"The Sultan of Brunei is dead. Long live the sultan!"
His passing hardly rated more than a brief reference on the evening news. Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah Muizzaddin Waddaulah had been a geopolitical footnote. He was best known as having been, off and on, the world's richest man and for such curious, but harmless eccentricities as converting his large collection of Ferrari and Jaguar sports cars into station wagons. Despite his extravagant lifestyle and his disdain for democracy, the sultan was a generous man, offering his people free education and medical services, while abolishing taxes. He was a congenial man, and in the fraternity of absolute monarchs, a good man.
"The Sultan of Brunei is dead. Long live the sultan!"
Defying the assumed line of succession, Bolkiah's successor is his rotund distant cousin, Prince Omar Jamalul Halauddin, best known on the back pages of society tabloids as an international playboy who through around his considerable weight and his royal pedigree at Hollywood pool parties and the triple-A list private club scene from London to Dubai. In the meantime, as his nights were filled with parties, it was whispered that his days were devoted to a small, but efficient, organized crime operation based in Marseilles.
Though he wasn't thought to be the direct heir, Prince Omar flew in from Cannes on his private jet the moment that Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah took ill. When the sultan died and the dust settled, Omar Jamalul Halauddin was on the throne.
"The Sultan of Brunei is dead. Long live the sultan!"
Nobody in the outside world took the new Sultan seriously. Indeed, he was hardly mentioned in the global media, and that was a problem. As with Kim Jong-il, the eccentric playboy potentate of North Korea, it was soon evident that Omar suffered from a deep inferiority complex, and that would be a problem.
