Obituary: King Hussein of Jordan

WHEN KING Hussein ascended the throne of Jordan on 12 August 1952, at the age of 16, he was a youth of little promise in a position of great peril. His father, King Talal, had abdicated on the grounds of "nervous instability", and left for Turkey. His beloved grandfather King Abdullah had been assassinated, before Hussein's own eyes, in Jerusalem on 20 July 1951. But for a medal which stopped one of the assassin's bullets, Hussein himself might have been killed. Yet, while other Arab rulers suffered assassination or ignominy, for over 40 years King Hussein made Jordan a bastion of sanity and stability in the Middle East.

Hussein's upbringing was far from opulent. He claimed that he once had to sew up a torn blazer "because I knew my parents could not possibly afford to buy me another". Hussein went to six schools in Amman, before the English-run Victoria College in Alexandria, and Harrow in England - where he found protocol considerably stricter than in the palace in Amman. While never close to his father, in the early years of his reign he was strongly influenced by his conservative and monarchical mother, Queen Zein, called by one British ambassador "the Metternich of the Middle East".

For six months after his accession, the king attended the military academy at Sandhurst. According to his company commander, Major-General David Horsfield, "Officer Cadet King Hussein" was "by no means a leading academic. But he was a jolly good cadet, a good team player . . . developing in silence." The king enjoyed Sandhurst: soldiering remained a lifelong passion.

His principal problem was enshrined in a phrase of his inauguration speech: "Jordan acknowledges the brotherhood which links together all the peoples of the great Arab nation." Jordan was over 60 per cent Palestinian in population, and was surrounded by rich and powerful Arab neighbours, Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, as well as by the Palestinians' mortal enemy, Israel. It owed its existence not to history or geography, but to the Emir Abdullah's invasion of southern Syria in 1920, from the family fief of Hejaz in what is now Saudi Arabia, and his annexation of portions of Palestine in 1948. Beset by the forces of Palestinian nationalism, Nasserism and Islamic fundamentalism, this dynastic state seemed doomed to disappear.

Moreover, since King Hussein's dynasty the Hashemites had started the Arab revolt in 1916, their reliance on British troops and money, and readiness to negotiate with Zionists, had diminished their prestige in the Middle East. They regarded themselves as the senior descendants of the Prophet Mohamed, "the oldest reigning dynasty in the world", and natural leaders of a movement for Arab unity. Yet many Arabs regarded, and regard, them as traitors. King Abdullah had been assassinated by a Palestinian nationalist: and King Hussein's own reign would be punctuated by so many conspiracies and murder attempts that, he wrote, "sometimes I feel like the central character in a detective novel".

In 1957 his Chief of Staff General Maan Abu Nuwar, "a young energetic helper in whom I had reposed my trust", tried to launch a coup. With characteristic courage and panache, the king drove to the rebellious regiments, spoke to them himself, despite what he called "bullets flying about", and regained their loyalty. In 1958 Syrian MIGs tried to force his plane to land in Syria, and there was a plot by another chief of staff in 1959. During the 1967 war with Israel, an Israeli bomb which landed in his study in Basman Palace might have killed him.

Israel was not the king's worst enemy. He joined the 1967 war partly in order to appease Jordanian public opinion, partly because Nasser had deceived him about Egypt's military performance. In 1968-70, with the support of many Jordanians and most of the Arab world, the Palestine Liberation Organisation established a cordon of mini-states in Jordan. PLO soldiers killed one of the king's cousins and the US Assistant Military Attache, and shot at the king himself. The survival of the regime was, yet again, in doubt: the king admitted that "the people in the armed forces began to lose confidence in me" - until he chose to fight.

In one week, 17-25 September 1970 - "Black September" to the PLO - the PLO was defeated despite support from Syria and Iraq, which had forces in the country. The king supervised operations from his country house in Hummar outside Amman, relieving tension by making "ham" radio broadcasts around the world from a personal transmitter. The PLO subsequently declared that the liberation of Jordan from the "puppet royal regime" was as important as the liberation of Palestine itself.

