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He was a chancer whose royal obsession ended in tragedy – so how did he worm his way into the family in the first place?
Covertly observing Mohamed Fayed as he inveigled his way into the court of his latest patron, a CIA agent summed Fayed up as being “friendly and evil at the same time”.
The description, contained in a secret memo from Haiti in 1964, has hardly been bettered, and remained as applicable to the man who wormed his way into the orbit of the Royal family in the 1990s as it was when he was breaking bread with the murderous dictator Papa Doc Duvalier.
Fayed’s brush with the CIA – and his ill-fated courting of Duvalier – is just one of the improbable episodes on his journey from penniless barrow boy in Alexandria to billionaire businessman and would-be father-in-law to the late Princess Diana.
He is such an irresistible character that the new series of The Crown devotes an entire episode to his back story, before it builds in later episodes towards Diana’s romance with his son Dodi that ended in tragedy in 1997.