Over many years, millions of dollars, mountains of headlines and much personal heartache, Mohamed Al Fayed tried to persuade the world that it had him all wrong. “They call me a crook,” he complained. “They say I’m not a gentleman. They don’t want to give me a chance.” When he died in August, aged 94, some of the warmer tributes might have surprised Mohamed, although, significantly, none of them came from Buckingham Palace.
The most famous of his many feuds arose after the deaths of Diana, Princess of Wales, and the Egyptianborn tycoon’s playboy son Dodi in a Paris car crash in 1997. Mohamed became convinced that the pair had been murdered by Britain’s intelligence services on the orders of Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh. Rejecting the official inquiry findings that blamed a drunken chauffeur driving at high speed, Mohamed spent huge sums trying to prove that Dodi and Diana had been assassinated to spare the royal family and British society the embarrassment of them marrying.
Mohamed, a figure of mysterious provenance, arrived in Britain in the 1970s laden with money. He used this fortune to buy an array of big-ticket trophy assets including Harrods, the landmark London department store. The tragedy of Dodi and Diana came to symbolise every hurt he felt
