THE HAMPER SQUAD
Mohamed Fayed, Scotland Yard and Corruption at Harrods
So Scotland Yard has been allowed once again to investigate claims of corrupt links to Mohamed Fayed, specifically whether serving and retired Metropolitan police officers conspired to harass and fit up enemies of the Harrods owner.
When these allegations first surfaced in the late nineties, the Met was already beset with corruption but had conned the Home Office into believing its new squad of Untouchables, whose integrity was apparently non-negotiable, would leave no stone unturned rooting out the bent.
They failed and the rot continued reaching epic proportions in 2022, which led new Met commissioner, Mark Rowley, to announce an improved Untouchables that washed whiter.
As with Harrods, the Met has now owned up to its own sexual predator problem. But it mattered not to the Home Offie that Rowley was another insider who had seen nothing on his way up the greasy pole of the very problem he was now promising to come down hard on.
This time it was different, he assured the public. And certainly many dick-pix sending rozzers have been sacked. But those digital tracks are very easy to uncover and do something about, compared to tackling Scotland Yard’s corrupt system of promotion and preferment that protects some serving and retired officers but not others.
Rowley’s new Untouchables will have to examine why the old Untouchables found no evidence that Fayed had bought the Met’s silence.
Two former senior officers will be central to any proper investigation. They are Sir David McNee, the former Met commissioner from 1977 to 1982, and detective chief superintendent John McNamara, the former deputy head of the Fraud Squad and head of the Public Sector Corruption Unit.
In retirement, McNee was a consultant to Fayed and admitted recommending McNamara to the Egyptian businessman when he bought Harrods in 1985. Both ex-cops enjoyed significant influence within the Met and a level of protection from it.
The system is a simple one: Cops get promoted not on the basis of talent, but who they know and what they know about them. In others words, whose career they protected on the way up and how much dirt they have on each other.
The Untouchables is similarly honeycombed with brown nosers, career butterflies and those seeking rapid promotion, knowing a stint in anti-corruption, regardless of results, does wonders for a detective’s CV.
Traditionally, the Untouchables only class as “threats” those cops who act as conduits to organised crime and terrorism or who pose a risk to the Met’s reputation by speaking out.
Serving and retired cops acting as conduits to big business are invariably left alone. Because to tackle that potentially corrupt relationship would threaten the enhanced pension of the top brass who on retirement, successful or not, slither into the private sector believing captains of industry employ them for their personality and war stories and not quick access to the policing establishment.
History tells us the Met is not interested in coming down on this corrupt system of promotion and preferment, nor the revolving door into the private sector that ensures continued loyalty and silence.
In the case of McNee and McNamara, they were not troubled by the first Untouchables inquiry and are unlikely to be bothered by part two because they are long dead.
Another way Fayed is said to have bought the Met’s silence was by doling out Christmas hampers to serving coppers, especially those in key police stations around Harrods in central London.
Such generosity today would cost anything from £50 to £750, depending on your usefulness to the Egyptian Santa, who is also dead.
At the heart of the Fayed-Met corruption story is an ex-royal military cop who joined the Harrods security department and ended up blowing the whistle in the late nineties on the ‘hamper squad’ of tame coppers and a commander allegedly on the take.
These old allegations have got the mainstream media presently whipped up into a frenzy after the BBC bravely waited for Fayed to die last year aged 94 before going to air about his sex crimes.
As it is Christmas, The Upsetter has produced a hamper from his own sack and unwrapped it for the Untouchables.
There are no Harrods pork pies but some yuletide crackers following an interview this month with a second Harrods security insider who was Fayed’s personal bodyguard.
The ex-special forces soldier has much to say about the way McNamara worked and his efforts to undermine any claims about corrupt links to the Met.
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