Saudi Arabia has launched a radical ‘Thatcherite’ shake-up to an avert economic crisis and prepare the kingdom for the post-carbon world, stunning analysts with claims that it could break reliance on oil within just four years.

Prince Mohammad bin Salman, the country’s de facto ruler, vowed to build a $3 trillion wealth fund and break onto the world stage as an investment superpower, the spearhead of an historic package of measures intended to bring the deformed economy kicking and screaming into the 21st Century.

“We have an addiction to oil. This is dangerous. I think that by 2020 we can live without it,” he told Al Arabiya television.

It is an extraordinary claim for a government that has historically relied on oil exports for 90pc of its income and has yet to achieve much success in building alternative industries. Gulf veterans say his words should be understood as poetic licence.