Eric Ellis

A ‘new paradigm’ built on sand At Dubai’s soaring, spurious peak, one factoid the emirate’s bling-burdened battalion of ‘corporate communications consultants’ liked to slip to junketing media was that Dubai had the world’s densest concentration of cranes. Impossible to verify but too good to ignore, the glib observation almost always made it into media reports. It compelled people to want to go where the action was: subliminally, it suggested an economy where the fast buck came easy. And it certainly seemed true from the spas of Dubai’s ‘seven-star’ hotels, rising over a city-state-as-building-site which was also constructing that contrived archipelago for Premier League millionaires and their ilk.

It’s early days in Indonesia’s election season, but already Jakarta is transformed into a riot of colour. Political bunting of all shades sprouts from every conceivable vantage point, brightening the grey of poverty; the green of the surging Islamist parties; the red and black buffalo of the party of Sukarno’s eldest daughter Megawati; the yellow of Golkar, the clan of the late kleptator Suharto and his cronies. Posters and promises garland walls, bridges and streetside food stalls. Some even sponsor the capital’s flotilla of kaki lima — literally ‘five feet’ — pushcarts that dispense snacks of sate, tropical fruits and sometimes salmonella.

I had read — admittedly in the Guardian — that one needed to count one’s fingers after shaking hands with Dick Evans. Anecdotes about the super-salesman who secured UK plc’s biggest and most controversial contract, the $80 billion Al-Yamamah arms deal with the Saudis that saved British Aerospace (now BAE Systems), suggested a crafty Lancastrian who has despots for breakfast, or at least to breakfast, while separating them from their defence budgets.

The strangest moment of the elongated théâtre de mort of the billionaire Indonesian dictator Suharto came islands apart on the day after the old crook died. In Central Java, the remains of the despot the United Nations last year declared to be the 20th century’s biggest thief were interred in his family’s crypt in a funeral that blended Javanese mysticism with the pomp of state. Indonesia’s elite attended in mourning dress, uniform or ceremonial sarong.