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Fact No.2: Following Fayed’s acquisition of his prized 29.9 per cent Fraser shareholding Tiny Rowland lobbied the Department of Trade hard to release Lonrho from its undertakings not to bid for the company.  So, if The Observer's editors and journalists had been ready to act at Rowland’s behest, one assumes that they would have been most active during this most crucial period, before Fayed had mounted his full bid, during which time support by The Observer would have been most valuable.  However The Observer maintained silent right up until March 1985 by which time it was too late to stop Fayed winning control. 

Fact No.3: The first newspapers to voice rumours that Fayed’s purchase of Lonrho’s Fraser shares had a “Far East” dimension, and that Fayed had been favoured with the Sultan’s power of attorney, were actually The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph on 8 & 19 December 1984 respectively, not The Observer, though The Observer had been the first newspaper to be privy to such rumours.

Fact No.4: Far from being Tiny Rowland’s "mouthpiece", the first issue of The Observer to contain an article written by its proprietor was published on 14 August 1988, when the paper carried Rowland’s seminal piece entitled The Harrods Scandal.  This was nearly four years after Rowland’s battle with Mohamed Al Fayed began and over three years after The Daily Telegraph had afforded Rowland the same privilege on 29 March 1985.

Fact No.5: The first newspapers to publish articles dissecting systematically Mohamed Al Fayed’s bogus portfolio of shipping and property assets were The Guardian of 21 March 1985 followed by the Financial Times of 31 May.  It was only after these two newspapers withdrew their coverage under threat of legal action from Fayed that The Observer then picked up the gauntlet to expose the scandal. 

Fact No.6: In an article entitled “Guilty but grinning,” published in The Guardian on 9 March 1990 (i.e. two days after the release of the DTI Inspectors’ report), The Guardian's editor Peter Preston acknowledged the undoubted importance of the scandal.  Preston stated:
      “The Fayeds' dishonest acquisition of Harrods and the other stores in the group must rank as one
       of the biggest financial rip-offs of the century.  If that isn't a matter of public interest, then it is
      difficult to know what is.”

Fact No.7: in some 230 issues, from its first coverage of 4 November 1984 to the midweek special edition of 30 March 1989, The Observer published around fifty articles on the Fayed/Lonrho battle for Harrods i.e. less than one per month.  All of these were reproduced in the paper's heavyweight Business Section.  Only a small proportion of these were designated the lead story, and even less — a mere handful — made it into The Observer's main news pages.  During the same period The Observer's Business pages published an estimated 3,000+ articles on other City stories. 

Fact No. 8: despite the political uproar against the Tories that could have been harvested from the Fayeds’ deception of Margaret Thatcher’s administration, during the five and a half years from November 1984 to the publication of the official DTI Inspectors’ report on 7 March 1990, The Guardian published only one serious article examining the Fayeds’ false claims (the article mentioned in ‘Fact No. 5, above, published on 21 March 1985).

Fact No. 9: On 8 March 1990, following the DTI report’s release, The Guardian published some ten articles about the affair criticising: a) the Conservative Government; b) the Fayeds; c) the Fayeds’ advisers.  These articles filled The Guardian's front and centre pages and spilled over into its editorial section (these articles can be accessed from the index to Section Six of this website), thus confirming the sensational newsworthiness of the whole affair.  However, though The Guardian portrays itself as a newspaper owned by journalists and run by journalists for journalists, and despite The Guardian's shared political standpoint with The Observer, The Guardian afforded no credit whatsoever to The Observer’s financial team for bringing the scandal to light.  Instead, the only journalists whom The Guardian singled out for praise were its own, for its solitary article of 21 March 1985.

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