'I hear you've banned our biggest advertiser,' said the somewhat menacing voice down the phone from New York. It was . We're in the mid-1980s, I was editor of The Sunday Times and I had indeed just banned our biggest advertiser.A few hours before Murdoch's call I'd been contacted by Mohamed Al Fayed, then the controversial and voluble owner of Harrods. Obviously, I knew who he was but I'd never met him. And our exchange was not of the friendly 'let's-get-to-know-each-other' sort.The previous Sunday we'd run a story which reported criticism of the way he was renovating Villa Windsor, the grand mansion in Paris, which had once been home to the former king Edward VIII and his wife .
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