"I have spent many years in Britain and I admire this country," he said - hardly soul- baring, but for Wafic Said, true glasnost.It could turn nasty. Links with Saudi princes and arms deals, and with personalities such as Jonathan Aitken and Mark Thatcher, are not the stuff of popularity even if generous gifts to universities and champion racehorses are. Should the bad press return, Wafic Said is likely to slip back into the shadows.. They held a memorial service for Lord Jay last week.

Douglas Jay was a proud man, almost the last of that generation of public-school socialists who built the Welfare State. But he was specially proud of his regional policy at the Board of Trade during the last war. In those days, as he loved to remember, he was a sort of commis-sar. He would pick up whole industries and deport them to where he considered they were needed, usually "distressed areas" in the north of England, in Wales or Scotland No nonsense about luring factories with inducements Douglas Jay did not believe in carrots He preferred the stick. In the US he lost heavily on two high-profile projects, the National Bank of Washington and Garfinckels stores. In Britain his pounds 5m stake in the Sunday Correspondent proved a mistake, and his much bigger holding in Aitken Hume, the merchant bank set up by his friend Jonathan Aitken, brought no glowing profits.But he can afford entrepreneurial upsets; what his money can not buy is good health.

Finding the time for the project, not the money, is said to be the problem.When it comes to making his money work, his record as an investor does not match his success as a middleman. Does it make him an arms dealer? He says no.What is beyond dispute is that over 20 years his connections and social skills have made him very wealthy, with a fortune probably of several hundred million pounds.He has homes in Marbella, Paris and Monte Carlo - for tax purposes his main domicile - as well as two in Britain: a pounds 10m flat in Eaton Square, London, and a 3,000-acre shooting estate, Tusmore Park, near Banbury in Oxfordshire.At Tusmore Park he hopes one day to demolish the relatively modest 1960s house and replace it with a Palladian mansion designed by Quinlan Terry that would be the biggest country house built in Britain since the war. If he has made commissions or won contracts from this, that would surely be an indirect way of profiting from a deal which he is believed to have helped to happen. "Whenever Wafic needed a question answered," Mr Khashoggi said, "Mark would go directly to his mother for an answer."Mr Said has denied receiving a penny in commission from al-Yamamah, but he added: "I have, however, advised British Aerospace in relation to the offset programme which it established as part of al-Yamamah."This "offset" programme is an arrangement under which, in return for the Tornado deal, Britain agreed to invest in Saudi Arabia.