While the Duchess of Cornwall exchanged pleasantries with Pakistan’s top wife today, the Prince of Wales was down stairs tackling the serious stuff.

During a 45-minute meeting with President Pervez Musharraf on the first full day of a five-day official visit to Islamabad, the elephant in the room could not be entirely ignored.

The Prince recently attempted to intercede on behalf of Tahir Hussain, the British national on death row in a Rawlpindi jail, who has won a stay of execution until the end of the year.

Clarence House confirmed that the two men had briefly discussed Hussain’s case, but would not say which of them had raised the topic.

The Prince’s spokesman insisted that they had spent most of their time discussing counter-terrorism, last year’s devastating earthquake in the north of the country, and the presence of British troops across the border in Afghanistan.

British officials are determined that the Hussain case should not overshadow the Wales’s diplomatic mission, which at five days is unusually long for a VIP visit to Pakistan and which they want to present as an affirmation of wider ties between the two countries in an age of terrorism and regional instability.

They also want it to be seen as a major vote of thanks to General Musharraf for his help in tracking down terrorists, and they fear that making the Hussain case too high-profile could be counter-productive.

No such weighty matters troubled the two women sitting on chintz chairs three flights up on the seventh floor of the Presidency, a disappointingly bunker-like white washed seventies building with few concessions to Islamic architectural tradition and an interior reminiscent of an anonymous international hotel.

The Duchess looked more at home than the building did. Her Robinson Valentine cream silk tunic and matching palazzo trousers set off with a dupatta scarf in cashmere (that’s the fine wool, not the disputed province) chimed well with Mrs Musharraf’s dove grey traditional shalwar kameez.

The President’s wife is no stranger to glamour; she is a former television newsreader and she counts among her present titles Chief Girl Guide of Pakistan.

Diplomatic niceties were repeated at the official residence of the Prime Minister, Shaukat Aziz, another large but undistinguished building in this artificial capital of wide rectilinear avenues but almost no Asiatic bustle. The residence does, however, boast a magnificent garden of immaculate lawns and spilling purple bougainvillea.

As the four walked in for another round of separate talks, Mrs Aziz and the Duchess walked a respectful step behind their husbands.

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