrtev 8 (00 385 5 384 1919; www.bovec.si).. In some places they toss flowers, but in revelling Krautergersheim they bombard us with cabbages. Mercifully, they’re shredded – for these are not your pipsqueak common or garden veg.

Statuesque, majestic, weighing up to seven kilos, the cabbages the crowds are cheering are the Bonapartes of brassica, great chieftains of the cabbage race

We are at the planet’s biggest cabbage party The parade seems never-ending Roars of applause greet each cabbage-themed float A dozen brass bands fuel the jubilation. La choucroute nouvelle est arriv? Of France’s ever-multiplying thematic roads, few sound as improbable as the Fermented Cabbage Road. In fact, La Route de la Choucroute is more a cabbage-shaped cluster than anything linear. A few kilometres from Strasbourg, fairy-tale villages like Meistratzheim and Blaesheim snuggle picturesquely among fields of giant cabbages in view of the Vosges mountains.
The most illustrious is Krautergersheim. Until the Middle Ages, it was just plain Ergersheim, but its cabbages were so famous it won the prefix “kraut” This German word for cabbage or herb is similar in Alsatian.

“I didn’t mind,” he says smiling at the recollection, “I was ready to go home.”

When they come to write the definitive history of Nineties football, of the birth of the Premiership, of the rise of the footballer as modern icon, there will be a chapter that belongs to Giggs alone. It happened with George Best, it happened with Paul Gascoigne and it happened with David Beckham It is the way of the world. He was about 32 or 33 and every day he got up at four in the morning to do an extra session at Bayern Munich That’s the sacrifice you need to make Ruud was on the bike four hours after his operation. You have to go ‘bang’, right at it.”Ferguson was reluctant to rejoin the debate generated by Rooney’s red card in Spain – “I have a lot of thoughts on what happened, I am just not prepared to share them with you” – as he intends to keep in-house a disciplinary procedure that is expected to include a fine of a week’s wage for the 19-year-old. It’s difficult to say if he’ll be fit for the World Cup but he’ll have a chance.”Ferguson is confident Heinze will be able to resume his career at United, but admits the 27-year-old has an arduous rehabilitation programme ahead of him “Our record with these injuries is terrific, 100 per cent. He did say: “We’ll put the sending-off to bed and Wayne will play on Sunday.

He is a big game player and there will be no problem with that.”I am not surprised by all the attention. Ruud [van Nistelrooy], Roy Keane and Wes Brown twice have come back from cruciates, so we are confident he will come back OK.”Methods have advanced but it is still hard work from the word go I use the example of Lothar Matth?. He’s been a real warrior and true defender in the Argentinian fashion. He’s going to miss most, if not all of the season because of it It’s awful luck for the lad. But it is the loss of Heinze, who could miss next summer’s World Cup, and the subsequent exposure of his limited squad that is now the Scot’s overriding concern.”It is terrible news,” said Ferguson “It’s a cruciate injury from an innocuous incident. These things happen all the time, but the way he landed created the injury. It is hardly ideal preparation for a contest that promises even greater antagonism than usual as the Kop warms up for Wayne Rooney’s return to Merseyside.Rooney, admonished by Ferguson for his dismissal against Villarreal on Wednesday, will start tomorrow at a ground where he scored the only goal in last season’s corresponding fixture and had a mobile phone thrown in his direction as a result.

Only last Saturday Heinze collected his Matt Busby Player of the Year award for a flawless introduction to English football following last summer’s £6.9m move from Paris Saint-Germain.With Neville out, younger brother Phil sold to Everton, Wes Brown and Quinton Fortune injured and Jonathan Spector on a season-long loan at Charlton, the loss of Heinze leaves the United manager little option but to select the midfielder Kieran Richardson at left-back for the trip to Liverpool. “If we get the breaks with injuries then we’ve got a great chance,” he said. Tomorrow he takes a Manchester United side already five points adrift of the champions to Anfield minus Roy Keane, Gary Neville and another of his “warriors” – Gabriel Heinze, out for the rest of the season with a cruciate ligament injury.
Confirmation that the Argentina defender had not suffered a medial knee ligament as anticipated in Villarreal and had instead ruptured his anterior cruciate represented a monumental setback yesterday. And who was the only player capped by England under Graham Taylor to share the manager’s initials? Happy mulling.b.viner independent.co.uk.

On the eve of the new Premiership season, Sir Alex Ferguson surveyed his squad’s prospects of not only competing with the resources of Chelsea but taking the title from them at the first attempt. Who was he?Furthermore, which is the only club in the Football League with the first five letters of the alphabet (in any order) in its name? Of all league clubs in both England and Scotland, which one is unique in having a letter that no other club has? Name seven post-war England internationals with an X in their surnames. The winner was Jon Russell, a football trader at Sportingbet , who gets a bottle of something alcoholic, but not Double Diamond, for coming up with the following list: Alan Ainscow, Bosko Balaban, Colin Cameron, Didier Drogba, Erik Edman, Fabrice Fernandes, Gary Gillespie, Hossam Hassan, Ivar Ingimarsson, Jermaine Jenas, Kevin Keen, Larry Lloyd, Massimo Maccarone, Noureddine Naybet, Oluwaseyi Olofinjana, Phil Parkes, Qu Qing (of Adelaide United, apparently), Ray Ransom, Steve Sims, Tommy Taylor, Ugo Ukah, Victor Valdes, Werner Weist, Xu Xiang (of Shanghai Zobon), Yevgeny Yordanov, and Zlatko Zahovic.Mr Russell asked whether he deserved extra points for including five Wolves players in his list and not using Zinedine Zidane, and I decided he did, which made all the difference.Anyway, I’m about to vacate this column for two weeks to concentrate on writing a book about sport in the 1970s, so I’ll leave you with these questions to mull over, starting with one, aptly, about a footballer capped by England in 1977 who was on the books of all four big North-West clubs – Everton, Liverpool, Manchester United and Manchester City. I was also keen on the tennis question: who was the first German-born player to win a post-war men’s singles title at Wimbledon? That was John McEnroe. And I am particularly indebted, as Cyril Fletcher used to say on That’s Life!, to Trevor Parry for acquainting me with this corker: which are the four places in Scotland to share names with Formula One racing drivers? The answers are Stirling (Moss), (Johnny) Dumfries, (Eddie) Irvine and Ayr town centre (Ayrton Senna).Football reigns supreme, however, and congratulations to those who met my challenge to find 26 alliterative footballers, although for really tricky letters such as Q and X I permitted entries from other sports.

