The most interesting thing about the news that Sir Lynton Crosby offered to launch a £5m campaign to strip Qatar of the World Cup is what the Tory election guru did do – rather than what he wanted to do but wasn’t given the chance.

We know that he wanted his firm to be paid £300,000 a month for 18 months to spread negative stories about Doha in the press, run grassroot campaigns on social media as well as lobby friendly politicians, academics and journalists.

Although he admitted it would be a difficult task, he hoped that criticism of the Qatari government from bases in the UK, America, Italy and Australia would lead to FIFA re-starting the bidding process for the 2022 tournament.

As it happened, his pitch document was turned down by Khalid al-Hail, a self-styled Qatari opposition leader based in London, who has long been pushing for this. But Crosby’s lobbying firm, CTF Partners, has confirmed that it did give al-Hail “a minimal amount of media advice”.

No big shakes, you might say, except this was all happening at a crucial time in the campaign by Qatar’s enemies to take the World Cup off it and give it to England.

The year before, in 2017, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt had launched a diplomatic and trade boycott of Qatar accusing it of cosying up to Iran and supporting terrorism, which Doha denies.

However, Dubai’s security chief Dhahi Khalfan, later let slip that the boycott was actually all about the World Cup – if Qatar lost the right to host the tournament then its jealous neighbours would end the blockade.

“If Qatar no longer hosts the World Cup, the crisis will go from Qatar because the crisis was created to end it’’ he said.

By April last year al-Hail – who denies being funded by Qatar’s rivals – was in the midst of a multi-million pound marketing campaign to get the World Cup off Qatar.  It included vox pop videos, research studies and two lavish London conferences with politicians and sports stars paid up to £15,000 to line up and attack the tiny Gulf state.

A conference by the Foundation for Sports Integrity (FFSI), which al-Hail’s wife helped organise at London’s swanky Four Seasons hotel led commentators to remark that Qatar’s enemies in the Gulf must be behind it, in particular Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Human rights expert Nicholas McGeehan said his invitation to the event at the end of May was withdrawn after he asked for assurances it was not funded by “Saudi and UAE money.’  It wasn’t until an investigation by the New York Times was published earlier this month that questions started to be answered. It showed how a little-known consulting firm, Cornerstone Global, which has received UAE financing, released a report in October 2017 claiming there was an “increasing political risk that Qatar may not host the World Cup in 2022”.

At the same time leaked emails from the UAE ambassador to Washington revealed a campaign by Qatar’s rival to steal the World Cup.

Cornerstone Global is run by Ghanem Nuseibeh, a relative of both the UAE’s minister of state and the country’s ambassador to the United Nations. According to the New York Times, documents reveal it was paid $1m by UAE in 2015.

At the same time as Al-Hail was organising his FFSI conference in May, Nuseibeh was introducing a Qatari whistleblower to a senior British MP.

Mike Holtzman, a former public relations boss who had worked on Qatar’s 2022 campaign, had come forward with damaging claims about Doha. Nuseibeh engineered a meeting with the Tory politician Damian Collins.  Collins confirmed to the New York Times that he met with Nuseibeh and Holtzman in May last year – the same month that the MP was also a keynote speaker at the FFSI conference.

Two months later, in July, The Sunday Times published what it claimed was a bombshell: Exclusive: Qatar Sabotaged 2022 World Cup Rivals with Black Ops.

This included claims it got influential people to attack their rivals and pump out propaganda. The story said: “The whistleblower gave testimony to Damian Collins, chairman of the culture, media and sport select committee. Collins said he was ‘extremely concerned’ and urged FIFA to investigate. The ultimate sanction for breaking the rules would be loss of the right to host the tournament.”

On the day the story was published Collins hit the airwaves appearing on BBC TV and Radio 5 Live calling on FIFA to investigate the story and, if wrong doing was found, have the tournament taken off Qatar. Things went slightly awry when a week before publication, a PR company that had previously worked with al-Hail was caught paying actors to pose as protesters against a visit by the Emir of Qatar to Downing Street.

CTF Partners says it nothing to do with the protest and stopped all involvement with al-Hail “upon hearing of such matters”.

This matters, beyond the World Cup, because this is how Gulf rivalries are being played out on the streets of Britain and as propaganda in our media.

Anthony Harwood is a former foreign editor of the Daily Mail