As David Cameron's new department is accused of watering down minister's warning letter on takeover to avoid offending Emirates rulers: the former Foreign Office boss with a surprisingly colourful history - and connections in all the right places

Sir Simon Fraser, the former civil servant who is now helping Abu Dhabi's Sheikh Mansour try to seize control of The Telegraph, knows a conflict of interest when he sees one.

Back in 2010, when the lobbyist was appointed to the top job at Her Majesty's Foreign Office, it emerged that his previous stint there had ended in scandal.

Specifically, he'd been forced to quit as private secretary to William Waldegrave, a Foreign Office minister in the Major Government, after becoming romantically involved with an official at the Palestine Liberation Organisation.

Sir Simon, now 65, had established what former colleagues described as a 'co-habiting relationship' with the Palestinian woman.

That was, at best, a bad look: her employer was then regarded as a terrorist group.

'Simon considered his position and decided that this relationship, which was a loving one, could cause problems among the government and in his professional life,' said a colleague.

'He then went to Waldegrave, of his own volition, explained his position and decided it was sensible to stand down. He has since gone on to enjoy a stellar career.'

Given this chapter in Sir Simon's life, there was concern in Israel when he was brought back in 2010, this time to run the Foreign Office. The country's Arutz Sheva newspaper complained that the revelation that Britain's new top diplomat had links to a 'terrorism-backing PLO official' came 'hot on the heels' of an awkward incident in which then Prime Minister David Cameron had called Gaza a 'prison camp'.

Fast forward 13 years, and Sir Simon — who lives in a £2 million pile in Kilburn, North West London, with wife Shireen, mother of his two grown-up daughters — finds himself facing another tricky round of scrutiny.

This time, it revolves around the Cambridge-educated former mandarin's lucrative new life at the lobbying firm Flint Global, which he joined in 2015. For his firm has been retained by RedBird IMI, an Abu Dhabi-backed outfit pursuing a £1.2 billion deal to take over The Telegraph.

The highly controversial bid raises awkward questions about Press freedom, human rights, and the wisdom of allowing someone so closely linked to a repressive Arab autocracy to get his hands on one of Britain's most influential media firms.

It will therefore face scrutiny from the very highest level of Government. And here, Sir Simon has connections in all the right places.

Only three months ago, one of Flint Global's partners, a former special advisor to David Cameron named Adam Atashzai, moved into Downing Street to begin work as a senior aide to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

He's not the only well-placed contact in Sir Simon's Rolodex, either.

There will also be old colleagues from Whitehall. And, coincidentally, his former Department does seem to be interfering with an official inquiry into Sheikh Mansour's takeover of the newspaper group, according to two separate reports that were published yesterday.

One in the Daily Telegraph — ironically the title at the centre of the saga — claimed Foreign Office officials had intervened to 'soften' language used by Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer in a statement where she claimed to be 'minded' to refer the deal to regulators.

The second, published by The Times, stated that the Foreign Office has 'expressed reservations to the Government over the potential diplomatic fallout' from upsetting any senior figures from the oil rich Arab country, which is an absolute monarchy.

It's a whiffy business. But as Sir Simon well knows, British diplomats have historic form for seemingly doing favours for ultra-wealthy Middle Eastern regimes. A couple of years back, it emerged that mandarins had even intervened to block a police investigation into the kidnapping of an Arab princess named Sheikha Shamsa from the streets of Cambridge.

Apparently, the Foreign Office didn't want to upset her father Sheikh Mohammed, the ruler of Dubai (and a horse racing chum of the late Queen) who allegedly ordered the abduction.

Since leaving public service, Sir Simon has certainly displayed few qualms about accepting highly-paid work from questionable states.

He founded Flint Global with Nigel Gardner, a former BBC journalist turned lobbyist whose previous clients included the Kremlin-owned oil company Gazprom.

And one of their most high-profile paymasters has since been Huawei, the Chinese telecoms giant which has invested vast amounts of capital to become deeply embedded in the UK's mobile phone systems. Sir Simon's firm tried, and eventually failed, to help stop the company — which is closely affiliated to China's despotic regime — from being banned from Britain's 5G networks as a high security risk.

Sir Simon has also accepted contracts from a range of free-spending billionaires who wish to cut potentially controversial deals in the UK, including Czech tycoon Karel Komarek, who hired Flint to help him get hold of the operating licence for the National Lottery, and Patrick Drahi, a Franco-Israeli telecoms magnate with designs on BT.

It all seems in keeping with his pedigree as a close associate of Peter Mandelson — Fraser was the Prince of Darkness's Chief of Staff from 2004 to 2008, when Mandelson was an EU Trade Commissioner.

And though he is reluctant to talk publicly about his firm's clients, Sir Simon has, like most Whitehall grandees, been positively garrulous over recent years in opining on Brexit. Or, as he once put it: 'the destructive and humiliating Brexit fiasco,' which at the height of post-referendum hysteria he described on a podcast as a bigger blow to the UK than the Suez crisis.

Such remarks would have cut little ice with previous Tory PMs. But with Rishi Sunak in charge, and David Cameron back in the Cabinet, clients appear to be under the impression that Fraser and his firm might be more likely to deliver.

According to Sky News, which broke news of Flint's work for the Abu Dhabi-backed Telegraph bidders, the firm was hired because of its 'track record of involvement in public interest intervention notices (PIINs) — government probes carried out by the media and competition watchdogs which can lead to deals being blocked'.

Importantly, in this regard, Sir Simon is lobbying on behalf of RedBird IMI with the assistance of a fixer named Ed Richards.

Richards is not only a former advisor to Tony Blair (a man who can spot a rich Arab a mile off), but also the person the New Labour Prime Minister placed in charge of Ofcom in 2006.

He ran the media regulator until 2014. Now, just a few years later, he's being paid to stop it blocking the sale of a major news organisation.

In other words, this former public servant is getting rich by lobbying former colleagues at the very regulator he previously ran.

Again, it's a murky business.

But for Sheikh Mansour to succeed in getting his hands on the Telegraph, backs will need to be scratched in all the right places.