After the Second World War the formulation of British policy on the frontier question in south-eastern Arabia became the preserve of the permanent officials of the Foreign Office. The Gulf was little known and comparatively isolated and only they had access to the requisite information on the subject from their local representatives and their own archives, which were closed to public view. Government ministers and members of Parliament were, therefore, entirely dependent for advice on their permanent officials. The Foreign Office had inherited its responsibility for the protection of British interests in the Gulf from the India Office, which had closed down after Britain left India in 1947. The Foreign Office never felt comfortable with this inheritance which was more in the nature of a colonial than a diplomatic responsibility. There had been indications in the 1930s of the contrasting approaches of the Foreign Office and the India Office to the dispute over the south-eastern frontier of Saudi Arabia. Most of the claim put forward by the Saudi government on 3 April 1935 (afterwards known as the ‘Red Line’) to some 150,000-200,000 square miles of territory had been mere bluff, especially that which related to Jabal Nakhsh in Qatar and the Khaur al-‘Udaid in Abu Dhabi, Oman and the Eastern Aden Protectorate. Ibn Sa’ud had wanted the Jabal Nakhsh for its oil potential and the khaur for strategic purposes, to gain access to the coast east of Qatar, thus separating it from Abu Dhabi and allowing him to put pressure on them both and the Trucial shaikhdoms. It was for these reasons that the British government had rejected the Red Line and put forward the Riyad Line of 25 November 1935 instead, which was in turn rejected by Ibn Sa’ud. When the frontier negotiations were resumed in 1937, the attitude of the Foreign Office had undergone a change. Worried by the deterioration of Britain's position in the Middle East due to German and Italian aggression and the Arab rebellion in Palestine, the Foreign Office turned to Ibn Sa’ud for support. To secure this they were prepared to ask IPC to surrender that part of their concession for Qatar which included Jabal Nakhsh to Ibn Sa’ud and SOCAL. When IPC refused, the Foreign Office turned to the Khaur al’Udaid as a means of appeasing Ibn Sa’ud.