Profile: Mohammed Al Fayed still insists that the royal family murdered Diana and his son, Dodi, but the Egyptian businessman is cutting a comical figure, writes Lynne O'Donnell in London
+Mohamed Al Fayed reinforced his image in the minds of the British public as a buffoon this week, swinging between sorrow at the loss of his son, Dodi, in a car crash with Princess Diana, and wild accusations that they were killed in a wide-ranging though unlikely conspiracy.
He used the inquests into the deaths of Diana and Dodi to once again harangue the royal family and accuse them of colluding with secret services and big business in Britain, France and America to have the pair murdered.
The owner of the London department store, Harrods, and Fulham Football Club, who rose from humble beginnings with the ambition of being accepted into British high society, emerged from the inquest into Dodi's death, which is being held simultaneously but separately from that of Diana, and made an immediate dash towards the thronging photographers. With little prompting, he declared himself emotionally drained by the tragic "accident" that claimed the lives of the pair more than six years ago. Wearing a grey double-breasted suit with a broad red pinstripe, Al Fayed then threw his arms wide and his head back, rolled his eyes to heaven and accused Prince Charles and Prince Philip of "horrendous murder".
A letter purportedly written by Diana and published this week in a tabloid newspaper, in which she accuses Prince Charles of plotting her death in a fake car crash - "brake failure and serious head injuries in order to make the path clear for him to remarry" - was just stating the facts as he had always believed them, Al Fayed said.
"But I am always saying this from the beginning," he said. "I suspect not only Prince Charles but Prince Philip, who is racist to the core." Once again contradicting his own claims - for which he has presented no supporting evidence - he continued: "It has been a long time, six years now and I am just fighting all the time, a loving father who lost his son in such a horrific accident."
Perhaps for Al Fayed, the son of a schoolteacher who attempts to style himself as an aristocrat by adopting the Arabic honourific "al" before his surname, the paranoia about the death of the "people's princess" has proved contagious. Since the deaths of Diana and Dodi - romantically linked but not, according to friends, a serious item - in a Paris car crash in the early hours of August 31st, 1997, Al Fayed has been unable to accept that they were killed by an all-too-familiar combination of speed and alcohol.
Neither Diana nor Dodi were wearing seatbelts. Their driver, Henri Paul, was found to have imbibed a cocktail of alcohol and drugs. He was driving well above the speed limit, ostensibly to shake off paparazzi photographers who had pursued them from the Ritz Hotel, which Al Fayed also owns. The Mercedes slammed into a concrete barrier and the state of the car, which was reduced to a crumpled wreck, was stark indication of the speed at which it had been travelling. Speed kills, and in this case it killed three of the four occupants of the car. The survivor, bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones (the only one wearing a seat belt), has little memory of the event.
Al Fayed has chosen to ignore the findings of a two-year official French inquiry. The delay in the British inquests is largely due to the legal action he has insisted on taking in France - including manslaughter charges against the pursuing photographers that were dismissed last year - which has tied up essential documentation in Paris. While obviously motivated in part by his own loss - he presented a picture of ashen-faced grief at Diana's funeral - he has effectively drawn out the distress of Diana's sons, the princes William and Harry, as well as her mother and siblings. Revelations in a book by the princess's former servant, Paul Burrell, showed her relationships with senior royals, including Prince Philip, to have been warm and sympathetic even after her divorce.
In characteristic fashion, Al Fayed has chosen to take up only those snippets that fuel his fantasies, a modus operandi that has become a marked feature of his long tenure in the public glare. His flexibility with the facts of his own life are well known. He has painted his family as wealthy members of Egyptian society, though they were ordinary, hard-working folk. He dressed up his own resumé to include attendance at the Egyptian equivalent of Eton, Victoria College in Alexandria, where the roster of old boys includes King Hussein of Jordan, Edward Said, Omar Sharif and Adnan Khashoggi.
Perhaps Al Fayed simply adopted the life of Khashoggi, the Saudi arms dealer he ingratiated himself with early in his career and whose sister he was briefly married to until shortly after Dodi's birth. He went on to befriend the Sultan of the tiny oil-rich state of Brunei and is said to have used his grace and favour to fund the purchase, with his brother Ali Al Fayed, of the Paris Ritz in 1979 and Harrods in 1985. The brothers were later investigated by the Department of Trade and Industry, which found they had lied about their background and their finances, effectively buying the famous store before they had arranged financing, and then using it as collateral for other business ventures.
