Saudi Arabia is as impenetrable a country as the old Soviet Union. The ruling family occupy much the same place as the former Soviet Politburo. The King and his close relations decide everything in closed sessions, and no outsider can really know who among them argues for what, or on what basis. This murky personalization of the political process means that favours have to be done, people have to be bribed, honor has to be saved, and so moral and financial corruption comes to be institutionalized.

Saudi Arabia spreads this corruption far and wide, simply because it has oil that outsiders need and for which they prepared to abase themselves. Death of a Princess was a British film some 20 years ago about the judicial murder of a member of the Saudi royal family, and the Saudi man she had eloped with. The Saudis did everything they could to have the film banned, so much so that the British Foreign Secretary said he regretted being powerless to oblige, and could only apologize. A major British company, BAE, seemingly bribed the relevant Saudis to obtain lucrative contracts. If the matter were investigated, the Saudis threatened, there would be no more contracts. This blackmail worked. The then Prime Minister Blair squashed police procedures on the specious grounds of national security.

These disgraceful episodes are preludes to understanding what has happened to Mrs. Jane Rodway. She and her husband Christopher, an engineer, were once living and working in Riyadh. One day in November 2000 they drove to a garden centre. A bomb had been set under their car, and its explosion killed Mr. Rodway and concussed Mrs. Rodway. It is unmistakably clear that Saudi jihadis were responsible, just as later they were responsible for shooting the BBC’s defense correspondent, and killing the photographer he was working with. But that casts shame on the Saudis, so the authorities concocted a fable that the Rodways’ bomb had been set by expatriates engaged in illicit brewing and selling of alcohol. Fourteen expatriates were arrested, beaten, and tortured. None of them knew how to handle explosives and there was no evidence against them. But Sandy Mitchell, an anaesthetist, was made to confess on television and was then sentenced to be beheaded. William Sampson, a Canadian, also was made to confess. After three years of this travesty, when the Saudis could feel their honor was safe, all were released.

Mrs. Rodway is now a school secretary back in England. I read in the Times that she has written time and again to the Saudi royal family and their London embassy to ask for an explanation of her husband’s murder, but has never received so much as a reply. I also read that the British Foreign Office offers “sympathy” to Mrs. Rodway but denies her request to receive compensation from a fund designed to relieve British victims of terrorism abroad. As Mrs. Rodway says, the Foreign Office has accepted the Saudi version of events.

Submitting to injustice like this, the Foreign Office is ensuring that Britain becomes a vassal state, adopting the Saudi ways of doing things secretly and corruptly. The scandal is enormous, and the consequences dire.