
Long reads shortened
From errand boy to autocrat
When he was a boy, “no one wanted to play football with Mohammed bin Salman”, says Nicolas Pelham in The Economist. The seventh son of the 25th son of Saudi Arabia’s founding ruler, he was dismissed by classmates as a nobody. When he and his tribeswoman mother visited the palace where his father lived, his suave older half-brothers mocked him as the “son of a Bedouin”. During superyacht holidays on the French Riviera he was “treated like an errand boy”, sent ashore to buy cigarettes.