The road from Damascus

Wafic Said is an exotic import, but a friend of Britain for 50 years. He has given roughly £100 million to philanthropic causes in this country, including founding and funding the Said Business School at Oxford. He also helped Britain secure with Saudi Arabia, Al-Yamamah, the biggest defence agreement in our history, which was signed in 1985. For this, he has repeatedly been called an arms dealer in the press. (As a result, he even got a letter from people who wanted to sell him a second-hand tank.) A reticent man, he said nothing at the time, but now regrets it. ‘I was promoting Britain. I should have challenged it when it came. If you don’t, it sticks,’ he says. Today, with his philanthropic projects here coming to fruition, he wants to talk.

The 72-year-old man who receives me in his enormous Belgravia flat looks younger than his age, but old-fashioned in appearance. With his beautifully tailored pinstripe suit and his shirt, which has one of those pre-war collars that trap the tie perfectly in place, he is English in dress and yet not in style.

Said is a survivor of the old Levantine culture almost destroyed by war and revolution. His grandfather was a general in the Turkish army and an Ottoman colonial governor in Syria. His father, a leading eye-doctor, was asked by Faisal, in his brief rule in Syria in 1918, to found the Faculty of Medicine there. In 1926, he also founded the Syrian University (now called Damascus University). He died when Wafic was six, and his mother, ‘whom I adored’, prepared him for a life of public service. Wafic was educated (in French) by Jesuits in Beirut, and then ‘because she wanted me to have an Anglo-Saxon education’, he came to Britain and was offered a place at Cambridge.