There appears to be one purpose, and one purpose only, driving Boris Johnson’s visit to Saudi Arabia this week, and that is to persuade Riyadh to support a dramatic increase in global oil supplies. The hard-hitting sanctions imposed against Moscow have had the desired effect of crippling the Russian economy, with the rouble losing around one third of its value since the conflict began. But one of the more alarming consequences for the West of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been a vertiginous increase in global energy prices.

This is becoming a major headache for Western governments, particularly as households were already facing a cost-of-living crisis caused in part by surging energy bills.

One obvious solution is to persuade friendly energy-producing nations to increase their production quotas, therefore putting downward pressure on prices. In this context, Saudi Arabia, as the world’s second largest oil producer, potentially has a key role to play. It easily has the capacity to increase production significantly.

Moreover, as a long-standing ally of the West, asking the Saudis for help in times of dire need ought to be a relatively straightforward exercise for Mr Johnson, especially as Saudi Arabia may stand to gain economically if it can increase its market share in the global oil market.

Yet, as the Prime Minister will find during his visit to Riyadh, the Saudis, together with other previously pro-Western oil producers such as the United Arab Emirates, are showing a marked reluctance to be their usual cooperative selves with the West.

The most obvious indication that the Saudis are in no mood to be taken for granted was last weekend’s execution of 81 prisoners, primarily for terrorism offences. It was the largest known mass execution carried out in the kingdom’s modern history.

The timing of the executions, on the eve of Mr Johnson’s visit, may have been aimed at sending a signal that, for all the West’s obsession with the Ukraine conflict, the Saudis have their own security concerns to address.

Indeed, the recent cooling in relations between the West and the Gulf states owes much to what they consider to be Western neglect of their own security issues, especially with regard to their great regional rival, Iran.

In particular, Gulf leaders feel resentment at their treatment by the Biden administration, which seems more concerned with reviving the flawed nuclear deal with Tehran than with addressing other security issues – such as the constant barrage of missiles fired at Saudi and Emirati targets by Iranian-backed Houthi rebels based in Yemen.

This would help to explain why Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, the country’s de facto ruler, took the almost unprecedented step of declining to take a phone call from US President Joe Biden when he recently asked to discuss the global energy crisis.

Mr Johnson, therefore, will have his work cut out if he is to achieve his goal of putting relations between the West and the oil-producing states back on a more even footing. In dealing with the Saudi Crown Prince, Mr Johnson has an advantage, in that the leaders have previously been on cordial terms, with the Prime Minister praising the Saudi leader’s reforming instincts.

Even so, Mr Johnson is likely to find the Saudis unwilling to help ease the global energy crisis caused by the Ukraine conflict if their own fears regarding Iran are not taken on board.

The Saudis may raise an eyebrow at reports that the UK is nearing a deal with the mullahs in order to free the British-Iranian aid worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. But it is Mr Biden’s behaviour with which they are most concerned. With negotiations to revive the flawed 2015 nuclear deal with Iran said to be nearing completion in Vienna, there are mounting fears that the Biden administration is more interested in securing a deal that will allow a resumption of Iranian oil exports than with dealing with Tehran’s stockpiles of enriched uranium, which experts believe is sufficient for producing four nuclear warheads.

From Saudi Arabia’s perspective, such an agreement would be unacceptable, and it would suggest that Washington was using the Ukraine crisis to justify a bad nuclear deal with Iran.