Morning:
10°c
When I last met Mohamed Fayed, as we shook hands he put a small box into my palm. It was marked "Viagra". He was chuckling as he did so. "It's for you, baldy." He pointed at my groin. "If this one is up, everything is up."
There was a blue pill inside. Whether it was the genuine article - and I've not tried it, so can't say - doesn't matter. This was the jokey, knockabout Mohamed. The one who also liked to say on meeting: "How are you? You getting plenty?"
While that might offend, I have to be honest and say that I rather enjoy his company. Compared with many of the dreary suits I meet in the course of my work, the chairman of Harrods is a breath of fresh air. Yes, he can be crude but, equally, he can be irreverent and genuinely funny. There comes a time, though, when the joking has to stop.
We've reached that moment with the Diana inquest. I suspected before the proceedings began that they would be a charade. But even I did not envisage what a circus they have become. At their heart is a tragedy: a father lost his beloved son and, he hoped, future daughter-in-law. But the hearing is in danger of turning into a personal disaster for Fayed. Nothing new has emanated from his side that substantiates his thesis that Diana and Dodi were murdered.
Anyone who has seen Fayed on a one-to-one in the intervening decade since the fateful crash is very familiar with all the accusations. However, a rant in a Harrods office, alleging Prince Philip is a Nazi who ordered MI6 to murder the Princess of Wales because she was pregnant and about to marry Dodi, takes on a different dimension in a court of law.
While the inquest is undoubtedly providing good value in terms of knockabout entertainment, that's all it is. We're surely entitled to ask whether it's the proper use of the machinery of justice, and if the estimated £10 million cost represents taxpayers' money well spent.
Fayed may say he's doing it to honour the memory of Diana and Dodi but this could be their legacy: howls of derision over the goings-on in Court 73.
The problem with Fayed is that he is not someone who likes to take no for an answer. In pursuit of his ambition he is cunning and unscrupulous. In order to acquire Harrods in the first place, he drew a veil over his own antecedents in Egypt, claiming to be descended from a wealthy family when he was not.
Then, when he became locked in a feud with his rival for the store, Tiny Rowland, their behaviour was unpleasant and downright nasty - Rowland, for instance, kept a safe deposit box at Harrods which was broken into and some of the contents shown to Fayed. And again, as part of his campaign, Fayed bribed MPs and then complained when they didn't produce the result he sought. This is the sort of person now taking centre stage and demanding to be believed.
My problem is not just with Fayed but also with those around him. He is surrounded by a troupe of bag carriers and sycophants who feed him unsubstantiated tit-bits and do his bidding.
Last week, a flavour of the madness of Fayed's fiefdom was conveyed by the cross-examination of John Macnamara. For those who have had dealings with
Fayed down the years, Macnamara is a feared figure. A retired detective chief superintendent in the Met, he was the Harrods owner's chief of security.
The jury of ordinary people, that Fayed is so keen should hear the full weight of the plot that killed his son and Diana, listened as Macnamara admitted there was no evidence for some of the key allegations and that he had lied in public about the crash. He told a US television interviewer the couple's driver Henri Paul had consumed only a pineapple juice before setting off, when Macnamara knew he'd drunk two Ricards.
He was asked if the Duke of Edinburgh had been involved in a conspiracy and replied: "Not to my knowledge." Macnamara said he had no evidence Dodi and Diana were engaged or that she was pregnant.
The coroner, Lord Justice Scott Baker, told him that one of the difficulties for the jury that Fayed was so desperate to have assembled, was: "If you are telling lies on some occasions, how can they tell if you are telling the truth on others?"
Yesterday, it was the turn of Fayed. The awkwardness of lack of corroboration for the marriage and pregnancy theory was neatly side-stepped by the simple device of Fayed claiming Diana phoned to tell him the good news - and only him. "Diana told me on the telephone that she was pregnant. I'm the only person they told. They told me they were engaged and would announce their engagement on Monday morning. She would speak to her sons when they returned from Paris."
Brilliant - in the absence of a tape of the call we only have the bereaved's word against the might of the supposed horrible, nasty Establishment. Except we don't: the chambermaid on Fayed's yacht saw Diana's contraceptive pills; days after the crash, Michael Cole, Fayed's most loyal PR, officially dismissed the pregnancy tale as fantasy, only to change his mind later; and there is nothing to support the engagement claim.
And so it goes on. Nothing in the evidence to the French investigation that followed the crash - all 6,000 pages - and in the report of Lord Stevens, the former head of Scotland Yard - another 832 pages - has found anything other than a record of a tragic accident. At each stage, Fayed has rejected their conclusions so the whole Diana and Dodi death caravan must continue its demeaning and unedifying journey.
We've now reached a stage where an investigation is to be launched into whether a central witness, Paul Burrell, the princess's ex-butler, committed perjury in his inquest testimony.
Meanwhile, Fayed is able to launch his broadsides with impunity. We've already got Lord Condon, another former Metropolitan Police commissioner, demanding an apology from him. Stevens wants one as well. Fayed's lawyer, Michael Mansfield QC, admits there is nothing to suggest Trevor Rees-Jones, Diana's bodyguard, who was badly injured in the crash, was ever connected to MI6 as Fayed claims - but the Harrods tycoon refuses to apologise to him.
Somewhere, lost in the middle of all this, are two sons who lost their mother. Fayed is grieving over his son and we know what he thinks; God knows what is going through the princes' minds.
In a criminal trial, a judge has the power to stop the prosecution when he decides there is no case to answer. Sadly, this can't happen in an inquest but we've surely long since passed that point in Court 73.
