Michael Cole has paid tribute to Mohamed Al-Fayed who has died aged 94, almost 26 years to the day after his son Dodi and Princess Diana were killed in a horror car crash in Paris.
Speaking on GB News Breakfast, the royal correspondent and former Director of Public Affairs for Al-Fayed shared his personal memories and thoughts of the Egyptian businessman, following his death.
Michael said: “I knew him for 37 years – I know that you Anne you met him on one occasion, I’m sure you formed your own opinion.”
“Highly controversial of course, but those people who actually knew him, who worked for him, who were his customers, who were the fans of his football club, and the many many many people who were beneficiaries of his kindness and generosity, they are without number, I can assure you.”
Cole continued: “And I said, you know, some of these hard luck cases, I said Mohamed, you can't do everything, and he said ‘no, no, no, Michael, you I can. I can’. He said ‘you do something good in life, you come back with something good’.
"And I said to him, well, that's Buddhism, you know, that's not Islam. It's certainly not Christianity. He said ‘in the Bible and in the Quran, it says if you do something good, it will be beneficial to you and to everyone else’. And he certainly lived by that.”
“It was the greatest tragedy what happened in Paris in the Alma tunnel 26 years ago, he was never the same again.”
Watch Michael Cole’s full tribute to Mohamed Al-Fayed above.
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