Is Qatar trying to buy up the royals?

Arab state's mega-rich rulers were feted at Epsom by the Queen - who's using their millions to repair one of her castles... but what will they want in return?

 Of one thing the Queen can be sure as she and Prince Philip are driven up the Epsom racecourse on Derby Day yesterday — the warmest of greetings from her increasingly good friends and fellow horse-racing enthusiasts, Qatar’s ruling family.

Unlike at Royal Ascot later this month, the Queen does not have official guests on Derby Day. But the gas-rich al-Thanis, who have made London their second home and bought large slices of the capital, was there in numbers.

Far from stepping quietly out of the limelight as the Fifa bribery and corruption clamour reverberates — focusing in particular on the breathtaking decision to award sweltering Qatar the 2022 football World Cup — they seem to be bolstering their social profile.

Of course, friendly relations with the Qataris are important for Britain, even though they are suspected of financing jihadist terror groups to promote the cause of Sunni Islam — a charge that they strenuously deny.

They supply about 20 per cent of our natural gas, which arrives by ship in liquid form and is held in a vast storage facility at Milford Haven in West Wales. The last emir, who stood down in 2013, was invited to stay with the Queen at Windsor Castle during his state visit in 2010.

But yesterday’s Epsom greetings was more effusive as it has emerged that Sheik Hamad bin Abdullah al-Thani, first cousin of the new Emir, is generously helping to pay for the upkeep of one of the Royal Family’s personal treasures, the Castle of Mey, a charming Scottish retreat that the Queen Mother bought after the death of George VI.

Indeed, as Sebastian Shakespeare revealed in the Daily Mail Diary this week, Sheik Hamad has even become vice-president of The Friends of the Castle of Mey.

Yet this flowering relationship could be hideously compromised if the gathering forces of the football world — urged on by the Queen’s grandson Prince William, president of the Football Association — try to take the 2022 World Cup away from Qatar, especially now that the British Government has offered to hold it in England.

William, possibly the only senior royal not yet sucked into the Qataris’ social orbit, called this week for a reformed Fifa which ‘put the sport first’. And some bookies at Epsom had shortened the odds on Qatar losing the World Cup it so covets to a tight 5-4.

It would be particularly embarrassing if the young Harrow and Sandhurst-educated Sheik Tamim, 35, Emir since 2013 of the tiny state of just 300,000 people (along with two million immigrant labourers and domestic staff), asked the royals for help in keeping the World Cup in return for past favours.

After all, in 2010 an anxious Prince Charles wrote personally to the then Emir of Qatar (Tamim’s father) for help when £3 billion of Qatari money was invested in the redevelopment of Chelsea Barracks into a steel-and-glass monstrosity of homes.

But it’s not just Chelsea Barracks. With billions of pounds to spend, the al-Thanis have bought up landmark properties in London including Harrods, the Olympic Village, Camden Market and Europe’s tallest building, the Shard.

They are so deeply embedded in Britain that they know they have more clout than the royals, notwithstanding Charles’s infamous ‘black spider letters’ to ministers, in which he gives his views on a range of issues.

Indeed, they know our royals welcome help — hence the fulsome thanks that the Queen smilingly proffered to Sheik Hamad at the annual Castle of Mey party in London’s Goring Hotel a fortnight ago, for the money he is putting into preserving the 16th-century castle.

The veteran columnist Charles Moore said in The Spectator that he saw the Qataris’ involvement in Castle of Mey as a ‘sinister development’.

The Sheik will be rewarded for his largesse not only with a private viewing of the Crown Jewels at the Tower of London but also a banquet in his honour.

Of course, the true rewards are much greater than that.

For this is only the latest move by the al-Thanis in what is widely seen as a crude strategy to buy — cynics might say bribe — a central role for themselves at the apex of British life, with uniquely close ties to the Royal Family.