The News of the World (and the Fake Sheikh) are back in business ...

The Sun's Sunday splash was written by Mazher Mahmood

The Sun on Sunday has morphed over the past month into the News of the World. The seventh day Sun has returned to the agenda of News International's late, unlamented title.

Three weeks ago the splash was a celebrity "confession" about a pop star's "wild night with a stripper". Two weeks ago, the lead was a kiss and tell (a woman telling tales about Manchester United footballer Patrice Evra).

Last week, a page one blurb headlined "My love for Ashley by topless bisexual nympho" alerted readers to an inside spread in which a woman told of her relationship with footballer Ashley Cole.

But they were mere pointers to today's confirmation of the new News of the World: a classic sting by the Fake Sheikh (aka Mazher Mahmood).

Billed as a "world exclusive" (though I can't imagine anyone fighting to get it), the story is given five pages. It claims to have exposed a former world heavyweight boxing champion, Herbie Hide, "as a drug Mr Fixit ready to throw a title fight for ?1 million."

It is a cut-and-paste Mahmood "investigation." Hide, now 41, who last fought three years ago, was "approached" by NoW (sorry SoS) reporters posing as businessmen "interested in organising exhibition bouts in the Middle East."

He was secretly taped and filmed agreeing, in return for ?1 million, to throw a fight. He was also persuaded to procure four grams of cocaine "when our reporter suggested that cocaine was not readily available in Norwich."

According to the Mahmood article, Hide called a friend who turned up with the drug (which turned out to be a mixture of cocaine and mephedrone).

And in classic fashion, the last couple of paragraphs tell how the NoW (sorry again, the Sun) has "passed its dossier" to the police.

The rest of the SoS content was remarkably similar to that of the old News of the World, which was closed down on Rupert Murdoch's orders in July 2011 following the confirmation of its phone-hacking activities.

On page 3 were pictures of a celebrity in a bikini on a Caribbean beach, one of which showed her two children (isn't that against the editors' code?). There was an "exclusive" spread about Katie Price (aka Jordan) being pregnant. A serious spread, with editorials and Guido Fawkes's political gossip column, featured a lengthy "exclusive" article by the chancellor George Osborne explaining away the significance of Britain losing its AAA rating.

And on it went, through a couple more celebrity spreads, an odd tale of woman alleged to be "tanorexic" (don't ask), and a spread about a woman, now 43, telling of abuse by her stepfather when she was 13, a continuation of Sara Payne's former NoW anti-paedophilia campaign.

Gradually, in a post-Leveson environment, the paper has become indistinguishable from the News of the World. The advantage for Murdoch is that it's much, much cheaper to produce and, of course, it's hacking-free.

PS: Memo to Sue Douglas, hopeful of acquiring The People in order to turn it into the News of the People, your USP has just disappeared.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2013/feb/24/sun-on-sunday-newsoftheworld

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