‘Good things are happening in Iraq’

There are no cloud-capped towers, but it is a gorgeous palace – or, rather, ranch. King Hamad of Bahrain, a short, stocky but powerfully built man in his early 50s, strides out of his marble hall to shake my hand on his distinctly palatial doorstep. It is about 110 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade in this desert kingdom, so we head for the air-conditioning as swiftly as possible.

His Majesty, who succeeded his father as Emir in 1999 and became King two years ago after establishing a constitutional monarchy, is between rides. He is wearing a green polo shirt with a discreet gold crown on the left breast, jodhpurs and riding boots. Each bears his insignia as a five-star general. We are at his ranch, which is situated in lavish gardens out in the sandy wastes of what passes for rural Bahrain, because he is spending this boiling afternoon with his horses. It is a lifelong passion, and when he went to the Leys School in Cambridge in 1964 it presented a problem. ‘I wanted my horse to be with me, my favourite one,’ he says. ‘I was in love with that horse. But they said, “The horse cannot be in the same school as you. It has to be in a stable.”‘ Once he had come to terms with this deprivation, he grew to love England, and in a region still long on Anglophiles he is one of the more demonstrative. He frequently visits London, and claims to like the traffic and the rain. In the second of those he is the victim of heredity, for his great-grandfather liked it too. The King recalls a headline from a British paper on the old man’s visit to England in 1936 which read, ‘London welcomes the Sheikh who loves grey skies.’

Bahrain matters at the moment for two reasons.