MICHAEL HOWARD had half a point. Tony Blair will have known, in choosing to go directly from the Madrid memorial service to Tripoli, that the juxtaposition would not pass without comment. Condemning terrorism one day, sitting with Colonel Muammar Gaddafi the next.

But only half a point. The Blair visit — just a day after that of William Burns, the US envoy — is an appropriate, deliberate reward for Gaddafi’s decision to cash in his secret weapons programme.

For Blair and President Bush, Gaddafi is the prize exhibit in their case that they can win the War on Terror. Their hopes are understandable and, up to a point, well-founded. It is not just Libya’s change of mind that is encouraging. The limitations of its weapons programme, now exposed, are reassuring, too; if that is the best that the black market can deliver, then terrorists are some way from nuclear weapons.

Yet the more sobering conclusion is that much about the Libyan case is unique. It looks like a poor model for bringing others in from the cold.

Cash, foreign corporate cash, lots of it and very soon. That was the implication of the briefings from Blair’s team yesterday, who dangled the names of Royal Dutch/Shell Group and BAe Systems.

It is in UK and US interests to give Libya a highly public reward for giving up a weapons programme that was far more ambitious than the West had suspected. Libya spent ten years painstakingly collecting spare parts from the world’s nuclear black market. Now, it is watching as the uranium enrichment plants are broken up, stashed in crates and shipped to the US.

Gaddafi appears able to separate his nuclear aspirations from a sense of national pride, an unusual quality. Even so, the dismantling of his nuclear kit might seem a humiliation. Part of the purpose of Blair’s trip is to say that it is not. Gaddafi’s move looked sudden, but represents a deal as formal, almost, as the Lockerbie settlement. Over several years, using the Lockerbie talks as a point of contact, British and American diplomats dangled the booty they had to offer in front of the Libyan leader — and even more important, his Westernised son Saïf al-Islam al-Gaddafi.

Gaddafi’s calculation looked shrewd from the start. His efforts to build nuclear and chemical weapons were expensive, and sanctions were shutting out any businesses that might employ the hordes of educated young people pouring into the workforce.

The more we find out about his weapons programme, the better the deal looks for him. Libya’s chemical weapons programme was smaller than some analysts reckoned. The nuclear research, the real shock to the West, was very large in scope. It extended from uranium enrichment to plans for making a nuclear weapon.

But, according to reports from Western officials based on interviews with Libyan scientists, the nuclear programme was missing crucial components. They were ordered from black-market suppliers, including the network assembled by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the now-disgraced Pakistani scientist, but many of the most valuable parts never arrived, to the rising frustration of the Libyan team.

So the programme that Gaddafi has sacrificed in order to put himself on speaking terms with the West was much less complete — and less valuable — than it first seemed.

In one sense, it is reassuring. It shows that even a technically sophisticated country, with plenty of money dedicated to the task, found it hard to get nuclear components. But it does not follow that a country that had mastered the technology to a much higher level — Iran, say, or North Korea — could easily be persuaded to do the same. The imperfect state of Libya’s research makes it a less useful precedent than it first seemed.

As does the suddenness of the switch, surprising even to those involved. It tells us a lot about how much Libya is still under the control of one man. In Iran, every nuance about the warmth of dealings with the West would provoke huge debate within the regime; in Saudi Arabia, too, to some extent. But in Libya, Gaddafi decided it was worth his while to switch, and that was that.

It is right that Blair and American envoys give Gaddafi an immediate reward with their presence; but it would be wrong to conclude that Libya is an easy model to replicate.

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