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The story comes from Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, a British diplomat who first advised the story in his 2012 memoir. Cowper-Coles didn’t witness the incident, he stated, however he heard about it from two very dependable sources: the 2 heads of state themselves.
It was a time of change for each royal homes. Princess Diana had died the earlier yr, and the British royal household’s chilly response had made it much less widespread with the general public than ever earlier than. In Saudi Arabia, King Fahd had a extreme stroke in 1995, leaving Abdullah the de facto ruler. (He wouldn’t formally grow to be king till 2005.)
In September 1998, the queen invited Abdullah to Balmoral for lunch. Afterward, he was invited on a tour of the 50,000-acre property.
“Prompted by his International Minister, the urbane Prince Saud, an initially hesitant Abdullah had agreed,” Cowper-Coles wrote. “The royal Land Rovers had been drawn up in entrance of the citadel.”
The prince was instructed to take the passenger’s seat — on the left facet in the UK. Then, “to his shock,” the queen obtained into the motive force’s seat on the fitting, turned the ignition and began driving them away.
Anybody is perhaps shocked to see a head of state driving herself round, and a 72-year-old one at that. However in Saudi Arabia on the time, all girls, royal or not, had been banned from driving.
The queen — once more, an skilled driver who knew the Balmoral property nicely — started dashing the Land Rover by way of the slender mountain roads of the Scottish highlands, “speaking on a regular basis.” By means of his interpreter, Cowper-Coles wrote, a really nervous Abdullah “implored the Queen to decelerate and focus on the street forward.”
5 years later, in 2003, Cowper-Coles was named Her Majesty’s Ambassador to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Earlier than he took his put up, he was given a non-public viewers with the queen, the place she relayed this story to him, discovering it humorous. A number of months later, when he had his first assembly with Abdullah, Cowper-Coles advised him he “introduced greetings from HM the Queen, who had shared with me fond recollections of their drive by way of the Highlands.”
Abdullah broke right into a broad grin, recounting his nervousness. Prince Saud, additionally on the assembly, summed it up like this: “I think, ambassador, that Her Majesty steers the ship of state extra steadily than she drives a Land Rover.”
“You’re not presupposed to repeat what the queen says in personal dialog,” Cowper-Coles wrote, however this story was “too humorous to not repeat.”
The Saudi ban on girls driving was lifted in 2018, three years after King Abdullah’s loss of life and after years of protests and arrests of feminine activists.
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