Kate is also a millionairess, but her breasts are those of a pubescent teenager Her torso and legs are untroubled by an ounce of flab This Kate also has a partner in the music industry. If you want to know what he sounds like, fight him yourself.. What a difference one little letter makes.

This is a story of a girl called Katie and a girl called Kate who both live in front of the camera They both have partners called Peter. Katie is a girl with ludicrously fake breasts, a perma-tan and a boyfriend (now husband) whom she met on a television reality show watched by millions. She arrived for her nuptials in a gilded cage wearing a pink dress with a spangled bodice that made her look exactly like a crinoline lady covering a toilet brush

Katie is anything but a style icon The chances of her featuring in Vogue are less than zero. But, she’s got a disabled child she clearly adores, and made millions flaunting her physical attributes, and writing an autobiography bought by people who never read books. But on a more serious note, we would suggest that Kendo’s silence be a good guide for you in this matter.” Fair enough I’m not upsetting that man again. I went to the toilet when he had gone, and heard his voice coming through the wall It made a huge psychological difference The mystery was gone He sounded .. well, I’m not saying. I have just emailed an address I was given for Peter Thornley and this is what came back: “The cheeky reply would be that you had already pissed yourself and there was a wall between you and Kendo.

Then he pinned me to the floor so my shoulders felt as if they were popping out. And he turned and held my foot, jamming his elbow between my calf muscle and shin bone. I banged the canvas to submit, but he held it until I screamed, “Enough.”Nagasaki stood up, stared again, then left the ring and the room John Ritchie seemed shocked “I can’t believe what I just saw,” he whispered. That was when I nearly passed out.”Had enough?” demanded the manager, but this was a (very painful) realisation of a childhood fantasy and I wasn’t giving up yet “I’m doing this out of respect,” I said to Nagasaki He nodded.

Scaring me.The manager had said Nagasaki would show me a few moves He did more than that. He stepped forward and delivered a karate chop, an explosion on my chest that made me grateful I had just learned how to fall. When I got up off the canvas he pushed my head down into an armlock and squeezed. “He lives in Staffordshire and runs a care home for disabled youngsters.” I knew that because he got into a dispute with a neighbour three years ago and his cover was blown in court But it didn’t help as I stood in the ring “Hello,” I said He didn’t answer I knew he wouldn’t He just stood there staring me out from behind the mask. The wrestler spoke, but only in subtitles.Now he has a book out.

Critics had predicted that the revaluation of millions of homes across England would mean major rises in tax bills. But any decision is likely to be postponed until Sir Michael Lyons completes an inquiry into local government funding at the end of the year. September 2005: Radio 4 presenter John Humphrys was rebuked by the BBC for his unguarded remarks at a PR event, including: “All you’ve got to do is say ‘John Prescott’ and people laugh”.. The Government was accused of a “massive climbdown” yesterday after it emerged that a council tax shake-up is to be put on hold. Ms Hodge claimed that a BBC reporter, Angus Stickler, was conducting a ” concerted campaign” to link her with cases of child abuse in homes run by Islington council, of which she was leader from 1982 to 1992.

She said that this amounted to “deplorable” sensationalism, and accused Mr Stickler of basing a report on evidence from an “extremely disturbed individual”. January 2004: The Hutton report cleared Tony Blair and Mr Campbell and blamed the BBC for just about everything. Mr Davies, the director general Greg Dyke and Mr Gilligan all resigned. February 2004: A leaked copy of a BBC legal report said that Lord Hutton’s report was “wrong in law”. August 2004: Mr Gilligan claimed the BBC is “going soft” on the Government, fearing a backlash from No 10 Speaking in Edinburgh. he said that Today “does seem to have lost at least half of its reporters and there seems to be a trend of moving story-breaking journalism off daily news programmes and into less-watched programmes in current affairs”.

No respite for the Beeb January 2005: A year after leaving the BBC, Mr Dyke, writing in The Independent, said: “Knowing what we now know, the saga has an unreal quality because, today, there is no doubt that the BBC story, which led to our departures, was fundamentally right when it said that Downing Street had sexed up the case for going to war in Iraq.” February 2005: Mr Campbell was branded an “out-of-control nutter” after sending an obscene email to Newsnight journalist Andrew McFadyen, which ended “Now f*** off and cover something important you t***s”. Even then, there was no furore until Mr Gilligan suggested in a newspaper article – still quoting his anonymous source – that the person responsible for inserting the 45-minute claim was Alastair Campbell. June 2003: Mr Campbell demanded an apology, as the Government ordered an inquiry into the source of the leaks. Mr Gilligan and Mr Campbell appeared before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee.