How I almost walked out on an audience with Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah

After a long book-signing tour, it's a relief to come to Jeddah, in Saudi Arabia, and do some real work. My deafness, caused by an American bomb in Iraq, made the book signings difficult. I had to strain to hear over the surrounding racket, trying to work out what to say or write. There was only one disaster. In Dublin, a man brought with him his pretty little daughter, and said something I couldn't hear. The girl had a bad cut on her cheek. "Pity about the scar," said the man. "Oh, that'll fade," I said, touching the same part of my own cheek. "No, I said it was a pity about the score." He'd apparently been talking about the Rugby World Cup final.

My publishers sold the serialisation rights to the Daily Mail. They ran a long chunk from it about how I believe that under Tony Blair the destruction of the BBC had begun. But being the Mail they couldn't resist putting a huge headline on it that said I also blame the BBC's management, which isn't actually the case. For the record, I think the BBC has only seven more years. After that we'll have a new charter, and the government, Labour or Tory, will slice up the licence fee. That's how CBC in Canada, ABC in Australia and a clutch of other good broadcasters have been cut down to size. Great legacy, Tony.

Twelve-foot chandeliers

Jeddah used to be wonderful. Now its boulevards are lined with all the shops we know and dislike from the average British or American mall. The goods sometimes differ, though, to match local tastes; the Jeddah Habitat sells twelve-foot crystal chandeliers. The Saudi prince who the BBC and others have accused of taking enormous amounts of money for arranging the BAE arms contract has a house of unbelievable naffness. Not that he lives there; it's been turned into a hotel with rooms at £3,000 a night. King Abdullah's palace, by contrast, is restrained and elegant. Scarcely small, of course, but wood-panelled, and with some rather attractive paintings. A few minutes before our interview was due to start, I was told the king wouldn't answer questions about Iraq, the possible bombing of Iran, or the BAE affair; he would only talk about things like terrorism and political change in Saudi Arabia itself. I replied, as politely as I could, that in that case we wouldn't have an interview; and I sketched out the possible consequences for King Abdullah's state visit to Britain. There was a two-hour negotiation involving two ministers and an ambassador.

Slowly, I began to understand. The king didn't want to talk about American actions in Iraq and the possibility that President Bush might bomb Iran, because these things made him so angry. He's not a man to mince his words, and as head of government he felt he might cause some big diplomatic rupture. I agreed to go ahead, on the understanding that I could report all this, and that the foreign minister, Prince Saud, would give me an interview saying the sort of things the king would have said. (Prince Saud compared America to a bull in a china shop.) I dare say it was all carefully choreographed, to show how independent Saudi Arabia wants to be nowadays; but I've never got so close to walking out on an interview.

A friend of Osama

Another minister arranged a delightful dinner party for my producer, Oggy Boytchev, and me. He assembled a small group of writers and intellectuals, all excellent English-speakers. "Ah," said one of them to another as he arrived, "I had a call from the BBC Arabic service this morning to say they'd heard you'd been arrested."

Everyone was outspoken, but it was clear this dinner table was neutral ground; they wouldn't say or write the same things outside. One man, a white-bearded Islamist, was a friend of Osama Bin Laden. "Osama was never really extreme," he said, "until our government drove him out of the country and he went to Afghanistan. It was a foolish mistake." Eyes strayed to the minister at the head of the table, but he was smiling benignly.

What better way to show a couple of foreigners that Saudi Arabia wasn't the repressive place the outside world believed?

John Simpson's new book, "Not Quite World's End: a Traveller's Tales", is published by Macmillan at £20

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