Like Frank Zappa’s Sheikh Yerbouti, Mazher Mahmood’s appropriation of Arabic dress leaves a nasty aftertaste.
In his pomp, between the mid-1990s and his sentence for perverting the course of justice in 2016, the award-winning Brummie red-top hack of Punjabi heritage revelled in his self-endowed honorific – the king of sting. He mugged off a series of gullible celebrities, including a page three model, the Duchess of York and the England manager while posing as the Fake Sheikh. These tabloid takedowns won him journalism’s top awards, but in retrospect some of them read like entrapment.
