The word incorrigible could have been coined for our popular newspapers. With practised chutzpah, they report the growing number of women lodging complaints about the conduct of the late Mohamed Fayed as if his sexually predatory activities were a surprise. The surprise, of course, is that an industry that boasts about holding power to account failed to take him down while he was alive.

Stories about sexual assaults were going around as far back as the 80s, including rumours that Fayed had Metropolitan Police on the payroll to deter those bold enough to complain. The prolific biographer Tom Bower published evidence of Harrods staff being bought off, Private Eye reported that a London police station was under his control, Henry Porter, London editor of Vanity Fair, tried hard to publish a full account of the extent of his wrongdoing. All laboured under the challenges of the libel laws. They were fighting a bad man protected by expensive lawyers and devoted PRs.

It was also a time when sexual misconduct was treated less seriously, as if it were the stuff of a Benny Hill comedy sketch. Propositions from bosses were defended as a bit of fun, rather than condemned as an imbalance of power, and women tolerated sexual advances at work as one of the prices of office life. Journalists in search of whistleblowers found that those who had dared raise accusations of sexual assault at work had been paid off, their silence enforced by non-disclosure agreements. It took the #MeToo movement to reveal the extent of sexual harassment, encourage women to report it, and change perceptions.

So yes, it would have been hard to nail Fayed. But it’s one thing to be deterred from disclosure by libel laws and non-disclosure agreements, another to embrace bad men as figures of fun. There were reasons Fayed never got the British passport he craved. The reluctance of the British government to give him one should have persuaded journalists to give him a wide berth. Instead, too many bought Fayed’s cheeky chappie act, laughed at his jokes, enjoyed his hospitality and accepted his gifts. For years, as a result, he got a remarkably generous ride. We get a Fleet Street view of him in the words of the former Daily Mirror and News of the World editor Piers Morgan, on his death last year: “Mohamed wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea and he was a flawed, complex character, but I liked him.”

Morgan and the papers he ran were by no means alone. Our late queen must surely have been warned about his true character, yet Fayed hung on to his royal warrant at Harrods and was insinuating his way into the royal calendar even before the astonishing drama of his son Dodi’s fatal relationship with Diana, Princess of Wales. There was also that compromising deal done by Peter Preston, the late editor of The Guardian, a devil’s pact with Fayed to find the proof of a Paris hotel stay that destroyed the libel claim against the paper of Jonathan Aitken. Let us acknowledge too the remarkably kindly portrayal of him by The Crown screenwriter Peter Morgan in the most recent Netflix series.

But it is that easy-going intimacy at the heart of tabloid culture that is most nauseating. As with Jimmy Savile – another figure never far from rumours of criminal behaviour – the pops promoted rather than exposed him. It is embarrassing how readily a publicity stunt or carefully constructed charitable act can win over our cynical press. It helped, no doubt, that Fayed had the support of Max Clifford, the two-timing, wheeler-dealing showbusiness publicist who was such a mainstay of the tabloid world during the high circulation years. Clifford prided himself on his ability to trade stories, his command of the stick and the carrot, his ability to flatter, cajole, blackmail and threaten. And then, through no action of the newspaper world, he was exposed as a serial sex offender and went to prison, and that was the end of him.

We don’t want our popular press to become po-faced but it is in its own interests to think more carefully about the figures it presents for its readers’ admiration. Some of us who oppose regulation do so on the basis of an informal social contract – we are happy for newspapers to be as rowdy and rude as they like in return for keeping tabs on the powerful. It’s what they say they do. So when they embrace rather than expose, it’s bad for all of us.

KF