If the novelists PG Wodehouse, Jackie Collins and Naguib Mahfouz had been asked to pool their creative talents, they would have struggled to invent a character as bold and controversial as Mohamed Al Fayed, who died on Friday at the age of 94. Almost everything about the man was subject to dispute, including his age.
For a long time, Who’s Who and his own website recorded his year of birth as 1933, but a Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) inquiry established that it was in fact 1929. That inquiry concerned his takeover of House of Fraser, owner of Harrods, which in turn involved this newspaper.
