In the wood-panelled offices of Queen Rania of Jordan, high on a sunshine-bathed hill in the Jordanian capital Amman, as a BBC crew packs away equipment in the next-door room, the youngest queen in the world is talking about a town 2,000 miles away: London.
“For me it’s my haven because I can get around anonymously pretty much,’’ the 37-year-old wife of King Abdullah II of Jordan says in her lilting, perfect English.
“I really get around. I go shopping, I buy books, I go to galleries, I go to restaurants. It’s a place where I can really relax and enjoy myself.”
This may not seem surprising. After all, who on earth is Queen Rania?
So many foreign royals populate the pages of Hello! magazine, it is hardly big news to the denizens of London when one pops in for a visit. But Rania is different, for two reasons.
Firstly, in an age in which being photogenic matters more than ever, she is one of the most beautiful royals around.
As Giorgio Armani once said: “She has the body of a model and she holds herself like the queen she is — what more could you want?”
Secondly, in the nine years since her husband ascended to the throne after his father, King Hussain’s, death, Queen Rania has acquired a reputation — in most of Europe, Asia, America and certainly in the Middle East — as an important player on the international political and humanitarian scene.
Forbes magazine has listed her as one of the most powerful women in the world; she is on the governing board of the World Economic Forum; in January 2007, Unicef created for her the title of Eminent Advocate for Children; in July she shared the cover of Vanity Fair with Mohammad Ali and Bono for the magazine’s Africa issue.
So why has the United Kingdom been largely immune to her powers? “It was kind of a conscious decision [to keep a low profile], so I can continue to have fun when I go there,’’ admits Queen Rania, dressed in a perfectly fitted black suit with short puffed sleeves and a ruffled royal blue silk shirt.
“I mean, if I go to Italy or Spain it is difficult to walk up and down the street but in the UK I do it very easily.’’
She likes to take her children (Hussain, 14; Iman, 11; Salma, 8; and Hashem, 3) to play in Hyde Park, her staff tell me afterwards, and enjoys the fact that they won’t turn a single head.
She has, however, recently decided to raise her UK profile to help some of the organisations she supports (such as Gavi, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation, on whose board she sits alongside Gordon Brown).
“Because we’re trying to fundraise for many different things, my profile is kind of important now,” she says.
Just inside the entrance to her sprawling office building, built from slabs of alternating white and beige sandstone, a pair of black, red and green Jordanian flags provide a splash of colour to the cool complex of long corridors and fountain-filled courtyards.
Heavy doors of intricately inlaid wood seal off her private offices (a sitting room, office, boardroom and playroom for her children).
I have just finished producing a BBC World documentary about her latest profile-boosting initiative, a YouTube channel on which she speaks frankly about honour killings and terrorism from a Middle Eastern perspective.
As she sits, with perfect posture, amid the regal portraits of her husband, it is hard to believe that, once upon a time, Queen Rania didn’t have a public profile at all.
Born Rania Al Yassin in Kuwait to Palestinian parents, she was raised as a doctor’s daughter, along with her elder sister, Dina, and younger brother, Majdi.
After school she attended the American University in Cairo, doing a degree in business administration.
But in 1990, while she was at summer school in California with her brother, her “very, very close-knit, normal family” life was shattered when Saddam Hussain invaded Kuwait.
It changed the course of her life: Her family fled to Jordan and it was there, at a dinner party in 1993, that she met Abdullah, the oldest son of King Hussain.
They married in the summer of that year and became king and queen six years later.
It must be strange to go from doctor’s daughter to queen of all you survey. “People ask me a lot about the fairytale aspect,’’ she says.
“For me, sadly, real life has stripped ‘queen’ from its fairytale status. It is not about the castles or carriages or crowns. It means commitments and work, and giving back. “Real life has meant that ‘queen’ to me means responsibility.’’
Those responsibilities loom large. On her desk is an impressive globe with countries depicted in black mother-of-pearl: It is a reminder of the real world outside her tranquil offices.
Jordan might be a small country of six million people but it is bordered by big problems: to the west is Israel and the West Bank, and to the east, Iraq.
The tensions between that part of the world and the West (which she has called “not an abstraction but a difficult and daily reality’’ for those in Jordan) have seen her take on the mantle of international spokesperson for her region.
“I mean, it’s not something I set out to do, it’s not something I’d planned to do,’’ she says, “but it very much came out of a sense of need.
All of a sudden, after 9/11, I found myself, wherever I was, being asked questions like ‘Why do your people do this?’ or ‘Why do your people dislike us?’’’
It is this drive to create a better understanding between East and West that was behind her YouTube initiative: She has been asking users of the site to send her the stereotypes they have about the Arab world so she can “break them down one by one’’.
It is part of a trend, says Patrick Walker, head of YouTube video partnerships, that has seen “videos coming in from political parties, world leaders and royalty worldwide’’.
But Queen Rania’s channel, like the lady herself, stands out. First, you don’t often see Arab leaders using the internet to try to engage with the West and promote moderate Islam (“There are many who would think that ‘she shouldn’t be doing this, this is not appropriate,’’’ she confides).
Second, it is popular: Gordon Brown’s first vlog on his Ask the PM channel has attracted 168,000 hits; Queen Rania’s has, at the time of writing, reached more than 1.4 million.
The biggest difference, however, is that while viewers are not able to leave comments on either the Downing Street site or the Royal Channel, the British royal family’s site, Queen Rania actively encourages them.
Users have expressed a wide range of opinions ranging from the adulatory to the angry to the downright deluded: “Are you Michael Jordan’s wife?’’ one asks.
“My husband found that very funny,’’ Queen Rania laughs, adding that her 14-year-old son, too, approves of the channel: “He’s a man of very few words and his response was ‘cool’, so I guess it’s got to be good.’’
