Has the Fake Sheikh become a busted flush?

The long-standing News of the World 'investigations editor', Mazher Mahmood, has a book out this month called Confessions of a Fake Sheikh. The not very original title hints at a follow-up movie - maybe a revival of the 1970s Confessions of... comedy franchise, with a glittering cast of celebrity coke-sniffers, love-rats and Sanjeev Bhaskar in the title role.

Publishers HarperCollins - a News International subsidiary - claim that Mahmood "details his methods as well as the secret deals that led to several stories being toned down to save careers and marriages".

Yet the idea of the News of the World toning down a story to save a career or a marriage is inconceivable, flying as it does in the face of the oft-cited claim by a former news editor, Greg Miskiw, that "this is what we do; we go out and destroy other people's lives."

So, does this revelation suggest the paper has reached a turning-point and that, as an investigative reporter, Mahmood is a busted flush? After all, there has been no really big front-page splash from Mahmood for a while. There was a time when he supplied a string of them, using a cynical - and very effective - form of entrapment by posing as an Arab with a bottomless well of money to invest or spend in his target's business.

Sometimes, when Mazher's informants brought him a story which wasn't strong enough, he'd set about creating a better one and cast it from a pool of gullible or compliant eastern Europeans – as in the Victoria Beckham 'kidnap plot'. In this case, and in several others, in order to add authenticity to his story, Mahmood managed to convince the police that a genuine crime was about to be committed.

Men have been arrested in some cases, but although prosecutions have been pursued at Mahmood's instigation, several couldn't be stood up, resulting in a huge waste of taxpayers' money in police