Diary – 21 March 2019

It isn’t easy getting around the Gulf these days. The blockade on Qatar means no direct flights from most of its neighbours, so I spend hours of layover looking at the great mountain ranges of Muscat from the antiseptic tedium of my transfer terminal.     My main reason for coming to the region is to speak in Doha for the newly revived ‘Doha Debates’. After my speech, a more than usually aggressive interviewer demands to know why Britain and other European countries have not taken in more Syrian migrants. The Emir’s sister and others are in the audience and I cannot pass up the opportunity to poke my hosts in the eye. I ask how many Syrians have been made citizens by Qatar. There is a terrible silence, followed by some giggling and a small amount of applause which is afterwards said to have come from the foreigners in the audience.

By way of comparison, with me on a panel onstage we have a smart young Syrian girl from Aleppo who is currently studying in Newcastle after being given asylum, with her family, by Britain. One of the other panellists came to the UK with her family after the revolution in Iran in 1979. I am later interviewed by a bright young British journalist who arrived in the 1990s from Afghanistan. Yet it is Britain and the West that my Qatari interviewer would like to portray as bigoted, isolationist and closed-minded.

I had detoured first to the United Arab Emirates to visit the stunning new Louvre museum there. Before going I had slightly wondered if the French had rinsed the locals for cash and given them some bric-à-brac from the basement in Paris. No such thing. The Louvre Abu Dhabi has a world-class collection in one of the most spectacular settings imaginable.