His enemies attributed King Hussein's survival to Western backing. His background made him one of the few Arab politicians who handled Western governments, and media, effectively. In 1958, after the murder of his cousin and friend King Faisal II of Iraq, and most of the royal family, when many Jordanian officials openly expressed Nasserite and anti-Hashemite views, and the king himself suffered from "listlessness", British troops had returned to Jordan for several months to protect the monarchy. Israel repeatedly threatened to intervene if King Hussein was overthrown, and Hussein had many "secret" interviews with Israeli leaders in his search for peace. Until 1990 he received Western and Saudi (and until 1978 Iranian - the king often holidayed with the Shah) financial aid: without which his impoverished country could not have survived.

However, Hussein's own personality was also a source of strength. Devoid of feelings of vengeance or fanaticism, he made his state one of the least brutal in the region. Police control of travel and speech was strict, but, unlike other Arab rulers, the king did not start wars, destroy cities, blow-up civilian aeroplanes or pack prisons. Many of his worst enemies, including Maan Abu Nuwar, received pardons and returned to Jordan. Christians, and women, served in Jordanian cabinets. The king's charm and dignity added to his prestige. A former head chef at the palace, Andrew Mitchell, called him "a kind, warm, almost glowing man . . . the king is really caring - no wonder his staff is so entirely devoted to him".

His army was devoted too. After he dismissed its British commander, Glubb Pasha, in 1956, at the height of anti-British feeling in the Middle East, he ran it himself. His ease of manner, and readiness to attend regimental functions, made Hussein far closer to his fellow soldiers than the monarchs of, for example, Iran or Saudi Arabia. The troops became lions around the throne.

Under King Hussein, Jordan remained an autocracy with a parliamentary facade. Access to the monarch was crucial; the post of chief of the Royal Court was second only to that of prime minister. With age and experience, the king became "the principal decision-maker in all fields of policy", especially foreign policy, according to his biographer James Lunt. He appointed the prime and foreign ministers, and received ambassadors' reports directly. Part of the boom which made Jordan's GDP grow by 14 per cent per annum between 1975 and 1983, and transformed Amman from a frontier town into a cosmopolitan capital, and regional headquarters of many foreign firms, can be attributed to the king's shrewdness and common sense.

Isolated, in constant danger, with few close friends, the king did not always find personal happiness. After the rapid break-up of his first marriage to a Cambridge-educated Egyptian cousin, Sherifa Dina, he knew loneliness. With his second wife, Toni Gardner, daughter of a British officer working in Jordan, he lived in a modest house outside Amman, cooking breakfast "every other morning". He was also happy with her more sophisticated Palestinian successor, Alia Touqan. After Queen Alia's death in a plane crash, he married an Arab-American, Lisa Halaby (Queen Noor), tall, blonde and beautiful, who converted to Islam and became a patron of Arab culture and international charities.

In 1965 it had been a characteristically shrewd decision to appoint as Crown Prince his brother Hassan, rather than one of his half-English sons. Crown Prince Hassan, who acted as Regent when the king was abroad, was as important as the king's wives in maintaining his inner strength. Rarely in the history of monarchy have a king and his brother worked so harmoniously together. The crown prince, who had been educated at Oxford, was an intellectual who spoke Turkish, French and Hebrew. Of the king's sons the good-looking, half-British Abdullah, head of the Jordanian army's commando unit, was considered the most intelligent, and inherited his father's charm. Queen Noor's son Hamzah was said to be his father's favourite. Ali, son of the Palestinian Queen Alia, once considered the king's choice to succeed Crown Prince Hassan, had become a playboy.

