Sad Mohamed Al-Fayed’s guilt over Dodi and Princess Diana made him lash out

IT was the 26th anniversary of Princess Diana’s death on Thursday and conspiracy theorists continue to speculate that the crash in Paris’s Pont D’Alma tunnel was no accident.

No doubt fuelled by the grief-stricken accusations of Mohamed Al-Fayed, whose son Dodi also died in the speeding Mercedes.

AP

AP:Associated Press

At an inquest in 2008, Mr Al-Fayed sensationally claimed Prince Philip and his son Charles had conspired with British security services to murder the princess, because they were unhappy about the mother of a future King being in a relationship with a Muslim.

Now Mohamed has died at the age of 94 and a far more pedestrian explanation has emerged, one that appears to back up what most of us have believed all along.

Former Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil, who worked as a consultant for Al-Fayed when he owned Harrods, says that following the crash he went to pay his respects to the grieving father and “he told me something I’ve never forgotten”.

Al-Fayed said the couple were safely tucked away inside the Imperial Suite of Paris’s Ritz hotel when Dodi decided they should leave.

However, when he told the security detail his plan to flee to another location, they said they would need the approval of their boss, and Ritz owner, Mohamed Al-Fayed.

When called, Dodi’s father told them they should just stay in the suite and relax with room service and a movie, but his son was insistent that Diana was apparently “distraught” about paparazzi in the street outside.

An odd claim given that inside the suite they could be neither seen nor heard by anyone.

But Mohamed relented, gave Dodi the green light to head for his apartment just off the Champs-Elysées and, as we know, chauffeur Henri Paul was suddenly recalled to duty after a night of drinking.

Andrew Neil says of his former boss: “He looked at me with a tear in his eye as he recounted this story and said, ‘I will never forgive myself for going along with Dodi’s plan. He would still be alive but for me’.”

That was in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy and, over time, Mohamed’s grief and irrational guilt crystallised in to a hard belief that the crash had been orchestrated by shady people who feared Diana was about to marry Dodi.

They made the decision

Firstly, her close friends have always dismissed the latter as nonsense, saying she viewed it as a fun fling.

Secondly, given that no one knew until the last minute that the couple would be fleeing their safe haven, how on earth did an assassin working for the “security services” know their movements in advance?

And thirdly, if they were so rattled by the thought of being photographed by the paparazzi, then why leave the safety of their room and go back out there?

This is a point I have made several times in the years since Diana’s untimely death and it remains that, if she and Dodi had stayed put in the Ritz, they would both be alive today.

But it wasn’t Mohamed’s fault they chose to leave. They were both adults and made that decision themselves.

Andrew Neil also reveals that photographer Terry O’Neill once said of Dodi, “ . . . never get in the back of a car with him. He does nothing but shout at the driver to go faster. It’s scary”.

Now Mohamed’s feelings of guilt have come to light, it perhaps explains why he lashed out at the establishment and blamed everyone but the couple themselves for what was ultimately a tragic and avoidable accident.

FANS WANT FOOTIE, THE REST IS ALL BALLS

@bluesbabysitter / twitter

PRINCE HARRY looked like he’d rather be anywhere else than watching a Beyonce concert with wife Meghan on Friday night.

But just 48 hours later he was laughing his head off with a friend while watching Lionel Messi play at LAFC.

Does this change of mood support recent reports that the couple’s marriage might be under strain? Nah.

As anyone married to an ardent footie fan will tell you, drag them along to anything that doesn’t involve a small leather ball and they can sometimes act like a top-class misery.

A friend’s husband has a T-shirt he likes to wear to non footie-related social events that reads: “Sorry I’m late, I didn’t want to come.”

But the second a complete stranger asks them what team they support, they spring into life and become more animated than Bugs Bunny after a couple of espressos.

ROOM TO DO BETTER

Guardian News & Media Ltd.

THE various fat cats feeding at the trough of Covid and making millions from flogging the Government PPE (some of it unusable) was bad enough.

Now it seems that a small group of business people are raking in a fortune from taxpayer coffers to provide accommodation and processing services for asylum seekers.

Alex Langsam, of hotel chain Britannia which houses an estimated one in ten asylum seekers, is believed to be earning £100,000 a day in profit, while Graham King, boss of Clearsprings Ready Homes, holds exclusive contracts to house asylum seekers across southern England and Wales and earned more than £25million as his personal share of the profits.

Given that millions of people in this country are struggling to pay their bills, how reassuring for them to know that a large slice of their hard-earned taxes are being spent on something that benefits them not one jot.