HOWZAT

Is she optimistic that things there will work themselves out? “In the short term, no. In the long term, I’m confident the Iraqi people will find their way. I’d like to be optimistic but it’s very, very difficult at this stage to predict where Iraq is going to go.”

Whether it is a good thing, ultimately, that Saddam has gone, she prevaricates on: “That will be for history to judge.”

Jordan, which as the queen puts it “always tries to play the diplomat in the Middle East”, has so far avoided being drawn into the conflict. But it has not escaped entirely. Angered, presumably, by the country’s strong links with the West, suicide bombers walked into three of Amman’s leading hotels last November and blew themselves up. One detonated his bomb in the middle of a wedding party, killing 27 guests.

“We are all in this together,” says the queen. “We had our attacks in November: you had yours in July. Our world has changed so much over the past decade that upheaval in one place has repercussions in another. That’s how interconnected we are.”

She met the king at a dinner party given by his sister, Princess Aisha, when she was 22. Although it was “a bit intimidating to think of falling in love with a prince” she was then essentially marrying a rather rich and sophisticated army officer.

It was a total shock when one morning, as his father lay dying, her husband walked in and said, “Rania, I think I am going to be crown prince.”

“It was terrifying,” she recalls. “I didn’t know what would happen to my life or to my children. But you do the best you can.”

She is grateful that she had the chance to have a “real job” and a “real life” before being surrounded by royal protocol. “I’m glad I had that time,” she says. “It gave me a chance to forge friendships and to be in the workplace. I do as much as I can to preserve that but obviously I can’t preserve it completely because now there are things I can’t do. But it’s important to remain grounded.”

Her children, she says, must stay in touch with “real life”, so when she gets home — to a luxurious villa in the western suburbs — all grandeur stays outside. “It’s important for my children to take all that stuff away,” she says. “It’s also important for us to let go of all that because you have to remain real.” A typical early evening might find the queen making cheese and walnut pancakes with Iman and Salma, Hussein doing his homework or helping his father with the barbecue (the king cooks a mean steak), while the youngest, Hashem, plays nearby.

She has read every Harry Potter. “Spending a couple of hours each night with the children doing homework or reading to them gives them, and me, a sense of security,” she says. It also plays well with the Jordanian public, among whom being a “good mother” is seen as crucial. But she seems genuinely to relish the vestiges of her “real life”. And she is determined to protect her older son, who is likely to become crown prince and will inevitably be prey to hangers-on.

“I don’t know if he will be king,” she says. “But he needs to develop values, to form strong friendships.” Accordingly, if Hussein wants something — such as a new computer game — he has to work for it: “He doesn’t get things automatically. He has to tidy his room, get good grades and demonstrate that he’s behaving well and he’s earned it.”

This brings us back to her central theme — that what we share is stronger than what divides us: “We can read all we like on the internet but the best way to learn about one another is through human to human contact. If people get to know one another, they can get past the stereotypes. I can’t overemphasise how important this is. There are rifts opening up that are dangerous for our world.”