Even more challenging to spin than the anti-corruption programme is the war in Yemen. Yemen’s instability and hunger crisis predated the Saudi-led intervention in 2015, but the coalition’s warplanes and de facto naval blockade have caused huge suffering and made it more difficult to control an outbreak of cholera which infected a million Yemenis.



The Yemen war is complicated - and the Iran-linked Houthi militia, which the Saudis are trying to force back - are guilty of plenty of violations of humanitarian law themselves. But the evidence that the Saudi-led coalition is also doing so is stark and compelling. When a UN panel of experts investigated 10 airstrikes by the Saudi-led coalition on civilian areas in 2017, they found that they had caused 157 deaths.

The Saudis have had various strategies for managing the negative PR from Yemen. Some are crude – in 2016, UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon strongly implied they had threatened to withdraw humanitarian funding if they were not taken off the body’s annual list of violators of the rights of children.

Some are more subtle. Last summer, ahead of Trump’s trip to Riyadh, US lobbying firms circulated ‘fact sheets’ about the war in Yemen which emphasised the care Saudi targeters took not to kill civilians. The UN Panel of Experts by contrast found that “Measures taken by the Saudi Arabia-led coalition in its targeting process to minimize child casualties, if any, remain largely ineffective.”

A former employee of one of the PR firms working for Saudi summarised the ‘lines’ he would be given to push as: “‘these are unconfirmed reports for the moment’, ‘we’re working with the Americans’, ‘we’ll investigate the situation’, ‘it’s a shame that civilians have been hit but you have to look at the bigger picture’”.

The stakes for the Saudis in this PR battle are high. Germany, Norway and Holland have already moved to suspend arms sales to the Saudi Arabia-led coalition because of the Yemen war and the UK could follow if Labour is elected. Dave de Roches, an associate professor at the National Defense University in Washington, thinks that even US arms sales to Saudi could be vulnerable. “The Saudis are one bad image coming out of Yemen away from moving three senators, then you’ve got a problem,” he said. “Foreign policy is an elite concern, but the Yemen war has the possibility to bring the emotional to the forefront and then they’ll lose across the West.”

The humanitarian situation in Yemen - where eight million people are now on the brink of famine - has also created pressure on the Saudis. Whilst the Houthis share a large part of the blame, Riyadh’s severe restriction of the movement of goods coming in to Yemen, which currently relies on imports for almost everything, contributes to the soaring price of food and medicine.

When the Saudis blocked even humanitarian supplies from coming in to the Houthi-controlled port of Hodeida, in response to a missile strike on Saudi Arabia in November 2017, it provoked a strong international reaction. Even staunch allies like President Donald Trump called for the blockade to end.

However, humanitarians say they have noticed a big effort to change the narrative on the humanitarian situation. First the Saudis allowed humanitarian supplies back through Hodeida, then they announced that they would deposit $2bn in the Yemeni Central Bank, and then, in February 2018, launched a much-trailed humanitarian action plan for Yemen, which included more funds. The plan was announced in a five star hotel in Riyadh, where members of the press were served an assortment of cakes.