AN Wilson
FAYED: THE UNAUTHORISED BIOGRAPHY by Tom Bower (Macmillan)
One of the most richly enjoyable incidents in this extraordinary story occurs in September 1964. Papa Doc, the Haitian tyrant, has engaged a young but illustrious Kuwaiti sheikh to rebuild the harbour in Port-au-Prince.
The sheikh tries to persuade some British oil experts that there is money to be made drilling for oil on Haiti. They ask him to submit a sample. When the “sheikh”, whose name happens to be Mohamed al-Fayed, receives the results from the laboratory, it is discovered that the “oil” is in fact some low-grade molasses from an abandoned French sugar plantation.
Most conmen who had tried to persuade Shell or BP to drill for treacle would have collapsed in shame. But this is very early days in Al-Fayed’s career. He has a long way to go. You more than half sympathise with the feikh shake and his sugary crude. After all, few men can have conned Papa Doc and lived to tell the tale.
Three years and only six pages later, we find Al-Fayed purring down Park Lane in a Rolls Royce. This time, he is a former member of the Egyptian royal family “who fled Egypt with the king after [Gamal Abdel] Nasser’s revolt. We lost most of our possessions. Our land, our fleet of ships, all our possessions were stolen.”
What did the truth matter? Sheikh Rashid of Dubai needed a British financial adviser. It was Al-Fayed who was able to escort a real sheikh to a real bank and having persuaded the 23-year-old David Douglas-Home there that he was a bona- fide customer, he was able to put his hands on some very real money indeed.
Douglas-Home was only the first of many British bankers and politicians who did not trouble themselves to find out, as Tom Bower has done, who Al-Fayed is, what he has been up to since he was born, 69 years ago.
In the early pages of the story, the reader is constantly impressed by how much odder, and in a way more impressive, the reality of Al-Fayed’s life has been than the crudely fantastic lies he spins about it. Pivotal to the whole story is how Al-Fayed managed to trick Tiny Rowland out of his life’s ambition, to own Harrods, and to persuade the various banks involved that he was a sound man.
No one questioned his credentials too closely, if it suited them. Margaret Thatcher more than half believed that she had Al-Fayed to thank for the Sultan of Brunei placing a 5-billion defence order with British firms.
In the early part of the tale, the lies are funny. Meet Al-Fayed the laird who has bought Balnagowan Castle. A neighbouring landowner boasts that he has shot 100 stags that year. “How many head do you shoot a year, Mr Al-Fayed?” he asked. “Ten thousand,” replied Al-Fayed without a blink.
Al-Fayed the sportsman is matched only by Al-Fayed the radical politician, who of course only had the interests of democracy at heart when he planted those used banknotes in the sweaty palms of Tory nobody-backbenchers.
After the 1997 election, he said: “I was proud, because I showed the masses … that they were ruled by a bunch of crooks … The win by the Labour Party and its majority – I have caused maybe 70% or 80% of it.”
By the end of the story, though, the machinations and the lies have become so horrible that smiles die. His speech is a stream of obscenities, his treatment of underlings is bullying, cruel and intrusive; his sexual predacity, common knowledge, would have put off many honourable people from being associated with him, even if he were not manifestly paranoid.
Bower has done an unforgettable demolition job. Al-Fayed is almost illiterate so he won’t read this book. But it is not conceivable – is it – that he will ever live it down? When we have read each nauseating incident of blackmail, brutality, illegal surveillance and greed, it isn’t possible to feel a glimmer of sympathy.
The book fills you with utter contempt, not just for Al-Fayed but for England, and all the unprincipled bankers, newspaper proprietors and MPs. “There’s not a single man I could not buy,” Rowland used to boast. Bower shows that Al-Fayed could almost make this text his own and, for once in his life, not be too far from the truth.