I told Diana about 'sleazy' Fayed. Why did she accept his invitation?

Whenever Princess Diana dropped into Harrods, typically via its most discreet entrance – Door 11 – she would check her wristwatch. Looking at her companion, she would ask: 'How long do you think we've got today? Four or five minutes?'

This little game was played out time after time as the princess wondered just when her expedition would be interrupted by the establishment's bombastic Egyptian owner Mohamed Al-Fayed. Usually, she could hear him before she could see him: the heavy footfall of his ­­muscle-bound close protection detail cutting a swathe through other shoppers as they led Fayed to the princess where he would envelop her in a clammy embrace.

'How does he know I'm here so quickly?' she would murmur as he brushed off their encounters as mere chance. The answer, of course, was the CCTV that scanned the Knightsbridge department store's every aisle, corridor, exit and entrance – the same cameras the monstrous shopkeeper used to scour his own ­emporium for attractive young female staff to groom and sexually abuse.

As more women came forward this week with accounts of shocking allegations – 200 to date – it brought back another uncomfortable truth: that Princess Diana was as much a victim of Fayed's depravity as the girls he assaulted, raped and trafficked. The difference, of course, was that she was one of the few whom he treated with kid gloves – respect, even.

This prolific sexual predator, who died aged 94 a year ago, did not grope Diana or trap her in a room and forcibly rub himself against her. Nor was she subjected to the obscenities and humiliating comments about her appearance directed at the girls who rejected his lascivious attention, let alone the fistfuls of cash he attempted to stuff down their blouses.

The Diana he lavished with freebies whenever he managed to intercept her on those shopping trips was not part of his grubby sexual gratification but a target to be groomed, nonetheless.

For him she represented the twin ambition of the respectability he craved as a retail magnate and revenge on the Establishment that had snobbishly – in his view – denied him his unquenched thirst for British citizenship.

If his generous company, his family and, of course, the loving affection of his son Dodi, were good enough for the Princess of Wales, then how could the authorities refuse him the passport it had twice vetoed?

As my colleague Amanda Platell movingly wrote for the Mail this week, had Diana heard one whisper of the appalling allegations against the man who so ­dazzled her, she might still be alive today.

These are the 'sliding doors' moments that can alter the trajectory of any life.

And in fairness, had the princess worn a seatbelt as her chauffeur-driven, Fayed-funded car hurtled out of control and at high speed through the streets of Paris in 1997, she would almost certainly have survived the crash that killed her.

But Amanda's point is a valid one: that had Diana known a fraction of the scurrilous claims against Fayed she might not have taken up with his son. At that time Fayed was not exactly a monster hiding in plain sight. Only after the princess's death did women begin to air their claims against him in earnest.

True, Vanity Fair had published a dossier about Fayed and aspects of his grotesque behaviour in which it described how he 'walked the store on the lookout for young, attractive women to work in his office. Some were asked to go to Paris with him. Good-looking women were given gifts and cash bonuses almost before they understood they were being compromised. ''Come to Papa,'' he would say. ''Give Papa a hug.'''

That article appeared in 1995, two years before the princess accepted Fayed's invitation to spend the summer, with William and Harry, at his beachside home in St Tropez. It was the start of a sequence of events that was to end in tragedy seven weeks later.

For such explosive allegations the article received remarkably little coverage from Britain's media, no doubt in part because the notoriously writ-happy Fayed threatened to sue anyone who repeated them. But also because he had by then cultivated an avuncular image as an outsider who with his famous clip-on ties – which he said were to foil an assassin's attempt to strangle him – had 'rescued' one of Britain's great institutions and restored Harrods to its former glory.

Diana, however, did subscribe to the glossy mag – she appeared on its cover in a memorable photoshoot just weeks before her death.

What is more, I can reveal, she had once previously turned down a Fayed request. Seven years before accepting that fatal invitation, she had received a similar offer to join Fayed and his family – and she was tempted to go.

She asked her security to fly to France to carry out a 'recce' or reconnaissance of the property where Fayed had offered to host her and the princes, then aged eight and five. But there was one crucial difference – Diana was still a senior member of the Royal Family and although not happily married her separation from Charles was on a distant horizon.

As the police officer asked to carry out Diana's instructions, her then bodyguard Inspector Ken Wharfe was immediately wary. 'We may not have known anything about him and girls at that stage, but his reputation was already controversial and I was very anxious that Diana associating with him would not only harm her, but the good name of the monarchy,' Wharfe recalled this week.

The reason for his anxiety was a scathing report from the Department of Trade and Industry, published in 1990, into how Fayed and his brothers had acquired ­Harrods in a £615 million takeover five years earlier.

It revealed how the tycoon had fabricated stories about his origins, wealth, business interests and resources. Decades before Donald Trump coined the phrase 'fake news', Fayed created what the government inspectors who led the investigation termed 'new fact: that lies were the truth and that the truth was a lie'.

Wharfe said: 'I told her that he was basically a villain and it would make life very difficult for the Queen if he was able to parade the princess and the boys as his guests at a time when he was ­publicly fighting Her Majesty's government over its failure to grant him a passport.

'Happily, back then she would take advice and was shrewd enough to see what I was driving at.' Diana declined the invitation.

By 1997, however, as the princess had emerged from her broken marriage and been stripped of her royal title, she was no longer obliged to follow palace rules.

Fayed had, in the intervening years, become an even more toxic figure. By bribing Tory MPs – then gleefully exposing them – he played a substantial role in the cash for questions scandal that destroyed the Conservative government of John Major.

So when in early June that year Diana casually mentioned to friends that she had accepted an invitation for a summer holiday at the home of the foul-mouthed Fayed, many were horrified.

