MY FAMILY and I have just been on holiday with Colonel Gaddafi. During our ten days in Libya we were almost inseparable. Wherever we went, there he was, watching over us.

The great man was there when we landed at Tripoli airport, gazing down from an outsized poster with an Arabic caption declaring: “We follow our leader, who does wonderful things.” He was there on hoardings beside the highway into the capital, welcoming us to his country.

He was there on giant billboards in the centre of every town and village - chin tilted up and sporting rock-star sunglasses, sometimes with his hands clasped triumphantly above his head and at others with the rays of the sun radiating out behind him. He looked astonishingly young for a man of 66.

The prize exhibits among the archaeological treasures of Tripoli's excellent Jamahiriya museum were the blue Volkswagen Beetle that Gaddafi drove as a young man, and the military jeep in which he led the coup that brought him to power in 1969.

In the southern city of Sebha we spotted a squat, one-room hut carefully preserved in the middle of a busy traffic junction. Our guide told us that it was where Gaddafi lived as a student. We faced something of a quandary when invited to add to the glowing comments in the visitors' book.

“So this is where it all began,” we wrote with what we hoped was appropriate ambiguity. The few hoardings and billboards that did not carry Gaddafi's smiling face bore - without explanation - the number 38. It took us a while to figure out what this meant. It was the number of years since the glorious revolution.

The only place the Colonel abandoned us was in the middle of the Sahara desert. I'm sure he was there in spirit, however, and he kindly ensured that a government minder never left our side.

Such adulation of Libya's leader is entirely right and proper. Yes, Gaddafi was one of the world's leading sponsors of international terrorism, but he has renounced all that.

The man described by President Reagan as the “mad dog of the Middle East” has abandoned his pursuit of WMD, compensated the bereaved of the Lockerbie bombing, and joined the war against al-Qaeda. Tony Blair rewarded his new chum with a visit during his valedictory world tour last year.

Having ended Libya's pariah status and all those crippling international sanctions, Gaddafi now serves his country in another way. He has become a tourist attraction. Travelling around a country ruled by a real live dictator adds a bit of glamour to a holiday.

His ubiquitous face is the perfect backdrop for those trophy photographs of you and your family that you hang in the lavatory. And copies of The Green Book, setting out his “Third Universal Theory” (£2 and available in 84 languages), make great novelty gifts to take home.

Despite this we got the impression that the Libyan people do not always accord their leader the love and respect he deserves. We were shocked to hear them chuckling at the readings of passages from The Green Book that precede news bulletins. They would not dare show such disrespect in public.

I asked one Libyan acquaintance whether the people like Gaddafi. “Yes,” he replied without elaboration. “Can you criticise him?” I asked. “No,” he replied. “What happens if you do?” I persisted. “You go to jail,” he said.

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