OPINION - I saw behind the curtain at Mohammed Al Fayed's Paris mansion — he always hid in plain sight
There’s a reason why I feel unease about the Mohamed Al Fayed allegations, the ones suggesting that he sexually assaulted umpteen women and regarded Harrods employees as fair game. It’s because I was around during the time he was trying to penetrate the Establishment, a more difficult call in the 1990s than now, and I was quite willing to take his hospitality. In fact I asked his press secretary Michael Cole, to put me up in the Paris Ritz, and he did. Twice. Naturally I wrote about it all for this paper, making clear that I owed my stay to Mohamed Al Fayed (thank you) and when I suggested that I’d be perfectly happy to have a honeymoon there at his expense, he, possibly at the behest of Michael Cole, wrote me a nice letter in reply.