They warned her that she would almost certainly be used and possibly compromised. One close friend told her all Fayed's properties were wired for audio and video and that he eavesdropped – and worse – on his guests. The message was clear: Diana couldn't even be certain of being able to undress without being watched.

When I suggested he was not the cuddly figure he liked to appear at the annual Harrods sale, she bridled. She said she'd had a lifetime spotting charlatans who pirouetted around her former husband. 'Oilers,' she called the people who sucked up to the Prince of Wales.

The Fayed she knew was a warm family man, whose four children with his second wife, Finnish former model Heini Wathen, were close in age to William and Harry. She told me she had been a guest at Fayed's Surrey home where she described an atmosphere of loving and happy domesticity.

For a young woman brought up in a broken home after her parents separated and later on had seen her own marital happiness disintegrate, this was a joyful interlude for Diana.

She also thought she had the measure of Fayed. A few weeks before the holiday invitation, he had asked her to inaugurate a Harrods escalator, in return for a £25,000 donation to a charity of her choice. She refused, telling me it was 'very tacky'. And just to prove that she had been listening to friends' concerns she began to jokily refer to Fayed as 'the phoney pharaoh', a nod to newspaper headlines about his behaviour.

But if her friends were cautioning her against the holiday offer, one figure did not – Raine, her stepmother with whom she had reconciled following the royal separation. At one time a hated figure to Diana – she once pushed Raine down the stairs at Althorp, the Spencer family home – the princess had come to depend on the wise counsel of the woman who had nursed her father, the 8th Earl Spencer, following a stroke.

The two met frequently for cosy lunches and Raine, who had been astutely hired by Fayed as a director of Harrods International, was insistent that she should take up the offer. She reminded the princess what a support Fayed had been to her father, who once told me that he considered Mohamed a 'good friend'. Raine and Johnny Spencer were guests of honour when Fayed threw a lavish party in Paris in 1989 to mark his

£10 million restoration of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor's former house, which he had acquired on a long lease, and they were frequently on Harrods' guest lists.

Lord Spencer was a godson of the exiled King Edward VIII, a fact which surely can't have escaped Fayed's attention. After the earl's death, Fayed told Diana that her father had asked him to keep an eye on her.

Even so, she found his attention on those Harrods shopping trips suffocating. 'He always tried to take over and give her stuff,' remembers Ken Wharfe.

'It always ended with her saying, 'Get me out of here, Ken!'

But Fayed would never take no for an answer. Frequently delivery vans in the distinctive cream and green Harrods livery would trundle up the private road to Kensington Palace, depositing gifts for the princess and her sons – TVs, computer games and the latest electronic gadgets. When the princess told staff to send them back, an elderly Harrods beadle called Rodney would arrive on foot bearing yet more parcels.

By now Fayed had inserted himself into the princess's life.

In 1996 he had become a major backer of English National Ballet, one of the few patronages she kept up, with a donation of £100,000. It was at an ENB event at the Royal Albert Hall that he sprang his enticing holiday invitation. It was her first post-divorce summer and the princess felt she had to maintain the standards she and the boys had enjoyed while still a royal highness.

The invitation over dinner following a gala performance by the ballet was posed with a homely informality. 'If you're at a loose end, come down and see us,' he suggested to her. She did not give an immediate 'yes' – she had other invitations from rich men but they both came with strings attached.

The electronics mogul Gulu Lalvani had suggested a trip to his Thailand holiday home and American Teddy Forstmann, boss of Gulfstream private jets, had offered a stay in the wide-open spaces of Montana. The two men, however, wanted Diana to be more than just friends.

How bitterly ironic that she ultimately chose the offer from the predatory Fayed whom she viewed as a father figure and who saw in the lonely and vulnerable princess an opportunity to make her his ultimate possession.

If anything, the hostility of her friends towards Fayed helped propel her into his arms. He skilfully played on their joint 'outsider' status, convincing her that this gave them so much in common.

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She also noted that Fayed was not exactly a social outcast. He had been a long term sponsor of the Queen's favourite event, the Royal Windsor Horse Show, had entertained Prince Philip in the Harrods boardroom and invested in the Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme and financially backed Prince Charles's polo activities.

He had also allowed Prince Edward, who was making a documentary about the Duke of Windsor, to film inside his Paris villa, and had offered Princess Anne the use of a cottage on his Balnagown Estate in Scotland, while Prince and Princess Michael of Kent had enjoyed a skiing holiday at his Swiss chalet.

Was her acceptance of Fayed hospitality so very different? She she also liked to point out that Harrods still enjoyed the patronage of four royal warrants from her former husband's family.

Even so, she was not prepared for the deluge of criticism that greeted her when her hoped-for secret holiday was uncovered within 24 hours of her arrival in France. I have a note of an exchange between us when she rang me, upset at media reports. Why was everyone so foul about Fayed, she asked. 'Because he is a sleazy man,' I replied.

She countered immediately. 'What about Charles's trips on the Latsis boat? He's a crook.' This was a reference to the hospitality he had enjoyed from shipping tycoon John Latsis, described as a 'gangster' in his native Greece. She also pointed out that she had secured the permission of the Queen and Charles to take the boys and had informed the ­Foreign Office.

Accused by critics of becoming a rich man's trophy, she showed her disdain by extending her stay. By then, of course, she had met Fayed's son Dodi.

Their deaths and the worldwide grief stilled the controversy but as Fayed began making outlandish claims that Prince Philip and MI6 were behind the fatal accident, sympathy evaporated.

As the years passed the truth about 'the phoney pharaoh' began slowly to emerge with more and more claims about his vile activities.

Scant comfort for his victims, however, and far, far too late for my friend Princess Diana.