DOMINIC LAWSON: He cast himself as a man of the people who took on the Establishment. But Fayed was obsessed with status and wealth, and abused both, wickedly
From beyond the grave (he was interred last week) we heard the voice of Mohamed Fayed, the billionaire former owner of Harrods.
On the radio news bulletins on Saturday, reporting his death, the BBC chose to play this clip from an interview with him: ‘I love the masses and the people. I don’t care about those b*****ds.’
The latter being the ‘Establishment’, who never, he thought, gave him the respect he deserved. Or, indeed, a British passport.
And he was — with the aid of his PR man Michael Cole, formerly the BBC’s royal correspondent — highly successful in persuading millions to see him as the unjustly persecuted victim of British snobbery and racism.
This was particularly true of Fayed’s self-created legend that his son Dodi and the Princess of Wales had been assassinated by MI6, on the orders of Prince Philip, because she was going to marry Dodi, was pregnant, and the Royal Family did not want a ‘Muslim’ baby.
Mohamed Al Fayed pictured alongside Diana, Princess of Wales at a charity event held at Harrods in London in 1996
Anger
It was all one big, lurid lie: a coldly calculated conspiracy theory designed to deflect from the fact that Dodi and Diana (who chose not to wear a seat belt) died because they had been driven at insane speed by an inebriated Fayed employee.
As for the claim that Diana was pregnant, my wife, Rosa Monckton, who was on holiday with the Princess just ten days before the fatal accident, testified that her close friend (and godmother to our daughter, Domenica) had had her period while they were on that last trip. And the autopsy confirmed that Fayed was lying about Diana being pregnant.
But Fayed took out his anger on Rosa, sending her a menacing letter — delivered at night, by one of his chauffeurs, to our isolated home in the country — and later accused her of being part of the conspiracy to murder Diana.
At the eventual public inquest into her death, Fayed’s lawyer, Michael Mansfield, insinuated this to Rosa, reducing her to tears. I could see from the expression on the faces of jury members that they understood just how cruel this was.
I also saw them registering something like bewilderment when Fayed, on the witness stand, ridiculed the idea that Diana would ever have married her long-term lover, Dr Hasnat Khan: ‘How can she marry someone like that, who lives in a council flat and has no money?’
READ MORE: Inside the rags to riches life of Mohamed Al Fayed
This was how the supposed ‘man of the people’ snobbishly dismissed the suitability of a distinguished heart surgeon.
Then we had the spectacle of Fayed denouncing Prince Philip himself as a ‘Nazi’; this about a man who had fought against the real Nazis as a naval officer.
Fayed, though, always seemed inordinately proud of his purchase of what he called ‘Villa Windsor’, the French home in exile of the late Duke of Windsor, whose own relationship with the Nazi regime was genuinely suspect.
This was a further illustration of Fayed’s extraordinary obsession to be linked not with ‘the people’ but with the highest levels of the aristocracy. After all, he invented the honorific prefix ‘al’, as in Al Fayed, because it connoted a family of high breeding (like ‘von’ in Germany).
And far from shunning Fayed, the Royal Family had long associated themselves with him, via his sponsorship of the Royal Windsor Horse Show. The Queen seemed to have no problem in sitting next to Fayed at this event, over many years. It was only in 2000 that the Duke of Edinburgh removed his Royal Warrant from Harrods. I couldn’t help wondering why Fayed had been prepared to continue his commercial relationship with a man he claimed had murdered his son.
While inside Harrods itself (not a shop you would naturally associate with ‘the masses’), Fayed preyed on young female employees. A number of them went public for a Channel 4 documentary in 2017.
One, who had been taken on as his personal assistant as a 17-year-old, said that she resigned rather than press charges ‘because it would have been the word of a 17-year-old nobody, I guess, against the word of a very powerful business tycoon’.
Mr Al Fayed with his son Dodi, who was killed in the same crash that killed Diana in 1997
Myth
Another, who was 20 at the time she had been a Harrods employee preyed upon by Fayed, said: ‘It’s unbelievable how you can be so disgusted by someone and yet be so afraid of someone; how someone can have so much power.’
Few now remember the name of Hermina Da Silva, who was dismissed in 1994 as a nanny from Fayed’s home in Oxted, Surrey. She had prepared allegations that she had been sexually harassed by the Harrods owner.
Fayed then used the contacts of his sinister head of security, a former detective superintendent called John Macnamara, to have her arrested on grounds of theft. She was released without charge after the police concluded she had stolen nothing. Fayed settled with her out of court, and she was awarded many thousands of pounds.
The point of all this is not, gratuitously, to speak ill of the recently dead: and Fayed had a redeeming aspect in that he gave generously to charities for sick children.
But it is necessary to bury with him the myth that he was a ‘man of the people’ fighting against the snobbery of the Royal Family and the ‘Establishment’. The truth is that he was obsessed with status and wealth, and abused both, wickedly.
Russian TV past of BBC’s new ‘satirist’
Any regular listener to Radio 4 will now know the name Jonathan Pie: the BBC has, for days, been excitedly promoting the station’s new comedy show, Call Jonathan Pie. It is the creation of an alleged ‘satirist’, Tom Walker.
Actually, there’s nothing new about it: for the past year or so, Walker had been doing his Pie act in videos for the New York Times. His shtick is wearily familiar: Pie paints the UK as a corrupt failed state, because of the wicked Tories (we had the same from the BBC, as so-called ‘comedy’, from Nish Kumar in The Mash Report).
If you go to YouTube, you will find one of Pie’s most popular rants for the NY Times. It is all about how the UK is too in hock to Russian oligarchs to take any action against the ‘war criminal’ Putin: ‘For 20 years Putin’s been neutralising us as a threat by using our own greed against us.’
This was actually broadcast in March 2022, when the UK, under the supposed Kremlin-appeasing Tories, was leading Europe in the supply of weaponry to the Ukrainians.
It’s true the Government had been pathetic in its response to the Kremlin’s murder of Putin’s foe, Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned with polonium in a London hotel in 2006 — and Pie/Walker makes much of that.
Any regular listener to Radio 4 will now know the name Jonathan Pie, creation of Tom Walker
But you should also know this: the first TV company to broadcast his act, in 2016, was RT, formerly Russia Today, and wholly funded by the Kremlin. This was ten years after the murder of Litvinenko, and two years after the annexation of Crimea (the same year Russian missiles brought down a civilian plane over Ukraine, killing 298 people, including Britons).
In other words, Walker, while now berating this country for being seduced by Russian money, was himself, even after those events, happy to take the Kremlin’s dosh. In an interview for the Spectator in 2017, asked about his RT arrangement of the previous year, Walker replied: ‘To give you some context, they offered me 500 quid a week, which was more money than I’d ever seen in my life. And they offered me total artistic control.’
Given his ‘Britain is a failed state’ theme, no wonder RT felt they could trust him.
Despite the BBC’s urgings, I won’t tune in to his latest ‘comedy’ lectures.
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