COLONEL Muammar Gaddafi has greeted terrorists, hosted dictators and embraced pariahs, but never in his colourful 30-year rule has he done anything quite so out of character as his public display of affection for Tony Blair yesterday.

After more than three decades burnishing his image as the bad boy of the Middle East — styling himself as the Arab world’s Fidel Castro — Colonel Gaddafi must now face the fact that he is on the verge of becoming respectable.

In the past few weeks the former army officer who seized power in a coup in 1969 has received delegations from the US Congress, a senior emissary from President Bush and now Tony Blair.

Following closely in their wake will be multinational companies with offers to exploit Libya’s huge oil reserves, develop the country’s unspoilt Mediterranean coastline and even help Libya’s bid for the Football World Cup in 2010. Contractors are already searching for a site for the new US Embassy.

Even by the standards of Colonel Gaddafi’s head-spinning policy twists and turns, the sudden leap into the modern world will be as revolutionary for Libya as the weird blend of Islam, socialism and pan-Arabism that he has tried to impose on the country since the 1970s.

Under his “Third Universal Theory”, set out in his Green Book, everything from formal government to businesses and shops were supposed to be abolished. To this day the country is nominally run by “people’s committees” and even Colonel Gaddafi has no formal rank, which is why his old military title is still used.

In an interview earlier this month, the Libyan leader insisted gamely that he still believed in his unique ideology.

“I consider it (the Green Book) the guide for all humanity,” he told foreign journalists. “One day the whole world will be a republic of the masses — topple down all governments and parliaments.”

The truth is, however, that the Libyan leader long ago put revolution behind him and decided to co-operate with his enemies in the West. After trying, and failing, to export revolution to Northern Ireland, the Arab World, Africa and even the Far East, Colonel Gaddafi has concluded that his country’s future lies in patching up differences with Europe and America.

The first sign of a change of heart came in 1999, when he agreed to hand over the two Libyans accused of the Lockerbie bombing in 1988. Suddenly the Libyans turned from supporting terrorist groups, like the IRA and Abu Nidal, into undoing their previous work. Libya paid ransoms for the release of French hostages held by Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines and then embarked on compensation deals with relatives of the victims of Lockerbie and the bombing of a French UTA airliner.

As negotiations neared completion last year, the Libyans embarked on secret talks with British intelligence to dismantle their weapons of mass destruction and secure guarantees for their return to the international community.

Sceptics are still not convinced that he has really changed and warn that he remains unpredictable and capable of ditching his new policy as easily as the old one.

Others believe that his U-turn is genuine and the result of his advancing years and the failure of his mad-capped schemes at home and abroad. Certainly in contemplating Libya’s future the 62-year-old is increasingly dependent on Western-educated ministers and his children — particularly Saif al-Islam, a London School of Economics student, who played a key role in turning his father round.

For a man who has survived numerous attempts on his life, including an air raid by American bombers in 1986 and a reported assassination by British intelligence, he may well emerge as the longest surviving leader of his generation in the Arab world.

GADDAFI'S GEMS

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