Letters from London by Julian Barnes Read Free Book Online Page B

major capitalists who have managed to offend against even the constitutionally lax rules of capitalism and been publicly rebuked for it. In 1973, in the House of Commons, the Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath described Rowland’s business practices as “the unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism,” a tag that has stuck ever since, and merited the unepigrammatic former Prime Minister his sole entry in
The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
. The only other tycoon of similar standing to have been so stigmatized in Britain over the last quarter of a century was the newspaper magnate (and publisher of Ceauşescu, Zhivkov, Husák, and Kádár) Robert Maxwell, who was described in 1971 by a Department of Trade and Industry inquiry as being “not in our opinion a person who can be relied upon to exercise proper stewardship of a publicly quoted company.” Needless to say, Mr. Maxwell has continued to run an increasing number of publicly quoted companies, while Mr. Rowland’s face, unacceptable as it may have been to liberal Conservatism, has grown plumper with the ingestion of more and more enterprises.
    The second claimant for the liver-spotted hand of Harrods was Mohamed Al-Fayed, an Egyptian businessman about whom not much was known when he first emerged except that he appeared to have large amounts of cash and his checks never bounced. He began, in the mid-1950s, as a protégé of the distinguished arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, to whose sister he was married, and he prospered as a middleman. With his brothers, Ali and Salah, he developed interests in banking, construction, oil, and property. He bought the Paris Ritz, took a second, Finnish wife, and lived the normal life of the superrich:homes in Paris and London, an estate in Surrey, a castle in Scotland, a villa in Gstaad, yachts in the South of France, armor-plated Mercedeses, bodyguards, and so on. But it was a fairly private life compared with that of Khashoggi, and was even marked by occasional benefactions. He gave financial support to the ultra-British film
Chariots of Fire
, and at the invitation of the mayor of Paris, Jacques Chirac, undertook the refurbishment of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor’s house in the Bois de Boulogne. (Some said that, failing to understand the Windsors’ renegade status, he hoped the job would ingratiate him with the Royal Family.)
    By the end of 1984, Rowland was still hanging around the church like a much-rebuffed bridegroom, hoping that a ban imposed by the Department of Trade and Industry on Lonrho’s making a bid for Harrods would be lifted. But he had retained 29.9 percent of the House of Fraser’s shares and now agreed to sell them to Mohamed Al-Fayed (who had himself served on the board of Lonrho back in the seventies). Rowland offered the stock at three hundred pence a share, or fifty pence above the market price, on condition that he was paid in cash within forty-eight hours. Al-Fayed replied that Rowland could have the money within twenty-four hours. It must have seemed a sound enough deal to Rowland: first, he turned a decent profit, and, second, everyone knew that Al-Fayed did not have nearly enough money to mount a full-scale bid for the House of Fraser. If the DTI subsequently rescinded its ban on Lonrho, Rowland could always buy back the 29.9 percent. It was at this point, however, that someone shuffled the script. Rowland sold to Al-Fayed on November 2, 1984. On March 4, 1985, to everyone’s surprise and to Rowland’s fury, Al-Fayed bid for all the remaining shares of the House of Fraser, and the company’s board, eager to escape the Unacceptable Face of Capitalism, swiftly accepted.
    Two immediate questions were raised. Where on earth did the extra money—£450 million in cash, at a low estimate—come from? And would Al-Fayed be allowed to get away with the purchase without scrutiny from the Monopolies and Mergers Commission? Whereupon the story broadens politically and brings in the richest man