Farouk was born 100 years ago this month and spent 13 years in exile as he morphed from a monarch – who was part of a great dynasty that began with Muhammad Ali in 1805 – to the lampooned subject of gossip columnists. He was effectively the last king of Egypt – if we don’t include the accession of Farouk’s son, Ahmed Fuad II, who, at only six months old, was constitutional monarch for less than a year (today, he is alive and well in Switzerland). Farouk died thousands of miles from home as an ousted ruler, and so his time to ruminate on his past life as ruler of an Arab kingdom was cut short.
