The phone rang. It was Mohamed Al-Fayed’s assistant. They wanted to move my seats at Fulham Football Club to be with him in the Directors’ Box.
I said it was not that simple. I went to Craven Cottage to watch Fulham with one of my sons and a friend and his son. Easy, she said. We’d all be moving. When I paused, she asked if it was the money. We would carry on paying for our season tickets but now we’d be sitting with Mr Al-Fayed. Again, I hesitated. She grew exasperated.
“Mr Blackhurst, what is the issue?” I asked if I could be honest with her. “Of course”. I didn’t want to be photographed near Mr Al-Fayed. “Mr Blackhurst, can I be honest with you?” Of course. “Mr Blackhurst, do you think you’re the first person who has had that problem?”
So began a bizarre season for us. I’d known Mr Al-Fayed, who has just died aged 94, for years, ever since I’d covered his epic battle with Lonrho, led by the redoubtable ‘Tiny’ Rowland, for control of Harrods.
Ever since he appeared on the scene with his audacious bid for House of Fraser, which owned Harrods, Mr Al-Fayed had presented himself, and played the role to the hilt, of the outsider. Even when he owned the Ritz Hotel in Paris, which he did to his death, he could not claim to be truly inside the top social circles.
The maverick image suited his mischievous, non-conformist personality and undoubtedly explained his ability to build a large fortune from lowly beginnings. It also sowed the seeds for some his frustrating battles as he sought to best his enemies in the British establishment.
I was “Baldy”. Ever since I would get a summons to meet him. The format was always the same. We would sit in the chairman’s office at Harrods and he would vent his frustration at the British establishment for not granting him a passport. He would end by asking how many children I had and once when I said I had a new baby he handed me a Harrods teddy bear.
When I told him I was following the team he owned, Fulham, I was deputy editor of a newspaper and clearly, he thought, of some value to him – hence the move to the best seats.
We would use the Directors’ Lounge, and mingle with a strange assortment of characters, including regulars such as Max Clifford, the late celebrity public relations man, and Countess Raine Spencer, step-mother of Princess Diana. Mr Al-Fayed himself would never be there – he had his own, wood-panelled room, across the corridor, where he would entertain his own guests.
Once, I received a request to see him in there. It was halftime in a cup match. In the lair, because that’s how it felt, was Hugh Grant. He looked equally embarrassed. Mr Al-Fayed wanted to tell us of a development in his feud against the British Royal Family and Prince Philip in particular.
This was after his son Dodi, and Princess Diana, had died in the Paris car crash. From that date on, there was less larking about and banter. He would frequently wear a sad, teary, mournful expression. He never recovered from that tragedy.
In his room at Harrods, he had the famous photograph of the princess sitting on the diving board of his yacht and looking coy and wistful (it was similar to the iconic snap of her alone at the Taj Mahal from years previously) framed in pride of place on his wall. “Look at her Baldy”. He would shake his head. “They killed her, Philip, he killed her.”
He spent a fortune, not to mention an age, on trying to prove she and Dodi were murdered. Every suggestion, however preposterous or so it seemed, and from the most unlikely source (he was prone to unscrupulous folk coming up with all manner of possible scenarios) was exhaustively investigated.
Always, there was nothing. Not anything that provided concrete evidence of her assassination. I found myself listening, because it would be rude not to and because there was always the thought that one day he might come up with something tantalising.
It didn’t happen. The counter was always much stronger: that if someone wanted to kill Diana there were easier ways than in a road accident in which there was no guarantee of death; she died because Mr Al Fayed’s driver, Henri Paul, behaved recklessly and was under the influence of alcohol and prescription drugs. And if she’d worn a seat-belt she would probably have lived. It did not smack of a clinical execution as he alleged.
Mr Al-Fayed was in denial. Possibly, he could not accept his own employee was responsible; certainly, it fuelled his conviction that Britain’s elite were out to get him.
He believed they abhorred that Dodi was close to becoming stepfather to the heir to the throne – in fact, there was no proof that Diana and Dodi’s relationship was leading to marriage.
The extravagant claims were a match for his demeanour, which was jarring to many he sought to cultivate in high society. What to him was flamboyant was suspect to others. This displayed itself in the garish shirts and clothes he always wore, some of the people he liked to gather around him – like Michael Jackson and Britney Spears – and the purchase of the house in France belonging to the exiled Duke of Windsor.
Corruption exposed
In truth, Mr Al-Fayed marginalised himself – by not being honest about the source of his funding to buy the department store group (he said it was his, when it was from overseas); by bribing MPs with envelopes of cash to ask questions in Parliament on his behalf; with his profane language and aggressive pursuit of women, some of whom worked for him; and his outrageous slurs on the House of Windsor.
He liked to say it was because he was Egyptian. It wasn’t. He did not play by the rules and when they went against him, he tried to bend them to suit his cause.
There was an element of snobbishness against him, that’s true. But it was not racism, and in attracting suspicion and unease he did not help himself either.
At the end of that season, our seats were summarily moved to the other side of Fulham’s stadium. No credible explanation was supplied. Presumably, I’d been a disappointment to him.
Later, after he erected a statue of Michael Jackson at Craven Cottage, I wrote an article saying I objected to taking my son to a football ground where there was a memorial to a man who faced trial on abuse charges. I received a message from Mohamed: “Baldy, this is the end. Mo.”
