Daniel Hannan:

The Khashoggi killing has shown the world the kingdom’s true face – and it is grotesque

The Saudis have our measure, I’m afraid. They grasp just how trivial, shallow and greedy Western opinion-formers can be. Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto Saudi ruler since June 2017, knew that he had to press only two buttons for his regime to get away (the phrase may this time be truly apposite) with murder.

For the Left, the button was letting women drive. Never mind that the Saudi state continues to imprison feminist activists, including some who led the original campaign against the driving restrictions. A social-mediaaddled Western public can’t be bothered with complexity. We want snap judgments, facile labels, clear divisions between goodies and baddies. The driving ban is precisely the sort of issue we enjoy getting exercised about, and MBS (as the Crown Prince is known) understood that a concession here would give him a free hand where it really mattered.

For the Right, the button was even more deftly chosen. MBS – or, rather, the British advisers in rumpled linen suits at his shoulder – put it about that he was pro-Israel. At the very least, they gave us to understand, his hostility to Iran was so strong that he was prepared to make common cause with the Jewish state.

Not all Israelis fell for it: their history had taught them to be cautious. But some turned out to be as gullible as the women’s rights campaigners. They overlooked the fact that official Saudi policy towards Israel never shifted and that, from time to time, the king would restate his country’s long-standing commitment to the Palestinian cause. They even swallowed the idea that Saudi Arabia, of all nations, was trying to stamp out Islamist violence overseas, and cheered when Riyadh claimed, without a shred of evidence, that Qatar was sponsoring terrorism.

The Saudis have spent a fortune on PR in the West, opening accounts with half the agencies in London. Those agencies amply earned their fees. During MBS’s 17 months as Crown Prince, Saudi Arabia has engaged in repression at home and adventurism abroad. Among those currently in prison are Salman al-Ouda, a religious scholar detained after refusing to tweet in support of the Qatar blockade, who may face the death penalty; Essam al-Zamil, an economist charged with treason after criticising MBS’s economic policies; and the blogger Raif Badawi, currently 50 lashes into his thousand-lash sentence.

Yet, incredibly, Western pundits and politicians kept describing MBS as a breath of fresh air. How many times, for Heaven’s sake? A young Arab ruler makes a few well-crafted remarks and is credulously hailed as a “reformer” even as his government establishes a tyranny. It happened with Nasser, with Saddam, with the “London ophthalmologist” Bashar al-Assad.

You shouldn’t need an ophthalmologist to see MBS for what he is: a spoilt, petulant princeling, whose regime is ready to lash out with extreme force at perceived insults. Here is a real-life Prince Rabadash, the peevish heir to the Calormene throne in CS Lewis’s children’s story The Horse and his Boy. Here is a man whose government rounded up prominent Saudi citizens in a luxury hotel and reportedly tortured a number of them into handing over their wealth – an operation disgracefully described in many Western media as an anticorruption campaign. Why didn’t we look more closely? Because Israel. Because women.

The most surprising thing about the grisly killing of Jamal Khashoggi is that anyone should have been surprised. We know how the Saudis settle grudges. We know, too, that they don’t respect territorial integrity. They have pursued a monstrous war in Yemen, besieged Qatar for daring to host an independent TV station and forcibly detained a serving prime minister, Lebanon’s Saad Hariri.

Having got away with all this, they understandably came to believe, Putin-like, that they could strike their opponents anywhere in the world. But they reckoned without two things. First, the self-absorption of journalists, finally jolted from their trance by the death and dismemberment of one of their own. Second, the tactical skill of Turkey, which timed the release of details of the killing – almost certainly gleaned from listening devices within the Saudi consulate – in such a way as to tempt the Saudi government into issuing denials which afterwards looked preposterous.

Turkey is the big winner, and will be seeking to recover its place as the West’s key regional ally. The big loser, other than MBS himself, is Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who apparently persuaded the president to back the Crown Prince after falling out with Qatar over a business matter. Close behind are the British politicians, businessmen and academics who are direct or indirect beneficiaries of Saudi largesse.

You can identify them easily. They’re the well-dressed men who tell you that human rights abuses need to be balanced against “British jobs”. “British jobs” is, of course, a prettier phrase than “my salary”. In fact, UK exports to Saudi Arabia amount to just over £6billion – roughly one per cent of our total overseas sales. I have always opposed economic retaliation against unfriendly regimes: it hurts the wrong people. But the converse also applies: it would be wrong to hold back from criticising a country because of trade – even if, as is not the case here, that trade were significant.

For years, we backed a nasty dictatorship for the most sordid of reasons, namely the interest of a well-funded lobby. To his huge credit, Jeremy Hunt has become the first British foreign secretary to propose concrete action against the desert despots. About bloody time.

‘We backed a dictatorship for the most sordid of reasons, namely the interest of a well-funded lobby’