There’s a reason why I feel unease about the Mohamed Al Fayed allegations, the ones suggesting that he sexually assaulted umpteen women and regarded Harrods employees as fair game. It’s because I was around during the time he was trying to penetrate the Establishment, a more difficult call in the 1990s than now, and I was quite willing to take his hospitality. In fact I asked his press secretary Michael Cole, to put me up in the Paris Ritz, and he did. Twice. Naturally I wrote about it all for this paper, making clear that I owed my stay to Mohamed Al Fayed (thank you) and when I suggested that I’d be perfectly happy to have a honeymoon there at his expense, he, possibly at the behest of Michael Cole, wrote me a nice letter in reply.
During the course of my stay I was taken to visit the Paris mansion formerly owned by the Duke of Windsor, which was brilliantly reproduced in the Diana episode of The Crown. It was very much still a shrine to the Windsors; the tapestry cushions of the Duke, stitched by his own hand, that sort of thing. Being entertained there would not, I felt, prevent me from biting the hand that fed me, but all the same, I wonder how much we were compromised by being so willing to stay at the Ritz, drink his champagne, enjoy ourselves at his expense. This paper’s editor at the time, Stewart Steven, did not enjoy Al Fayed’s hospitality; lesser fry were less picky.
It was the same with his parties. We — I mean, lots of us journalists — went to them (there was a lavish one for the launch of Punch magazine), took the champagne, ate the canapes, wrote diary stories about them, all in the knowledge that he was not, to put it mildly, a respectable individual. But everyone knew it. Put it this way; I was not in the least surprised by the recent revelations. But in the Nineties, people shrugged when his creepy reputation with women came up, though I don’t think anyone knew about actual rape allegations.
When he had lunch at Harrods with a colleague of mine, he talked about his c**k all the time; indeed he offered to show him his bits. When the editor of Punch suggested hiring a very good female journalist, he said, “she’s too f*****g fat”. (He also recommended elasticated ties like his own, on the basis that the wearer would be less likely to be strangled.) He was a sex pest not even hiding in plain sight; he was in plain sight.
He was, of course, perfectly charming as a host, though I had the impression he was under no illusion about why we were there. At the time people still recalled his bid to obtain the ownership of Harrods in a bitterly fought contest with Tiny Rowland; he emerged from the fight victorious but with a dodgy reputation, having, in Rowland’s view, used the Sultan of Brunei’s financial backing to obtain ownership of what was then a British institution.
The thing is, Al Fayed thought, in many cases quite correctly, that money could buy him whatever he wanted. He was able to buy the services of a former BBC royal correspondent, Michael Cole; and he was able to buy any number of distinguished personnel. It was still a shock to find that he was able to pay for the Venus flytrap that successfully enticed Diana into his son’s ambit — the private jet and the rest of it — but he had reason to think that a rich man could get what he wanted.
It turns out now that he was worse than we thought. The women didn’t come forward at the time, because he was rich, well connected, powerful. I can see why.
