Socialist crusader? Ruthless despot? Occasional 80s Michael Jackson-a-like? Our man in Tripoli has fitted all these roles and more. Much is made of his humble beginnings and the resilience formed of growing up in a place most people would find uninhabitable. And it’s either his Clinton-like ability to cling to power while seemingly doomed to fail and his in-built determination or being completely jammy that keeps the colonel at the top of the pile today.

Qadaffi came to prominence against a background of Italian imperial/monarchical oppression. Arab hero Nasser’s humiliation in the Six-Day War fuelled his ire and he developed an obsession with becoming the next Arab hero. Getting rid of the UN-backed King Idris was his first main move. After a bit of a pray and the ubiquitous ‘God is with us’ argument, his band of merry men drove up to the palace in a Beetle, catching the King’s ‘elite’ guard napping. The poor guards let Qadaffi’s crew through without so much as a ‘no trainers or AK47s mate’. The palace had been expecting a coup and mistook Qadaffi’s lot for the reinforcements. Idris, meanwhile, had played his part dutifully, doing the age-old royal tradition of disappearing off somewhere far away and safe when the going gets tough.Bringing Libya into the 20th century was priority number one for the lad Muammar. At first, all went well. Qadaffi remembered his humble roots and set about a programme of social reforms – nationalising the oil companies and investing the profits in the infrastructure. Regionally, he further boosted his Arab hero status by ousting the Western powers from their Libyan air bases and taking a militant line against Israel. But there was a disconnect from other Arab leaders who weren’t keen to follow socialism, or explicit support for the Palestinians. The trouble, when you’re sitting on a whole pile of black gold, is that it’s awfully tempting to spend the money on grand palaces and bulletproof Mercs.

Qadaffi reacted badly to the realisation that you cannot please all the people all of the time, and that only substantive change endears you to the people. Any form of dissent – following the lack of real change in the average Libyan’s fortune – was crushed, and he took a more hands-on approach to intensifying the revolution and codifying his ideas in his third Green Book. Yet he did his bit for sexual equality. Throughout his reign Qadaffi used an elite guard of women to shield himself from assassins. Whether he thinks women are more perceptive than men, have greater loyalty than men, or like some arcane ruling class fear the loss of power and position if their leader does come to harm is open for debate.

Campaigning for sexual equality and nationalisation of industry, oil being the obvious one here, may seem like the ideas of a ‘working-class hero, boy from Sirte done good’ story – but there were problems along the way. The declaration of Libya as a jamahiriya – a state managed directly by its citizens – did have a catch: if you had a different political idea you could expect to be hung. Difference dealt with by terror.

For so long isolated even from its neighbours and the region, the skirmishes with US President Reagan and co made his image in the West but may have been the product of a rampant paranoia. Even the quite literally insane Reagan declared Qadaffi ‘a mad dog’. Qadaffi in turn declared that any ‘stray dogs’ – dissidents on foreign soil, many of whom were US-backed Libyan expats – be eliminated. Obviously a the loose canon from the Middle East who ate babies and constantly had his finger hovering over the nuke button, according to the tabloids, has to be neutralised. The US air strike of the Libyan leader’s home, his bunker in Tripoli, was a key moment. Qadaffi felt remorse after his adopted child was killed as a result of the strike. The Lockerbie bombing, seen as a retaliation against both the US and UK (the US air planes flew from British soil, naturally), was the endgame in Qadaffi’s destructive phase of sabre-rattling. Not necessarily because he authorised it, but because there was so much pressure on him to bend to Western will.

So Qaddafi eagerly took on a new roles. At home he likes to believe he is still running a beacon of socialism in a sea of Arab dictatorships, but cronyism has held the much-needed investment back and the provincial centre Benghazi is restive. Things have moved on since 1969. His current incarnation, reinventing himself once again to become a pan-African figure and one of the West’s allies against the War on Terror, shows he is tired of to trying to be a figurehead for the Middle East and is turning his thoughts to self-preservation. Maybe he sees his friendship with the West being used a way of rubbing his Arab neighbours’ faces in it for snubbing his dreams of becoming an Arab hero.