MIDDLE EAST NEWS

The first day ended with a drinks reception in the Royal Suite of the Four Seasons, a little closer to Doha city centre. I was twenty minutes later than the others in arriving, but that twenty minutes had clearly been enough to totally destroy whatever morale might have been left among the press corps.

We had been promised a 4x4 desert safari; I don’t mind admitting it was the principal reason I accepted the assignment. Instead, we were stuck drinking non-alcoholic smoothies in a gold-leaf apartment with smiling, vacuous officials. The balcony afforded a fine view of Doha; my boys looked ready to jump.

Like many middle-class Britons, I’m happy to indulge the line that we’d all be better off if we sipped slowly like the French rather than etc etc. But a drinks reception without drink is just wrong, I’m sorry. And for British journalists – it’s just insulting, quite frankly.

I tried to cheer everyone up with amazing stories of my visit to Lusail. At the presentation they had attended, Lusail looked like this:




In fact, Lusail currently looks like this:




They all found this hilarious, as you can imagine. I was also able to laugh, having survived the car journey back from Lusail. The Qatari state is pretty obsessed with road safety, for a country where there is presumably no drink driving, and most of the roads are of the straight, desert variety. To deter people from dying in traffic accidents, there are loads of posters literally encouraging people not to die in traffic accidents, as well as car wrecks perched on roadside plinths. These were a curiosity on the way out, but more ominous on the way back - at least while the hi-tech dashboard of our driver’s Mercedes repeatedly asked him to pull over and check the tire damage he had suffered busting a sharp U-turn across the road. Not a strong English speaker, he was oblivious; not a religious type, I nevertheless prayed for my immortal soul.

Of course, the reception did at least afford an opportunity to hobnob with the bigwigs. A chance to pick up the scoop, the inside, the real deal.

A common paradox in financial journalism is that the more important someone is, the less they have to say. The top dog is invariably so elevated from the real action as to be reduced to vagaries and verbless sentences. For crunch, you actually need to speak to the ambitious head of a minor desk, the maverick analyst, or the central European lawyer who’s spotted a problem with such and such directive.

Tom, for instance, had covered the G8 summit in Gleneagles, and declared it to be the dullest week of his life. The only relief from the tedious mission statements and position papers was being able to watch the riot police wade in on the kids, all from the safety of the hotel. That, and watching the professional fury of the major outlets’ big-dick reporters, stuck in a remote Scottish village while the YTS boys back at head office got to cover the biggest terrorist attack in London’s history.

True to form, none of the top brass had anything to say – in fact, most of them had only been brought on board a few weeks previous, and none of them seemed to understand what the company was or what it was doing.

After a mediocre buffet dinner and some stilted chat with our brothers in the Arab press, we made a unionised decision to fuck off back to the Ritz-Carlton for some $10 cans of John Smiths and an early night.