Mohammed 'Al' Fayed burned royal warrants

[tolman]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11051964

The billionaire also called for a "fitting" public memorial to Diana, Princess of Wales, and his son Dodi, who died in a Paris car crash in 1997.

How about a statue of Jimmy Saville with a speech bubble saying "Clunk click every trip?"

[Janot]

What possible reason would there be for a public memorial? Dodi might or might not have been a nice guy, but so what?

[panama]

Thought there was a memorial...

http://www.royalparks.org.uk/parks/h...a_memorial.cfm

and here's another...

http://www.royalparks.org.uk/parks/k...playground.cfm

If Fayed wants one for Dodi he can buy the ground, get planning permission and build the thing with his own money.

[tolman]

If Fayed wants one for Dodi he can buy the ground, get planning permission and build the thing with his own money.

And see if anyone outside his own family ever visits it.

I entirely understand parents grieving, but I don't see how Fayed is different to any other parent who has lost a child.
Even despite his father's media presence, chances are that without being linked with Diana, few people would ever have even heard of Dodi, and fewer still would have remembered his name for more than a second or two after hearing it.

However special Dodi may be to him, his father should understand that to almost everyone else, Dodi was just someone who happened to be around when an accident occurred involving a celebrity.
If I'd been an innocent motorcyclist in Paris run over by a speeding ex-Royal's Mercedes, few people who didn't already know me would remember my name now, and few would think that anything more than a private family memorial was really appropriate.

Having a memorial in the overpriced tourist-magnet that is Harrods would have been creepy even when Fayed owned the store.
Though I'm sure that countless other store owners also suffer bereavements, they generally don't stick up memorials to their wife, child, parent or other relative and expect people who neither cared about them nor knew them to act as if the person was of any importance to them.

Public memorials for people who actually did something special for the country - fair enough. Anyone else should be a private affair.