Crown prince with an English accent

First the bad news. His command of Arabic is poor. `He speaks street Arabic, not classical,’ said a source. `He has no problem communicating with the soldiers under his charge but, like the elite class of Amman, his first tongue is English. This will be a problem for him once he has to take the international stage beside the other Middle Eastern rulers,’ the source added.

Abdullah’s poor grasp of Arabic is testament to his strong bond with his mother, Princess Muna al-Hussein. Born Toni Gardiner, she was the daughter ofLieutenant-Colonel Walker Gardiner of the Royal Engineers, an adviser to Jordan on water conservation. King Hussein married Princess Muna, his second wife, for love rather than politics and although the marriage was short-lived, they have maintained good relations.

`She could have left, returned to England and still received her royal stipend, but she chose to stay and stand by her children,’ said a source close to the court. The result is that Abdullah, a career soldier, has turned out unmistakably English in deportment, character and outlook.

Abdullah has always been ruled out of contention for the throne because of persistent doubts about whether his mother ever converted to Islam.

The king’s enduring intimacy with Princess Muna has been a source of friction in his relationship with his present wife, Queen Noor, a Muslim convert who has pressed for her eldest son, Hamzah, to succeed King Hussein. Though Queen Noor attended the wedding of Abdullah and Rania Yassin in June 1993, she was kept out ofthe official photographs.

Abdullah, who turns 37 on Saturday, enrolled at Sandhurst military academy when he was 18 like his father and went on to study international politics for a year at Oxford University like his deposed uncle Hassan. Later he attended Fort Knox Armored School and Georgetown University in the US.

In his masters degree thesis on the Arab-Israeli conflict Abdullah wrote that Israel’s retaliatory operations against Yasser Arafat’s Fatah organisation across the border into Jordanian territory were justified. He earned an `A’ grade. `He was an excellent student who never told anyone that he was King Hussein’s son, never displayed his status, demanded and received treatment identical to every other student,’ said Alon Pinkas, Abdullah’s Israeli-born teacher at Georgetown who now serves as an aide to the Labour Party leader, Ehud Barak.

After his studies Abdullah returned home to pursue an army career and in October 1997 was made commander of the Special Operations Command, the mailedfist of the Hashemite regime. The loyalty of these crack forces to Abdullah is not in doubt.

`He has always had a very nice and easy life, lots of cars, girls, you name it,’ said a source close to the court. `There’s this frivolous side but he’s ambitious within the army. I don’t think he ever thought he would be king. He’s no saint, but that goes for the rest of the family too.’

`He has the potential to become a worthy successor to his father, but he lacks political and foreign policy experience,’ said a palace-watcher. `He is affable, humble even, gets on easily with everybody. But Abdullah needs a year at least of his father’s tutelage,’ he added.