Queen Rania’s staff is mostly made up of women like her: beautiful, intelligent and immaculately dressed in Western clothes.
The fact that Queen Rania is a modern Middle Eastern Muslim woman means that, in an age preoccupied with the Arab world, she is an Eastern leader to whom the Western world can relate.
Some are sceptical of her motives for trying to foster a better understanding between East and West: Her country benefits enormously from a good relationship as Western support is crucial to help Jordan stay afloat in such a turbulent region.
Others question whether her YouTube project is the conversation it is billed to be (the top of the screen screams “Rania Responds’’) because she can pick and choose which comments she answers. So far though, she hasn’t shied away from the tricky issues.
In one of her videos she states: “Women across the Arab world do not have equal rights to men’’; “Does violence against women happen in the Arab world? Yes’’, and “Honour crimes happen in the Arab world, including Jordan”.
It is pretty punchy stuff but then Queen Rania has never avoided the controversial issues.
She has been quoted as saying she has “a gender agenda’’, and much of her time and effort is directed towards issues involving women and children.
While that may be standard fare for young female royals around the world, in Jordan there are real fights to be fought.
There is a way to go until women receive equal rights in Jordan: “We still face challenges, not least of which is the fact that women feel under pressure to give up their careers once they get married, even if they have great educational achievements.’’
Last summer she was in Morocco with Unicef, visiting a school that is working to integrate former child workers into the education system. I was there making a documentary about child labour.
Navigating through the chaos of excited children, the packs of international press and the clouds of overpowering rose water the building had been fumigated with, she was happy to volunteer information about the problems her own country faces in relation to women and children.
“She does not stick with the non-controversial issues,’’ says Anne Skatvedt, the Unicef Jordan representative.
“She’s very courageous about using her name and her position to raise not only the safer issues about breastfeeding and vaccines but issues on violence and the sexual abuse of children.’’
Taking a stand against such issues may not seem particularly brave, or novel, to us, but in the Arab world Queen Rania has been a pioneer.
In 1995, she founded The Jordan River Foundation to “empower women and children’’. It was the first organisation in the Middle East to deal with child abuse.
“Before we started the child safety programme and brought child abuse out into the open, it was a taboo subject in Jordan,’’ she states.
“It was something to feel ashamed about. That was partly due to the sanctity of the family unit in the Arab world, which is something we hold very dear.
"Traditionally, family issues are resolved within the boundaries of that unit. That made confronting the issues all the more challenging but I am pleased to say that after a long period of painful silence in Jordan, child abuse is now being denounced openly and loudly.’’
Today, we have just returned from a park in east Amman which she opened with her 3-year-old son, Prince Hashem.
She says being a working mother can be tough: “There’s no magic formula,’’ she admits. “There are a lot of balls to juggle and sometimes you have them all up in the air and sometimes they’re all over the place.’’
She has a nanny and tutor for the children and relies on her mother when she is abroad, but invariably, she says, she feels guilty for leaving them.
Despite the sunshine blazing through the windows, Queen Rania is suffering from a cold (she keeps reaching for the tissues, but there is no sign of the red nose which besets mere mortals).
“All of us have days where we think, you know, we really want to be out there, confident, and days where you just kind of want to retreat,’’ she says, “but if you’re in the public eye you don’t have that kind of choice.
If you have a commitment, then you need to be out there. If there are cameras, you need to be in front of the cameras.
I always get nervous but people tell me it doesn’t show, which is a blessing.’’ When asked about what she likes to do when the cameras aren’t present, she says she likes to relax by watching a good film, reading or making desserts.
She has a copy of Nigella Lawson’s How To Be a Domestic Goddess and says she is “very proud that my chocolate chip cookies do well in my children’s school.
"I just made a batch for my 8-year-old and she told me they were gone in ten minutes.’’
They are trite answers to trite questions. But when asked if she has become bored with the inevitable prying into her private life, she shrugs it off with a polite laugh.
She has, she says, grown used to what is expected of her in her royal role and she understands that people’s expectations are high.
She is not immune to it herself, having been nervous of meeting Queen Elizabeth for the first time: “I was so excited to meet her,’’ she says.
“Before, I’d only seen her on television and in magazines … inevitably shrouded in formality, protocol, and poise … she was very much the archetypal ‘Queen’.
Speaking to her for the first time, all that melted away. She immediately put me at my ease and was as warm, human and down-to-earth as I could have hoped for.’’
It is an approach she has tried to adopt herself: “I make a conscious effort to disarm people and maybe the first minute or two, they might be awed by the whole title thing, but after a while they realise I’m just a human being and they act naturally because that’s the way I like it to be.
"I’m not interested in being in relationships where people are just telling me what I want to hear. There’s something very ungenuine about that and in my heart it just means I’m wasting my time.’’
Wasting time isn’t something Queen Rania is ever prone to doing. With a king, a country and four children relying on her; she has, as she says in one of her YouTube broadcasts, “my work cut out for me’’.
Here in Amman, Queen Rania has another YouTube broadcast to film: She is asking people to post more videos on her site showing life in the Arab world.
Her offices have finished reverberating with the sound of the midday call to prayer and the camera is ready. Looking straight down the lens, she does her piece in one take, with no hesitations and no mistakes.
It is a small reminder, if one is needed, of just how impressive this particular foreign royal is.
In fact, there is only one thing likely to make Queen Rania lose her poise: Hamleys toy shop in London. “It’s one shop that I find it hard to be in because my head explodes,’’ she laughs. “My children are shouting. … There are toys all over the place. … My head just becomes frazzled.’’
It is hard to imagine Queen Rania anywhere near frazzled. But if you ever see a stunning Jordanian with a bodyguard in tow dashing about Hamleys after four children, you’ll know exactly who it is.
