Fawning over Fayed? We're all as guilty as each other

Anyone who was deemed a threat to the former Harrods owner was silenced. And we editors played our part, too

- Chris Blackhurst

IN his office in Harrods, the late Mohamed Fayed would sit and stare at a photo of Princess Diana, framed in pride of place on the wall. It was the one of her sitting alone on the diving board of his luxury yacht. “Look at her, Baldy,” he would say. “They killed her, that Nazi Philip, he killed her.”

I can’t begin to count the hours I spent poring over the death of Diana and Fayed’s son, Dodi, in the Paris car crash in August 1997. I knew him because I had covered his career and various scrapes at length as a writer and for different newspapers and magazines. After the tragedy, every so often, I would receive a summons to Harrods to hear a new theory propounded or the phone would go and it would be a Fayed minion sharing the latest “compelling” detail.

Fayed could not accept that Diana and Dodi were killed by his drunk driver. His driver did not insist on them wearing seatbelts. He spent millions trying to convince the world it was a put-up job, that the Princess was assassinated because she was carrying a child which, if it had been born, would have been a Muslim. She wasn’t pregnant and she was not going to marry Dodi. We went along with it, though, reporting faithfully his latest outpouring. It was the same with his finances. We knew those to not be as billed, but we described him as fabulously wealthy. It was based on what he told us he owned; we did not know, did not, could not, ascertain what he owed.

Once, a senior newspaper executive said he knew Fayed was super-rich because he went to the Egyptian’s apartment in Park Lane and came out of the lift saying, “There’s marble everywhere”. I asked how did he know Fayed actually owned the apartment? For that, I received a withering, contemptuous stare.