The valet served the Duke of Windsor and Wallis Simpson for 30 years before he was scouted by an Egyptian businessman with royal ambitions
In the third episode of the fifth series of The Crown, Mou Mou, the Royal family, for once, play something of a supporting role. Instead, the emphasis is on three men who all played their own role within the fortunes of the monarchy over the past decades. The first, and main focus of the episode, is Mohamed Al-Fayed, the Egyptian businessman and former owner of Harrods department store. The second is his son Dodi, eventual lover of Princess Diana and another victim of the most famous car crash in history. And the third is a less familiar name, Sydney Johnson: the man who served as valet to both al-Fayed and, before that, to the Duke of Windsor.
Scripted as usual by Peter Morgan, Mou Mou begins in Alexandria in 1946. The young Al-Fayed, then merely Mohamed Fayed, is a teenage entrepreneur, nicknamed ‘Mou Mou’, who is introduced playing football outside the British consulate. As he does so, an immaculately dressed young black man opens a car door and lets an older couple out: the Duke of Windsor and his wife Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor, once again played by Alex Jennings and Lia Williams. They wave briefly at the crowd before entering the consulate, and Fayed is impressed by their glamour.
The remainder of the episode shows Fayed firstly adopting his new identity as Mohamed Al-Fayed, a man who can purchase the Ritz hotel in Paris without blinking, and secondly attempting to inveigle his way into English aristocratic and royal society. For this Pygmalion-esque transformation he enlists the assistance of Johnson, presented as a man who understands everything that there is to know both about etiquette and about royalty, having learnt it all from his master.
A bromance of sorts develops between the two. The night that the film Chariots of Fire – financed by Al-Fayed and Dodi’s company Allied Stars – wins Best Picture at the Oscars, we see an overjoyed al-Fayed embrace and kiss Johnson. As with many episodes of The Crown, it makes for an affecting, revelatory story.