If you want to admire Napoleon, it helps not to have met Gaddafi

Forty-odd years ago, in the early phase of the Gaddafi regime, I had the slightly mixed fortune to attend the new Benghazi University’s first degree ceremony. The university had actually been closed for months and there were no degrees to award, but that did not stop them kitting out their foreigners in a job lot of academic gowns shipped in from Poland and marching us off to sit, ringed with machine-gun-carrying guards, in a huge tent under a broiling sun to wait for the Colonel himself to arrive.

Every so often the band would strike up, we’d all stand, a loudspeaker would blare out ‘Mu’ammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi’ and nothing would happen. We must have been there a good five hours while this went on, and were just about giving it up when suddenly he was there, followed in by his whole revolutionary government, dressed in white and looking, in those days, more like a Greek shipping magnate than the raddled madman of his last years.

As well as students, the heroes of the 1930s Libyan freedom struggle against Mussolini’s Italy were being honoured. They had managed to find a few fairly plausibly aged veterans, and we were just reassuring ourselves that the day had gone pretty well when an old janitor stumbled up for his medal, walked straight past Gaddafi, blithely unaware of who he or any of them might be, and got way past the prime minister, Major Jalloud, before he was grabbed by the shoulder, spun round and sent grinning back towards Gaddafi. For a terrible second the whole tent held its breath. And then — performance or the one human moment in the whole farce? — Gaddafi lent across, took him in his arms, and hugged him. Then he went, the rest of the ceremony cancelled.

I was made to think of this incident again while I was reading Andrew Roberts’s new biography of Napoleon.