Boris Johnson's elaborate ruse to persuade News Of The World he was a cocaine dealer

London mayor hatched plan in 1999 when he was editor of The Spectator

The London mayor hatched plan in 1999 when he was editor of The Spectator (Jim Watson/AFP)

Boris Johnson plotted to pose as a drug dealer in an elaborate ruse to sting the News of the World and its notorious “Fake Sheikh” reporter Mazher Mahmood when he was editor of The Spectator.

The current Mayor of London and aspiring MP stashed a plastic bag of baking soda beneath a silver statuette in his office in an attempt to fool the tabloid.

The bizarre escapade in 1999 was detailed on the periodical’s Coffee House blog in a post written by Lloyd Evans, The Spectator's sketch-writer and theatre critic. Mr Evans described how Mr Johnson had asked him to act as a “stooge” and approach the now defunct newspaper with a series of “fables” designed to allow the magazine to expose “how the News of the World deals with the stories of the punters who approach it with bits and pieces of dirt”.

Having called the tabloid with his “dirt” on Boris, Evans claimed he was met in a pub by a reporter called Nadia and asked to sign a contract saying he would be paid £5,000 if the story made a two-page spread - if it only made a single page, the fee would be halved.

“Nadia wired me up and I phoned Boris, using my codename ‘David’,” Evans recounted. “As an opener I mentioned some poems I’d sent him (in real life I’m a poet). Did he want to publish them? He sounded lukewarm, as we’d agreed he should. Then I mentioned ‘Prince Charles’ and asked if he could give me a small package from ‘Charlie’. Fine, said Boris. Nadia liked this touch. ‘Prince Charlie,’ she said, ‘must be real Oxford talk?’ 'Yeah,’ I said.”

As the paper began to get excited at the prospect of a scoop, Mr Johnson was “busy preparing” his end of the sting in the his office at the magazine, which traces its origins to 1711 and the early years of news publishing in London’s first coffee houses.

The editor’s office, in an upstairs drawing room of a Georgian house close to the Charles Dickens museum in Doughty Street in London, was decorated with a chandelier, a large Turkish rug and mementos from editors past, including a thimble containing a molar once belonging to Frank Johnson, Boris’s predecessor. But the future mayor’s attention was drawn to a particular ornament, one featuring a miner with a pick and shovel.

“[Boris] had a plastic bag of baking soda and was stuffing it underneath a statuette that graces the mantelpiece of his office,” stated Evans in his piece. “The inscription on the fine silver figurine reads: ‘To The Spectator. From The Townsfolk Of Aberdare. 1929’. The drugs would be produced with a flourish from beneath this official heirloom.”

As the story began to gather pace, Mr Mahmood – whose methods and past record are currently the subject of inquiries by Scotland Yard, the Crown Prosecution Service and his employers, News UK, who have suspended him from his job at The Sun on Sunday – was called into action.

But Mr Evans was evidently not as experienced in setting a trap as the Fake Sheikh himself. The stooge’s cover was exposed when the Sunday paper realised that he had earlier failed to provoke its interest in another fable about Boris selling antiques on the black market.

When Mr Mahmood swept into the Hilton hotel to meet Evans he had a clear message for the informant. Boris Johnson was not “in the normal sense” a drug dealer and the News of the World would not be doing a story. “That’s entrapment. And entrapment is not the way we work.”

Mr Johnson published details of the strange plot in his magazine a couple of months later. Today he declined to comment further on the episode, since when his position – and that of Mr Mahmood – has changed quite drastically.