"For Winston Churchill they were “40 thieves”, an irreverent comment on the illustrious gathering at Cairo’s Semiramis Hotel on March 12, 1921.

Churchill, later to become Britain’s great wartime prime minister, was one of them, an Ali Baba who led the gang on the banks of the Nile.

At the time, he was head of the Colonial Office charged with resolving the chaos of the Middle East after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, at the end of the First World War.

The “40 thieves”, a reference to the number of delegates at the conference, hoped to resolve three of the region’s most pressing issues: Palestine and its growing Jewish population, the territory east of the Jordan River, known as Transjordan, and control of the land we know today as Iraq."