THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: The Emir of Qatar, who is on a three-day state visit, owns large slices of London and has £50 billion in the bank – but there are clouds on the horizon. Richard Spencer reports.
This year, a small peninsula jutting out of Saudi Arabia into the Gulf has been the subject of a Chelsea planning row that turned into a constitutional crisis. It has bought Harrods and it has threatened to buy Christie’s. And this week its flamboyantly dressed rulers dined with Her Majesty. If you hadn’t heard of Qatar before, you certainly will have now.
Looking at pictures of the statuesque Emir of Qatar (the emphasis is on the first vowel, by the way), and his even more statuesque wife, they seem perfectly at home in London. There’s a reason for that. His Highness Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, to give him his full title, owns large parts of it. There’s Harrods, of course, but Qatar also owns significant chunks of other real estate including One Hyde Park Square, a share of Canary Wharf, the Chelsea Barracks development – whose designs the Prince of Wales asked the Emir to alter – and the US Embassy building in Grosvenor Square.
But home is more than buildings: it is about history, relations and community, and on all of these, this country also passes with flying colours.
The emirate’s history started with Britain: it is how it came into being. While many of the Gulf emirates, from Dubai to Kuwait, were once protectorates, the al-Thani family has particular reason to be grateful. The British, always with an eye to making new friends for sound strategic reasons, intervened in the middle of the 19th century in a regional feud involving the ruling family of neighbouring Bahrain. We employed a local merchant to negotiate a settlement. Out of the settlement, somewhat mysteriously, was formed a new statelet; its name was Qatar. The negotiator, one Jassim bin Mohammed Al Thani, became its ruler. His descendants have run the place ever since.
Hardly surprisingly, the ties with Britain remained strong, even after independence in 1971. Good relations were maintained when, like many Gulf princes, the Emir trained at Sandhurst – always a good place to learn the art of international contact-building, as well as international warfare. He cemented the family’s place in the British establishment by giving his son a traditional public-school education. Because of its record in taking well-connected foreign pupils for whom English was a second language, he chose the West Country school Sherborne for the boy who is now the Crown Prince. The family grew to love the place, nestling amid the hills and honey-coloured hamstone cottages of Dorset. So the Emir did what any self-respecting monarch would do: he paid it to set up a branch back home, and Sherborne School Qatar opened last year. Read on and comment >>> Richard Spencer | Thursday, October 28, 2010
