Harrods has sold us a fantasy

Other draws include Britain’s controversial “non-dom” status, which allows wealth earned and retained abroad to avoid taxes for 15 years, and “golden visas” that offer fast-track residency rights in return for investment. Add to this the appeal of London’s property market, with more than 62,000 homes in London registered to foreign owners.

But we cannot overlook the importance of lifestyle and status symbols. Britain has a genius for luring wealthy individuals into a kind of fantasy world – a world where the First World War never happened and where the latest luxuries somehow coexist with eternal Edwardian splendor. Townhouses in Mayfair and Chelsea retain their stately appearance even as they hide enormous underground swimming pools and garages full of Range Rovers. Public schools and universities offer their foreign students the trappings of British tradition, along with the most up-to-date facilities. From the Old War Office in Whitehall (now the Raffles OWO hotel) to Admiralty Arch in Trafalgar Square (soon to become a Waldorf Astoria), London’s architectural heritage is being sold and repurposed for luxury hospitality.

“Britain has the genius for luring wealthy individuals into a kind of fantasy world.”

This is a trend that Al Fayed’s Harrods has anticipated and tested to its limits. The baroque facades and cavernous, beautifully decorated interiors, together with a heavy emphasis on British heritage, provide an irresistible veil of respectability and aesthetic sophistication (“enter another world”, as the store’s slogan used to go). Behind that veil, Al Fayed, as recent testimony claims, oversaw a treacherous regime of surveillance and intimidation. But it also provided an ideal backdrop for the increasingly cosmopolitan luxury retail industry, where “fair-skinned English girls” with white skin – to Al Fayed’s specifications, according to a former HR worker – sold Italian handbags, French perfumes and Swiss watches to wealthy customers. from all corners of Eurasia. In 2020, Chinese shoppers accounted for 25% of sales at Harrods, while the store claimed it represented half of Britain’s Middle Eastern spend.

It’s one thing to entertain foreign customers in this way; What is more remarkable is that institutions such as Harrods have retained their position as well-known landmarks in British life throughout this time. Perhaps this is my own foreign background, but even as a child I was vaguely aware that public life in Britain was littered with grand-sounding traditions that had been popularized as tourist attractions, from Ascot and Wimbledon to the Royal Family themselves. Harrods was one of the words in this lexicon. The shop’s glamorous visitors occupy the gossip pages in much the same way, it now occurs to me, the personal lives of the aristocracy a century earlier. The shrine to Diana and Dodi must be seen in this context: it showed the realization that Harrods is not just a luxury brand, but a popular brand in a quintessentially British way.

The broader point is that we have accepted the fantasies of people like Al Fayed more than we like to admit. London’s ‘private wealth community’, as its richest residents are sometimes hilariously called, has long enjoyed the blessing of British governments. New Labor and Tory chancellors have justified its privileged treatment on the grounds that, if such individuals are not satisfied, they will simply take their money and businesses elsewhere. But such threats have been successful because another, unspoken logic has been at work at the same time. As much of Britain has struggled economically, the ability to attract a wealthy elite – one that celebrates traditional symbols of Britishness – has created the illusion of a successful, prosperous country. Even people whose own experience contradicts this idea may still want to believe it.

But the allegations against Al Fayed come at a time when London’s appeal to private wealth appears to be waning. With Labour’s plan to limit the benefits of non-doms (which the Conservatives also promised) and to impose VAT on private education, consultancy Henley & Partners predicts the departure of almost 10,000 millionaires from Britain this year. Only China faces a larger exodus. In fact, Britain has lost wealthy residents since 2017. This is partly due to the decline of the London Stock Exchange and Brexit-related shifts in finance and trading. But other causes include a deteriorating healthcare system and rising crime – including violent watch thefts outside Harrods itself. The real London can no longer be separated from the imagined.