Even from the grave, Mohamed Al-Fayed dictated his obituary. When news of his death emerged in September 2023, Al-Fayed’s loyal spokesman Michael Cole pronounced that the former owner of Harrods had been ‘full of great humanity’. ‘Many people’, Cole said, ‘were beneficiaries of his kindness and generosity’. When I was approached by the BBC to give my verdict on Fayed, my contribution that he had been a ‘pimp, rapist, fraudster and a habitual liar’ didn’t make the cut.
Even his name ‘Al’ Fayed was phoney, a concoction he dreamt up with his partner in crime, the Dubai ambassador Mahdi al Tajir in 1970. International travel for the Egyptian required endless visas, so Tajir agreed over lunch in the embassy’s kitchen that Fayed should get a Dubai diplomatic passport and a new identity – his age would be reduced by four years and ‘Al’ would be added, agreed Tajir, to ‘make you important’.
Like almost every British institution, the Royal Family had been bought by an Egyptian crook
In common with the BBC’s apparent ignorance and cowardice, most Sunday newspapers also described Fayed in glowing terms. The papers were stuffed with descriptions of a colourful businessman who had suffered after his son Dodi’s death with Diana in Paris in 1997. The media’s concealment of the truth about a career criminal was nothing new. Yet the truth about Fayed had been out there for some time.
In my unauthorised biography, The Fall of Fayed, published in 1998 and republished this week, I described in graphic terms Fayed’s truly ruthless operation that earned him a vast fortune and destroyed many innocent reputations. My book described in detail his perverted sexual obsession with young blondes. I identified many women he had assaulted and raped and spoke to them at some length.
I revealed the power that his head of his security, John Macnamara, a former chief of Scotland Yard’s fraud squad, wielded over Metropolitan Police officers. I catalogued the blackmail of former employees and business competitors, and Fayed’s self-enrichment via a lifetime of fraud. The book also described how major players in the City, Westminster, Whitehall and Buckingham Palace had bowed to Fayed’s demands – and lies – and perpetuated a breathtaking cover-up.
Fortunately, over the following 25 years, Fayed never dared to issue a claim for libel against me. Yet during his lifetime, successive TV editors rejected repeated pitches to commission a documentary about the sordid tycoon. Remarkably, even after his death, no British TV station wanted to tell the truth until Keaton Stone, the husband of one of Fayed’s employees and an eyewitness to his assaults on women, persuaded a BBC executive to commission a TV report about Fayed’s rampant sexual assaults. Al Fayed: Predator at Harrods aired in September last year.
But the self-congratulation of BBC executives in the aftermath of that widely publicised TV exposé ignored the fundamental question that had been raised in 1998: just how did Fayed get away with his many crimes during his lifetime? These included not only allegedly raping women, but also defrauding foreign governments out of millions of pounds, lying about his past to bankers, lawyers and City regulators to buy and keep the House of Fraser store group, bribing politicians in France, Dubai and Britain, where MPs were paid to ask questions in the Commons, breaking into the homes and safe deposit boxes of his enemies, organising the blackmail and false arrest of innocent employees and falsely accusing Prince Philip and other British establishment leaders of organising the murder of Princess Diana in Paris.
Few could understand how Fayed, always surrounded by armed bodyguards, escaped all the accusations against him, not least by women complaining to the police about his assaults. Just why did Buckingham Palace remain silent for a decade while Fayed peddled his lies that the establishment had conspired to kill Diana to avoid her marrying and giving birth to a Muslim child? And why did the City and civil servants fail to secure Fayed’s criminal prosecution?
The reality is that Fayed survived and prospered by corrupting every organ of Britain’s governing elite. Money, false accusations and blackmail silenced his accusers. Britain’s draconian libel laws and its pusillanimous judges kept most newspapers in line; the few that dared speak out, like London’s Evening Standard, which published a truthful expose, were punished by Fayed. Overnight, he withdrew Harrods’ annual £1 million advertising campaign in the Standard. Thereafter, newspapers avoided arousing Fayed’s anger.
Fayed’s more direct threats were orchestrated by John Macnamara. The weasel-faced Scotsman bribed police officers to arrest his boss’s complainants and, more disturbingly, allegedly wrote deliberately defective reports for prosecutors about Fayed’s assaults against women.
To sabotage my efforts to write Fayed’s unauthorised biography, Macnamara also targeted me. First, he sought someone to break my fingers, and then he set up an elaborate ruse for a disgruntled ex-employee to sell me a ‘stolen’ photo album of Fayed’s favourite girlfriends. He planned to have me arrested in a south London car park by corrupted policemen as I paid for the stolen goods.
Highly-paid lawyers employed by Fayed collaborated in the deception. Enquiries by government inspectors, the Inland Revenue and Whitehall officials were rebutted by Fayed’s lies about his past and his finances. Greedy bankers similarly took Fayed’s fees and repeated outlandish fantasies about his family’s phenomenal wealth instead of the reality that he was the son of a school inspector.
After the publicised inquiry about how the impoverished Fayed could raise £615 million to buy House of Fraser in 1985, a diligent researcher in Fayed’s personal archives found a lawyer’s memorandum describing that the money had been borrowed from the Sultan of Brunei. But this explosive truth was hushed up.
Despite all those paid liars, two Department of Trade and Industry inspectors tasked with investigating Fayed did deliver a damning report in 1988. It concluded that Fayed’s breathtaking deception had festered in an Alice in Wonderland world where ‘lies were the truth and the truth was a lie’.
Yet still Fayed escaped retribution. Even Buckingham Palace remained silent. Since the Queen and Prince Philip had regularly accepted Fayed’s hospitality as the sponsor of the Windsor Horse Show, and officials had taken so many expensive perks, the Palace was compromised. Like almost every British institution, the Royal Family had been bought by an Egyptian crook. One day, British TV may tell the true, full story. But don’t hold your breath.
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