Prince Bandar bin Sultan charmed everyone from George Bush Sr to Nelson Mandela in an international weapons scandal

The Prince: the Secret Story of the World's Most Intriguing Royal, Prince Bandar bin Sultan

William Simpson HarperCollins, 480pp, £16.99

ISBN 0060899867

Normally the heart sinks at hagiographies of rich people written by their chums. The two fawning classics of the genre came from Harold Wilson's one-time defence minister Lord Chalfont. First he sucked up to the late shah of Iran; then he offered a clue to his feelings about the ruler of Brunei in the snappy title he gave to his biography of that zillionaire, By God's Will.

This life story of Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia, however, written by a retired airman who trained at RAF Cranwell with him, has turned out to be unexpectedly fascinating. The bad news for the author, William Simpson, was that he missed the story. No sooner had the book come out than it was revealed that Bandar had allegedly been paid £1bn by the arms company BAE for his role in arranging the enormous al-Yamamah weapons deal with Britain. Bandar was accused of playing a central role in blocking the police inquiry into the money, manipulating a craven Tony Blair to get the result he wanted. The personal Airbus that Bandar whizzes about in, painted in the blue and silver colours of the Dallas Cowboys football team - which Simpson breathlessly describes - turned out to have been discreetly donated to him by the very same arms company.

The good news for the artless author is that he will now sell a good few extra copies on the strength of the international scandal surrounding this cocky, cigar-chomping figure, christened "The Arab Gatsby" during his high- profile life as Saudi ambassador to the court of both George Bushes in Washington.

Simpson quotes Bandar at length, and the use of Bandar's name got him access to a starry roll-call of supporting players - Colin Powell, James Baker, the former BAE chairman Dick Evans and Margaret Thatcher's old adviser, Charles Powell. Bandar's unusualness is demonstrated by the appearance of gushing forewords by both Thatcher and the man she called a terrorist - Nelson Mandela.

Mandela, who invited Bandar to his wedding and was offered the loan of his plane, describes him as "one of the great peacemakers of our time - an outstanding man - a charming eloquent and nonetheless humble figure . . . larger than life and full of fun - for he is a storyteller without equal". It is plain that out of the generally toxic soil of the ruling Saudi bandit clan has grown quite an exotic flower. Bandar's personality seems a far cry from that of the stereotypical Saudi princeling, who is fat, greedy, lazy, brutal, arrogant and spends his country's undeserved oil wealth on Scotch whisky and blonde tarts.

Mandela likes Bandar because the two men worked together behind the scenes to get a deal with Colonel Gaddafi, under which the Libyan ruler agreed to hand over the alleged Lockerbie bombers for a Scottish trial in a neutral country.

But, according to this book, Bandar did some other things, too - quite bad things - and seems to revel in his own capacity for deceit. At the time of the Thatcher arms deal payments (which he insists were legitimate), Bandar was also gleefully washing money for the Americans. He helped the CIA director Bill Casey evade congressional curbs by flying to Switzerland and having his own bank there tip $32m into a Cayman Islands offshore account to fund the murderous contra rebels who were making life hell in Nicaragua. He also became what Simpson terms, in a rare stroke of wit, "bagman for the pope". Bandar helped the Christian Democrats steal the 1983 Italian elections by flying to Rome (the man loves planes) and handing $10m in a suitcase to a priest to deposit in the Vatican Bank, as covert political funding. He says that Casey and Thatcher put him up to it.

I didn't find this a funny story. I am old enough to recall how Bandar took libel damages off the Guardian in 1993, when the paper claimed in error that he had secretly made donations to the Conservative Party. Bandar told the courts that the very idea he should seek to influence an election in another country caused him extreme "embarrassment and distress". Yeah, right.

Simpson, as befits a hagiographer, does his best to characterise Bandar as a psychological man of mystery. He points to his "Machiavellian" traits and says: "I nonetheless believe that we can separate the Bandar of integrity and honesty from the amoral prince of guile and shadow diplomacy." I am not so sure about that. When Bandar was a young major in the air force, lobbying in Washington for the sale of Awacs surveillance planes, his Saudi fellow-pilots all had to stand up when he entered the room. He always imagined he could do as he liked and that rules were for little people.

When he tried to precipitate the first Gulf war with Iraq by leaking a stern Bush-Saddam letter to Andrew Neil of the Sunday Times, Bandar was following the iron rule of the Saud clan: anything that keeps them in power is good. That also meant running unsavoury errands for the Americans, whose security guarantee props up the Al Sauds on their thrones. It meant Saudi Arabia covertly arming the fundamentalist mujahedin, as well as funding the mad mullahs who poison the minds of young Arabs with jihadist fantasies.

Bandar is certainly a dashing and entertaining figure. His ability to ingratiate himself with George Bush Sr (who describes him as like a son), and indeed with men of integrity such as Mandela, is impressive. Maybe he would have risen above the common mob even if he had not had the luck to have been fathered on a teenage slave girl by Crown Prince Sultan, one of Saudi Arabia's most influential despots.

But Bandar's celebrity life story, as Simpson tells it, taps into the fairy-tale idea that there are certain people who are masters of the universe. They might appear to a more critical gaze merely as play-acting psychopaths - and ones who bring about unhappy consequences for the rest of us.

David Leigh writes for the Guardian

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