Knightsbridge, we have a problem

As the AI Fayed sex abuse stories spiral, can Harrods survive the scandal?

- JOE BROMLEY

As Storm Bert battered the glowing, Loro Piana-branded facade of Harrods on Saturday night, hundreds of mink-covered elbows battled their way through its doors for safety. Inside, they were met by a cacophony of contactless cards bleeping tens of thousands of pounds through to Europe’s largest department store — a Wonka’s factory for the global one per cent, where billionaire’s children clamber on £120,000 model Ferraris, tourists squeeze into £8,000 Carolina Herrera sequin gowns in VIP shopping suites, and queues for the ground-floor ornament department snake further than the eye can see.

But ghosts stalk the halls of this 175-year institution — none more so than that of the late Mohamed Al Fayed, its Egyptian owner and chairman from 1985 to 2010, as countless accusations of his rape and brutal sexual assault of female staff continue to leave the nation speechless. There is no denying Al Fayed’s presence inside: his face is still carved into the sphinxes which stare down in the once magnificent, but now bone-chilling, Egyptian Hall. Insiders from the fashion, food, drink and luxury industries interviewed over the course of this investigation testified to the decades-old rumours of Al Fayed’s crimes, which had long swirled around high society.

“It was known he was a randy old sod who tried it on with staff,”; “we knew he was a letch, to be avoided”; “everyone thought he was a wrong ’un,” they have said. All also claim never to have known the details, nor understood the scale, of the abuse which lawyers now say “combined the most horrific parts of Jimmy Savile, Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein”.