Main Index

Index to British press articles on the Fayeds' purchase of Harrods

The Harrods Sale serves as an important case study on several levels. 
    As a study of the British media, it shows how easily British newspapers and broadcast news programmes can be persuaded into printing and broadcasting erroneous news stories as fact, even when reliant on unsubstantiated claims made by a person of proven doubtful probity. 
    In the light of the 'cash for questions' affair ten years later, the Harrods Affair of 1984-1990 also shows us that once British news organisations have been duped collectively into disseminating a false story, they can be collectively very reluctant thereafter to disseminate any news that undermines their previous reports. 
    Furthermore, the Harrods Affair shows us that individuals who stand up against a prevailing media viewpoint, to prevent lies being written into the annals of history as truth, can expect to be vilified as well as shunned - but that the truth occasionally does win through in the end.

Compared to the other political controversies that befell Margaret Thatcher's Conservative administration during her long, illustrious tenure of office, Mohamed 'Al' Fayed's fraudulent acquisition of Harrods of Knightsbridge (and the other stores that made up the House of Fraser retail combine) was quite simply the greatest scandal of all, and could -- perhaps should -- have resulted in the Conservative Party being ejected from power well before their eventual dispatch in May 1997.  Indeed, the principal facts of the affair are more akin to the synopsis of a far-fetched novel than a political controversy:

A serial liar, raised in the slums of Alexandria, Egypt, married the sister of the world's greatest arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi.  From there he wormed his way into the confidence of the world's richest man, the Sultan of Brunei; whereupon he filched $1 billion from the Sultan's bank accounts and, after tricking one of England's most shrewd and flamboyant businessmen, Tiny Rowland, used his ill-gotten gains to buy London's world-famous Harrods department store, all with the blessing of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government and the British Press.

That the Conservatives largely escaped retribution over its handling of the Harrods sale seems hardly possible, and can be explained only partly by the fact that the British media had been taken in initially by Mohamed 'Al' Fayed every bit as much as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her Trade Secretary Norman Tebbit.
    In contrast, and perversely, it was the reputations of The Observer newspaper's editor and journalists, who had exposed Mohamed Al Fayed as a crook and the Conservatives' handling of the affair as lamentable, that suffered from the affair.  For instead of receiving plaudits for their painstaking journalism, rival newspapers whom Fayed had duped carped that they had acted at the behest of their proprietor, Tiny Rowland.  These smears then acquired the credibility of undisputed fact when the journalists' bible, The Guardian, endorsed and propagated them as the truth.
    In fact, The Guardian smeared The Observer's editor and staff as part of a cynical scheme to acquire The Observer as The Guardian's own Sunday Broadsheet, through the systematic denigration of Lonrho as an unsuitable newspaper owner and Lonrho's chief executive Tiny Rowland as an 'interfering proprietor'.  Callously, to make the charge stick The Guardian also characterised The Observer's editor and staff as 'Tiny Rowland's lapdogs' who had knuckled under to Rowland's supposed meddling.  Those who suffered the most were The Observer's editor Donald Trelford and his political editor Adam Raphael; and The Observer’s City editor Melvyn Marckus and his staff Lorana Sullivan and Michael Gillard.  (For more information about The Guardian's smear campaign against The Observer read my tribute to Lorana Sullivan in Section One of this website and the two documents proving The Guardian's conspiracy in Section Eight).
    However, as The Guardian's celebrated editor C P Scott said himself, in his famous article of 5 May 1921:

'A newspaper is of necessity something of a monopoly, and its first duty is to shun the temptations of monopoly.  Its primary office is the gathering of news.  At the peril of its soul it must see that the supply is not tainted.  Neither in what it gives, nor in what it does not give, nor in the mode of presentation must the unclouded face of truth suffer wrong.  Comment is free, but facts are sacred.  "Propaganda," so called, by this means is hateful.'

A list of ten facts (beginning at the bottom of this page) show that these allegations against The Observer's financial journalists are ill founded, perverse, and undoubtedly malicious. 

One of The Observer's financial staff who did so much to expose Fayed, but who went unrecognised by her peers in the British Press as a consequence of The Guardian's campaign, was the late American financial journalist Lorana Sullivan.  In December 1997 Lorana became one of the few journalists who actively took an interest in the research Malcolm Keith-Hill and I were undertaking into the 'cash for questions' affair.  Perhaps she recognised the solitariness of our own stance against The Guardian-led British media and, having suffered similar isolation and vilification herself, empathised with us.  Perhaps her motivation was merely journalistic interest in our work, much the same as Keith-Hill and I had become interested in the 'cash for questions' affair out of curiosity in a high profile but ill-explained story. 

In order that Lorana Sullivan's and her colleagues' work can be valued in its proper context, I have reproduced in this subsection the vast majority -- perhaps all -- of the articles that she and her colleagues penned on the Harrods affair up to April 1989.  I have also reproduced other newspapers' articles that played a significant role in the Harrods affair.  Combined, these 56 articles provide a fascinating chronological account of a stranger-than-truth story as it unfolds over the years.  Collated like this they provide a unique resource for those researching Mohamed 'Al' Fayed's First Grand Deception of the British News Media.  They also allow scrutiny of ten facts, listed below and overleaf, which disprove the suggestion that Lorana and her colleagues were Tiny Rowland's lackeys.

Fact No.1: Much to Tiny Rowland’s dismay, the first newspaper that had fallen for Fayed’s lies about himself and had given a positive interview of the Egyptian was actually The Observer itself, in a story published on 4 November 1984, two days after Fayed acquired (by deception) Lonrho’s 29.9 per cent stake in House of Fraser.

Continued overleaf