A letter to the Guardian

Mohamed Al Fayed
Monday January 9, 2006
The Guardian

Dear Sir,
My attention has been drawn to an article by your columnist, Alexander Chancellor, that appeared in your edition of December 24 2005, under the heading: "You pays your money ...."

Rarely have I seen such a vile example of deliberate poisonous malice, thinly disguised as opinion. The Guardian has a fine reputation for scrupulously sticking to the facts. For never allowing the boundaries to blur between fact and comment.

Yet Alexander Chancellor deliberately disregarded the facts to write a hateful and venomous attack on my store and me. Chancellor is an odious creep who has become a disease on the face of the Guardian.

If he wished to make a fool of himself by demonstrating his lack of taste in describing Harrods, the world's most celebrated department store, as "tacky"and "depressing", then that was up to him. But when this journalist jackal poured scorn and derision upon the Book of Condolence, the real purpose of his disgraceful attack became all too clear.
The reason for the Book of Condolence is that, after Diana, Princess of Wales, and my beloved son, Dodi Fayed, were murdered, people who came to Harrods from all over the world asked me to create a place where they could go to remember those two wonderful young people and to record their tributes to them.

The book lies open at Harrods, every day. In it, visitors record their thoughts and prayers for the loving couple who died together, so tragically, eight years ago. So far, people of all races and creeds have filled 50 books with messages of love and kindness.

And that is exactly what Alexander Chancellor's attack on Harrods, and myself, was really all about. How dare this morally bankrupt swine sneer at the memory of a loving young couple whose lives were so cruelly snuffed out, and at ordinary decent people who feel so strongly about them?

The truth is that your columnist, Alexander Chancellor, is an establishment toady who is using his position on the Guardian for his own ends. He is a middle-class racist willing to sink to any depths to please his establishment masters. And he cannot bear the thought of the memory of the love of the Princess of Wales, and Dodi Fayed, being kept alive.

Before worming his way into the employ of your newspaper, which came as something of a surprise to most journalists, the poisonous Chancellor was the cringing lackey of Conrad Black, the disgraced owner of the Daily Telegraph.

As editor of the Guardian, I suspect that you will feel duty bound to defend your columnist and tell me that he is free to write whatever he wishes, so long as it is within the law. But I wonder if it has crossed your mind that there was yet another, darker reason why Chancellor abused the hospitality of your columns to attack me.

You will remember that I helped bring down the last Tory government. And that the Guardian was alone in supporting me. I regarded it then as my patriotic duty to help get rid of politicians that were rotten to the core. And I did so at no small risk to myself. But I never wavered. And neither did the Guardian. Can you imagine how angry Mr Chancellor, the Tories' champion, must have been? With both me and the Guardian?

Perhaps you should privately remind your double-dealing, sleazy, columnist that the Guardian is a newspaper, not a platform for his slimy establishment propaganda. And that if Chancellor wishes to deliberately grind his axe, by confusing fact with comment, he might be happier working for another, less scrupulous newspaper.

Though, having failed at so many jobs, it is difficult to imagine upon whom he might next inflict himself.

Yours faithfully,

M Al Fayed, chairman

 Letter to Richard Tomlinson ordering him to stop spreading MI-6 lists  source