"It's a miracle really," said a City source, who spoke on condition of anonymity about Al Fayed's entrepreneurial longevity. "You have to be continuously spinning the bullshit and building on bullshit because once you start borrowing to keep everything afloat you can't stop. It's like a house of cards, not so different from Parmalat [the failed Italian dairy]". The likelihood that Al Fayed would make a bid for the Telegraph newspapers, currently owned by the troubled Canadian Conrad Black, was dim, he added.
Yet Al Fayed famously proved himself able to wage titanic battles when he crossed swords with the late Tiny Rowland, the mining tycoon and owner of the Observer newspaper, in a fight for ownership of Harrods that he eventually won. The enmity that grew from the fight for the store lingered until Rowland's death, aged 80, in 1998. Former Observer editor, Donald Trelford, said Rowland's obsession with destroying Al Fayed nearly destroyed his own multi-billion-pound empire as he spent much effort in his final years attempting to blacken the Al Fayed name.
But Al Fayed was pretty good at stirring up trouble for others too. In a 1999 court case, in which disgraced former MP Neil Hamilton sued him for libel over assertions that he had accepted up to £120,000 in return for asking questions in parliament on Al Fayed's behalf, Al Fayed won the case, with costs that ruined Hamilton, despite the judge having advised the jury not to accept Al Fayed's evidence in isolation.
His fantastic self-obsession is gruesomely on display on his website, www.alfayed.com, which presents doctored photographs of the businessman as Caesar in a Roman toga, and a tanned and oiled Mr Universe-style muscleman with a boxing glove obscuring his private parts. He also appears as a father figure to impoverished children, and a debonair man-about-town in white tie and tuxedo. The site lists some of his businesses - Harrods, Fulham F.C., Air Harrods, Harrods Casino, Punch magazine, Kurt Geiger shoes and his hunting lodge in the Scottish highlands among them - and charity work. It functions as a forum for his many "passions", he says, as he rehashes some of the grossest rumours about Princess Diana, "my great friend", and her death. He implicates the American, British and French secret services, the American and British defence industries, which he says wanted to quash Diana's campaign against landmines, as well as senior royals as responsible for her death.
He claims that the American government has evidence that Diana was pregnant at the time of her death - a rumour routed this week by the former royal coroner, Dr John Burton, who was present at her Paris post mortem. Al Fayed contends that Diana and Dodi had already bought an engagement ring, and that Diana was about to announce their plans to marry. In newspaper interviews he has blamed the British establishment for murdering Diana, and "taking Dodi with her", to prevent her marrying a man with brown skin, and a Muslim to boot.
His garrulous ramblings have alienated him from the affections of the British establishment he craved so blatantly and mitigated against him obtaining his Holy Grail, a British passport. Shunned as "an Egyptian shopkeeper", his claims that he regularly handed large brown envelopes of money to Conservative MPs, whom he said were as easy to hire as taxis, triggered an investigation by the British taxman into his cash resources. Thus he announced early last year that, after more than three decades in Britain, he was relocating to Switzerland as the Inland Revenue had cut his special tax status capping liabilities on foreign earnings at £240,000 a year.
Claiming unfair treatment, he issued a statement saying: "I am leaving with a heavy heart because this is a country where I have lived for over 35 years and which I have come to love very deeply. All my four children were born and brought up here and are British citizens. My record shows that I have contributed enormously to the economy, business infrastructure and social fabric of this country over many years."
Critics, among them Tom Bower, author of Fayed, the unauthorised biography, published in 1998, said that Al Fayed's businesses, including Harrods, were not the huge successes he claimed and that he would be sorely pressed to pay taxes above the ceiling he had long enjoyed.
With the inquests now adjourned for up to 15 months to allow investigations of all the conspiracy theories to proceed under the supervision of Britain's most senior police officer, Sir John Stevens of Scotland Yard, Al Fayed's sideshow is likely to run and run.
The AlFayed File
Who is he?
Owner of Harrods department store and Fulham football club in Lond and the Ritz Hotel in Paris. His son, Dodi, was with Princess Diana when they were killed in a Paris car crash in 1997.
Why is he in the news?
Britain's royal coroner has opened inquest into Diana and Dodi's deaths, giving Al Fayed the opportunity to renew his claims that Prince Charles and Prince Philip planned the accident to bump off the princess and prevent her from marrying Al Fayed's son, who he believes they disapproved of.
Most appealing characteristic.
It's a toss-up between his habits of distributing cash among pliant politicians, inviting poorer friends to stay at the Ritz and keeping records for later use, and having his bodyguards intimidate business rivals and tenants.
Least appealing characteristic.
Widely regarded as a born liar.
Most likely to say.
"I know because I know".
Least likely to say.
"As I was saying to Prince Philip just the other day . . ."