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At last, after months of diplomatic wrangling which in more ways than one had the distinctive flavour of a Whitehall farce, the Arab League delegation have finally arrived in London. Britain had always wanted King Hussein to lead the delegation and the red carpet treatment accorded to the Jordanian monarch contrasted sharply with the way Downing Street had earlier dealt with King Hassan.

The OPEC oil crisis, although anchored firmly in the financial and economic bedrock of oil prices and production levels, has now unceremoniously shouldered its way into the political agenda.

The kingdom has kept a low political profile during the past few weeks and has refrained from substantial comment on various and far from insignificant developments in the Middle East. For the time being, Saudi Arabia appears to be content to operate through the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) which, conveniently, met at foreign minister level last weekend.

February 14th may well be the watershed date in current Arab political affairs; it is then that the Palestine National Council is due to meet in Algiers. The council should, among other things, reach a decision as to whether the Palestinian movement will concert with Jordan in possible negotiations centering around the issue of the West Bank.

King Fahd has stressed, with every good reason, the importance of maintaining the momentum of the Arab peace efforts. King Hussein of Jordan said recently the Arabs have only till March to make up their minds as to the direction they wish to take.

Britain's power and prestige has waned drastically over the past quarter of a century or so but it has retained, particularly in the Middle East, something of a reputation for skilled exercise of its diplomatic and political affairs. In Arab eyes that reputation must now be dented, if not entirely demolished, by the sorry British performance over the issue of the visit of the Arab League delegation to London.

A draft constitution for the united Yemen is due to be discussed next month at a meeting of the Yemen Council, formed to implement the unification of the two Yemens. The snails-pace negotiations - they have been in intermittent progress for three years - may now be somewhat accelerated, following the South Yemen-Oman reconciliation agreement. Since the signing of the agreement with Oman, the South Yemen has been fairly active in mending its fences with other states in the peninsula, particularly Saudi Arabia.

The miserable catalogue of errors of commission and omission which has led to the cancellation of the visit of the Arab seven-man committee to London is a classic case of a wrong outcome arrived at for all the wrong reasons.

The third Gulf Co-operation Council Summit produced a great deal of congratulatory noises, both from officialdom and from the media of the six member countries, but beyond the expressed satisfactions the conference achieved rather less than had been promised or suggested.

The reconciliation agreement reached between Oman and South Yemen, signed in Kuwait at the end of October, brings to an end fifteen years of hostility by the two countries.

"Positive, constructive and successful" was how Yasser Arafat described his recent discussions with King Hussein of Jordan about a Jordan-Palestine federation. The Jordanians also appeared to be well satisfied with the talks. But both sides have been fairly cagey about their negotiations and such public statements as have been made have tended to cloud rather than clarify the issues.

The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), the esteemed London-based institut, has issued the latest edition of its yearbook "The Military Balance, '82-83". This gives an up-to date listing of almost every nation's military capacity from statistics gathered from publicly available sources and from questionnaires sent to governments.

King Fahd has given his pledge to do his best to end the Israeli occupation of West Beirut and the Lebanon. In three separate cables to the Lebanese President, Prime Minister Shafik al Wazzan and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, King Fahd expressed his resentment, shock and condemnation of the massacre of the Palestinian civilians in the refugee camps of Shattila and Sabra in the Lebanon. King Fahd pledged that Saudi Arabia will continue "a vigorous pursuit" to secure withdrawal of Israeli troops from the Lebanon and the protection of Palestinian refugees.

The merits and virtues of President Reagan's Middle East peace plan to the Arabs can, in some degree, be assessed in the light of Israel's reaction to it. Israel's out-of-hand rejection of and vehement opposition to the American initiative suggest that at least some elements of Mr. Reagan's plan could be of advantage to the Arabs. It is not unreasonable to think that anything Mr. Begin opposes so violently cannot be wholly bad for the Arabs.

The Syrian Deputy Premier and Foreign Minister, Abdul Halim Khaddam, recently paid a sudden and unannounced visit to Sadi Arabia's summer capital of Taif, where he had talks with King Fahd and Prince Saud al Faisal, the Foreign Minister. No details were released on the issues discussed or the purpose of Khaddam's trip, nor was there any commentary on the subject from Riyadh or Damascus. However, it needs no special insight to deduce that the talks would certainly have centred on the second stage of the war in Lebanon.