Chris Titley

Bless his woolly rugby socks. He was just trying to secure sponsorship from a razor company. But in the event he got well and truly nicked by a cut-throat tabloid newspaper.

We must feel sorry for poor Lawrence Dallaglio, tarnished golden boy of the rugger scene. He is the victim here, he repeatedly insists.

He fell prey to an "elaborate fabrication", perpetrated by that incorrigible bunch of pranksters at the News of the World. It is simply not fair that young Lawrence was abused in this way.

He is but an unworldly international rugby captain. He knows little of the sophisticated ways of the modern media. All he understands is his job, at which he can rightly be termed a consummate professional.

Lawrence grabs other men around the waist until they fall over better than anyone. Yet when he was tackled by lightweight News of the World reporter Louise Oswald, he fell hook, line and sinker.

She was posing as a represent-ative of a shaving company which offered oodles of cash to get Lawrence's square jaw in contact with its product. Inevitably in the course of the subsequent negotiations, Lawrence told the "Gillette rep" that cocaine was the best a man can get. He bragged about dealing in drugs, taking Ecstasy and cocaine while on tour in South Africa and indulging in a four-day orgy with 12 Dutch prostitutes.

The orthodox gambit of a celebrity trying to impress a toiletry corporation. So imagine Lawrence's shock when he read last Sunday's News of the World front page headline: England Rugby Captain Exposed As Drug Dealer.

Naturally he has since retracted his confession. He was tricked into it by a conniving, amoral (and undeniably attractive) hack.

True, the transcript of the Dallaglio Tapes shows his expertise about drugs. He talked in detail about the methods of taking cocaine, acid and heroin, as well as giving a full run-down on how long each stayed in a sportsman's system.

But he later admitted "experimenting" with drugs in his teens. Perhaps he was led astray by a bad egg at his former school, North Yorkshire's Ampleforth College?

Ampleforth and drugs are not unknown to one another, after all.

So Lawrence fights to clear his name, having fallen for the sleazy, but amazingly effective, form of journalism known as the "honey trap".

Of course he would never do anything so despicable as take drugs. All he was doing was lying through his teeth to try and obtain cash, betraying his girlfriend and child as he did so. Nothing wrong in that, is there?

The tabloids have harvested a bumper May crop of fallen celebrities. A week before the Dallaglio debacle, Tom Parker Bowles was strung up in identical fashion.

Yesterday The Sun alleged Ian Botham "romped" and "frolicked" with a young blonde (although Botham Stays Faithful To Wife would have been a more shocking headline).

And the same paper accused Lenny Henry of spending a night in the Royal York Hotel with an entirely different blonde.

It is hard to defend these stories on grounds of public interest. But we are fascinated by them. At least the Royal York Hotel benefited from the Lenny story.

The hotel was described as the "finest in town", and its three different entrances were shown to be perfect for the use of furtive couples.

Perhaps the management should consider using this as a marketing ploy - "The Royal York Hotel - the place you can tryst".

In a feature on the campaign for Yorkshire devolution in The Guardian, Talish Butt, a Bradford cricketer said: "People say Yorkshire people are racist, but I don't think they are.

They just don't like outsiders." When those outsiders from Kosovo arrive in York, let's do our bit to chip away at this reputation for mistrust.

12/05/99

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.