Queen Elizabeth once pranked Saudi King Abdullah

Caitlin Dickson
·Reporter

With the recent death of Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, Great Britain’s Queen Elizabeth has accumulated yet another title: the world’s oldest living monarch.

That alone was enough to spark Friday afternoon Twitter excitement hailing her majesty as a “badass.”

But it was an unearthed anecdote from a former British ambassador to Saudi Arabia about a particularly badass exchange between the Queen and the late King that really set off a royal Twitter frenzy.

Shashank Joshi, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, tweeted a screenshot of Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles’ recollection of a story he heard first from the queen and later from King Abdullah about a 1998 visit between the pair at the royal estate Balmoral in Scotland.

Abdullah was then only the crown prince, and Queen Elizabeth decided to have a little fun with him. She offered him a tour of the Balmoral grounds and, to his surprise, jumped into the driver’s seat of one of the “royal Land Rovers” to give the tour herself.

“Women are not — yet — allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia, and Abdullah was not used to being driven by a woman, let alone a queen,” Cowper-Coles wrote. “His nervousness only increased as the Queen, an Army driver in wartime, accelerated the Land Rover along the narrow Scottish estate roads, talking all the time. Through his interpreter, the crown prince implored the Queen to slow down and concentrate on the road ahead.”

Abdullah, who died this week at age 90, would go on to become regarded as a reformer, if a modest one. His sponsorship of the Arab Peace Initiative and harsh stance against conservative Islamist clerics following the 9/11 attacks earned him praise internationally. Yet the Saudi Arabia that King Abdullah left behind is still extremely old school in a lot of ways; for instance, women are still not allowed to drive. Did that magical joy ride with Queen Elizabeth mean nothing to him?

It obviously meant something to Cowper-Coles, who, despite being technically barred from repeating the queen’s private comments or reporting on her hijinks, deemed the story “too funny not to repeat.”

Many others agree.