King Hussein had long presented himself as a Palestinian leader. Only with great reluctance did he accept the PLO's claim to represent the Palestinians in 1974. On 19 February 1986, infuriated by Yasser Arafat's refusal to recognise Israel, he suspended relations with the PLO leadership "until such time as their word becomes their bond, characterised by commitment, credibility and constancy". Yet the king, called by some of his subjects "the Day to Day King", was himself no stranger to impetuous changes of policy, which owed more to instinct than judgement. In 1988 he began to dismantle Jordan's remaining legal and administrative links with the West Bank - thereby strengthening the PLO's control over the Palestinians.

Originally content to live in a simple house outside Amman, with age Hussein developed a taste for luxury, building palaces in and around Amman and Aqaba and buying houses in Washington, Ascot and Switzerland: he sold his London house to pay for the regilding of the mosque of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. The king was no reader; his hobbies included horses, collecting old cars and flying aeroplanes (even on international flights he was generally his own pilot). He was also a "snacker" and "pizza freak" for whom felafel, pizza and chicken fingers had to be available at all times.

Money, as well as hostility to Syria, may have been at the root of his improbable friendship with President Saddam Hussein of Iraq. Throughout the 1980s Jordan acted as a middle man for Iraqi purchases of arms and technology. Some implied that the king directly benefited. He took Queen Noor to stay with the dictator, and described himself as "very close to Saddam Hussein", although "unable to influence him and to change the course of events".

In the summer of 1990, after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, King Hussein's assumption of the title "Sharif", like his great-grandfather Sharif Hussein of Mecca, was seen as a sign of a revival of the family claim to the Hejaz . His support for Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War of 1991 made the king more popular in the streets of Amman than at any time since the dismissal of Glubb Pasha. When his left kidney was removed at the Mayo Clinic in 1992, on account of cancer in the urinary tract, some of his subjects offered to donate their own kidney to replace their king's. Yet, as a direct result of Saddam's war, over 300,000 Palestinians left the Gulf for Jordan; the economy could not absorb them and, by failing to oppose Saddam even verbally, the king gained the enmity of Saudi Arabia, long Jordan's financial mainstay. When they met, Saudi princes refused to embrace the King of Jordan.

In 1995, as peace with Israel appeared to solidify, the Jordanian economy revived. Amman became a centre of trade with Israel. Soon, however, popular hostility to Israel seemed stronger than ever, and there were bread riots in Kerak, south of Jordan. Once "very close" to Saddam Hussein, the king took the initiative in welcoming members of the dictator's family who fled to Amman. In 1998 the king's battle with cancer of the lymphatic tissue, and months of chemotherapy at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, inspired panic among some of his subjects. A spectral figure, bald and frail, he was the most impressive leader at yet another round of Israeli- Palestinian peace talks, at Wye Plantation in the United States in October 1998.

In January 1999, however, many Jordanians were shocked when the king, who had spent much of his recent painful cancer treatment alone with Queen Noor, on a brief visit to Amman suddenly issued a royal decree, changing the succession away from Crown Prince Hassan, the experienced statesman who had held the post for 33 years, in favour of his eldest son, Prince Abdullah. For the first time the king criticised his brother's conduct of the government, in particular the army, in his absence, in a bitter letter which also alleged that Queen Noor and Prince Hamzah had been subjected to "whispering, innuendo and a smear campaign". Prince Abdullah was sworn in as Regent on the tarmac of Queen Alia International Airport, just before the king flew back to America for his last days of cancer treatment.

In a brave speech of 13 October 1991 the king, not for the first time, had described himself as tired and thinking of abdication, and urged his subjects to "bury senseless illusions", "face reality" and accept peace with Israel. It was his greatest claim to respect that he had long been the Arab ruler with fewest illusions.

Hussein bin Talal: born Amman 14 November 1935; King of Jordan 1952- 99; married 1955 Sherifa Dina Abdul Hamid (one daughter; marriage dissolved 1957), 1961 Toni Gardner (Princess Muna; two sons, two daughters; marriage dissolved 1972), 1972 Alia Toukan (Queen Alia, died 1977; one son, one daughter, and one adopted daughter), 1978 Lisa Halaby (Queen Noor; two sons, two daughters); died Amman 7 February 1999.