If the novelists PG Wodehouse, Jackie Collins and Naguib Mahfouz had been asked to pool their creative talents, they would have struggled to invent a character as bold and controversial as Mohamed Al Fayed, who died on Friday at the age of 94. Almost everything about the man was subject to dispute, including his age.
For a long time, Who’s Who and his own website recorded his year of birth as 1933, but a Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) inquiry established that it was in fact 1929. That inquiry concerned his takeover of House of Fraser, owner of Harrods, which in turn involved this newspaper.
At the time – 1989 – the Observer was owned by Tiny Rowland, head of the Lonrho corporation, which lost out to Fayed in its bid to take control of Harrods. Rowland was convinced the Egyptian-born businessman had used the sultan of Brunei’s money to fund his purchase of House of Fraser.
The inquiry delivered its results in July 1988, finding that Fayed could not have funded the £615m asking price for Harrods himself, but the DTI declined to publish the report.
The following year, Rowland, who had relentlessly pursued Fayed, got hold of a copy, and Donald Trelford, then editor of the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper, took the unusual decision to publish the report in a free one-off Thursday edition of the Observer, before Lonrho’s AGM.
The move forced the government to publish its inquiry, but it left Trelford looking as if he pandered to his boss’s commercial interests.
The key outcome, however, was that although the report found Fayed had lied, the “phoney pharaoh”, as he was rather dubiously labelled, managed to hold on to Harrods and it was the Observer’s reputation that arguably suffered the greater damage.
Not for the first or last time, Fayed demonstrated the cost of underestimating him.
Born in Alexandria to a poor teacher, Mohamed Fayed (he added the Al in the 1970s) started out selling sewing machines and lemonade.
He went into business with his brothers Ali and Salah and in 1954 married Samira Khashoggi, sister of the Saudi arms dealer and businessman Adnan Khashoggi, for whom Fayed began working.
In the 1960s the brothers founded a shipping company and established offices in London. A few years later, Fayed got involved with the Haitian dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, a highly profitable relationship that ended in farce when a putative crude oil deal turned out to be for molasses.
More successful was his role as financial adviser to the sultan of Brunei, which opened doors and, it has been claimed, bank accounts.
By 1979, Fayed and his brothers were in a position to buy the Ritz in Paris. The famous hotel would provide another scene for his complicated relationship with British newspapers when, 15 years later, he revealed that Jonathan Aitken, the Tory minister in charge of defence procurement, had stayed there at the same time as a group of Saudi arms dealers.
The Guardian followed up on these claims and was sued by Aitken for libel, but the case collapsed
Around the same time, Fayed claimed to have paid a number of MPs to ask questions in parliament on his behalf, a revelation that led to the cash-for-questions affair.
Neil Hamilton, named as one of the recipients, was forced to leave the government. Hamilton denied Fayed’s claims that he had received £110,000 but lost a libel action against the businessman.
The mid-1990s were to prove an extremely eventful period, even for a prolific headline producer such as Fayed. In 1995, more than 20 years before the #MeToo movement took off, Vanity Fair ran a lengthy investigation accusing Fayed of serial sexual harassment (a later allegation of sexual assault on a 15-year-old schoolgirl was dropped by the Crown Prosecution Service).
In 1999, Aitken, having been exposed as a liar, was imprisoned for perjury and perverting the course of justice. Before the former minister’s fall, Fayed himself experienced his lowest moment, which paradoxically raised his profile to its highest point.
On the 31 August 1997, Diana, Princess of Wales died with her boyfriend, Fayed’s son Dodi, in a car crash in Paris while being pursued by paparazzi.
A grief-stricken Fayed claimed that the crash was orchestrated by MI6 under the orders of Prince Philip. His accusations were dismissed by a number of inquiries, but Fayed doubled down, multiplying the number of alleged conspirators.
In one sense, he never recovered from his son’s death, seeing himself as a victim of powerful hidden forces. The Egyptian street seller who had taken control of Harrods, the luxury department store with a royal warrant, had possessed an outsider’s desire to penetrate the establishment, but had twice been turned down for British citizenship.
It was as if all the condescension and snobbery he had encountered, the bitterness and resentment he had built up, had formed a poisonous hatred that came pouring out after Dodi’s death.
He could scarcely give an interview without repeating his belief that Philip was a Hitler-like figure who was secretly running the country.
Fayed grew contemptuous of public opinion even while he courted it. In 2011, as owner of Fulham football club, he unveiled a statue of Michael Jackson at Craven Cottage. He dismissed fans who complained Jackson was an alleged child molester as “stupid”.
At one moment, Fayed could appear a cartoon figure who had sprung from the pages of Private Eye (a longtime antagonist), the next an astute businessman: in 2010, he sold Harrods for £1.5bn to the Qataris.
Fayed was buried in the family mausoleum at his estate in Oxted, Surrey, next to Dodi.
He was a man who continually blurred the line between fact and fiction, creating a larger-than-life image whose finer, and perhaps more troubling, details may only become fully apparent with his passing.
