Christopher Walker: End of Gaddafi regime will be no thanks to the West

While members of the cabinet, including William Hague, the Foreign Secretary and Kenneth Clarke, Justice Secretary, defended Britain’s recently opened multi-million pound trade links with the Libyan dictator, Mr Susman said: “I would suggest that to deal with him, to give him greater stature, greater ability on the world front to look like he is a good citizen, is a mistake.”

Like all diplomats in the eyes of their critics, Mr Susman was only using the BBC’s flagship Andrew Marr programme to do his day job of putting immediate diplomatic considerations first.

For, although in 1986 Ronald Reagan dubbed Gaddafi – today the longest surviving (if only just) ruler in the Arab World, “the mad dog of the Middle East” – it was less than two decades later, in 2004, that the US formally resumed diplomatic ties with Libya, that it had broken off 24 years previously.

Soon after, US officials were speaking of their erstwhile adversary as “a person of personality and experience”.

In the same year, 2004, Tony Blair secured the memento of his long premiership that he is likely to be the least proud of today, a cheesy photograph of his handshake with Gaddafi in his trademark desert robes in the town of Sirte, his birthplace to Bedouin parents. It was marking the self-styled “deal in the desert” which is now looking grubbier by the day. Under its conditions, Gaddafi, until then the main diplomatic pariah of the 22-member Arab League, was welcomed in from the cold by being offered a series of commercial and industrial deals in exchange for renouncing his weapons of mass destruction programme.

This embarrassing U-term – hailed at the time in a number of European capitals – conveniently overlooked the fact that no one has ever been brought to book for the callous murder of WPC Yvonne Fletcher.

She was shot dead by a Libyan diplomat in 1984 while on duty outside the London Embassy during a demo there against Gaddafi’s sentencing to death of two student dissidents in Benghazi – ironically the starting place of the present huge wave of protests against his ruinous 42-year rule of Libya.

He had first seized power aged only 27 in a bloodless coup against the ailing King Idris, who was receiving medical treatment in Turkey.

Since the Blair deal – which also overlooked that Gaddafi, whose self-styled Green Revolution concealed his naked autocracy under a false veneer of “People’s Committees” which supposedly ruled Libya – UK firms have sold sniper rifles, tear gas, wall-breaching projectile launchers and crowd control ammunition to a country which famously ordered the Lockerbie bombing, Britain’s worst terrorist atrocity.

The handshake led in turn to the lifting of sanctions, compensation over the Lockerbie atrocity and Western oil companies gaining access to Libya’s lucrative oil fields (often seen as a vital potential supply line in the event of serious problems in the Gulf).

Looking at the enthusiasm of British entrepreneurs to take advantage of Gaddafi’s new found respectability, one can imagine that there is anxiety in many boardrooms today over Libya’s future – and the recriminations into Gaddafi’s reign and misrule.

These were highlighted in 1996 when 1,200 prisoners in the notorious Abu Salim jail were herded into a yard and shot to death for having had the temerity to protest against conditions in their prison. Hundreds have already been killed in Libya during this uprising, but is this going to be the fate of those who have taken to the streets of Tripoli calling for Gadaffi’s overthrow?

Like the little-missed Mubarak, Gaddafi was careful to never name a successor for fear of providing a destabilising force for the popular discontent that he must have known existed against him among Libya’s six million citizens.

Similarly, he has so far refused to name a destination where he might seek refuge if overthrown – although due to the news blackout, rumours that he had indeed fled prompted joyous crowds to come out onto the streets of Tripoli, only to hear his son’s rambling TV broadcast claiming that his father remained in Libya “leading the battle”.

Speculation in the Arab media suggested that he was trying to escape to Venezuela. But only the coming days will tell whether the prediction of the Ancient Greek historian Herodotus will once again prove accurate: “The new comes from Libya.”

Christopher Walker is former Middle East Correspondent of The Times.