I worked for Fayed – thank heavens the world has moved on

For a couple of years in the late 1990s, I worked for Mohamed Fayed as the literary editor of – the satirical magazine that he had relaunched in the hope, entirely doomed, of restoring its once great fame.

I was young and callow and didn’t know much about “the Chairman” except that everyone on the magazine seemed to hold him in contempt. He was regarded as a ludicrous character, an embarrassment really, with his loud expostulations, his trembling jowls, his bustling, Mr Toad figure and – above all – his transparent yearning to be accepted by the British establishment. There was a lot of thinly-veiled snobbery and racism towards him – and a fair bit of hypocrisy, given that we were all guzzling his money in return for very little work.

His “randiness”, as we called it then, was part of the joke. The contrast between his unprepossessing looks and his infamous libido seemed tragicomic – at least, until you thought about the women who might find themselves on the receiving end of it. Which we tried not to, on the whole. That was how we dealt with sexual abuse in those days: by ignoring, diminishing or laughing about it.

On his occasional state visits to the office, Fayed would always make a bee-line for one of my colleagues: beautiful, shy and impeccably polite. He would stand much too close to her chair, and lean over her and press against her – I don’t know how hard, because I never asked. And she would never have said.

It fills me with shame, now, to remember that Fayed’s “crush” on my colleague became an office joke – one that she laughed at too, because what else could she do? My generation of women didn’t make a fuss about that sort of thing. It was just part of the landscape of our lives: an obstacle course of unwanted lechery, through which you had to move as nimbly as possible.

Sexual predators were everywhere: rubbing up against you on buses, grabbing your bum in the street, and, of course, leering over you at work. You kept quiet, absorbed the shame of their behaviour into your own body, and hoped that it wouldn’t escalate into anything worse. And of course, by staying silent you helped maintain the culture of silence.

That omertà of shame only really began to lift in 2017, with the MeToo movement. It hasn’t been a straightforward liberation. As with all major cultural shifts, there have been excesses at the fringes. Some teenage boys have become so frightened of being accused of “inappropriate behaviour” that they don’t dare socialise with girls at all.

But looking back at the Fayed era is a useful reminder of what MeToo was really about. Giving girls and young women the confidence to trust their own intuition, to make their feelings known and to put the shame back where it belongs.

My 13-year-old niece, recalling a fun night at Abba Voyage recently, told me: “I was dancing with my friend and this gross old man came up and started dancing really close behind us. So I turned around and said loudly: ‘You are making me uncomfortable. Go away.’ And he did.”

I felt so proud of her bravery and self-possession, and relieved, and a tiny bit jealous too. If only we had known, all us women of the past, that such defiance was possible.