@epaulnetPaul Erickson
Spectator.co.uk: Revealed: #Essaysof a #tyrant's son spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/72… #Libya #Qaddafi #Saadi at twelve. Still a baby, even now.
Someone somewhere must have decided it was worth keeping. Like many parents around the world, Colonel and Mrs Gaddafi were probably terribly proud of their child’s progress at school. But you can't take everything with you when the mob is storming the barricades. So there it was strewn on a patch of sun-parched lawn, next to a bizarre take on a Swiss chalet.
For your average Tripoline indulging in some light pilfering of the abandoned Bab al-Aziziya compound, it wouldn't have been worth a second look. For anyone hunting down incriminating intelligence files linking the UK to torture in Libya, it wouldn’t have been up to much, either.
But the school notebook of a 12-year-old Saadi Gaddafi, one of the more loathsome members of the clan, is a fascinating snapshot into the surreal world of Gaddafi's Libya.
Unlike his laughable football career, in which his entire Serie A record in Italy consisted of two single performances for three clubs over five years (Perugia kicked him out after he failed a drugs test in 2003), he scored well. If you were his teacher, would you have marked the boy down? Occasionally there is a bold scribble across a blank page. "Where is your subject?" It would have taken a brave person to do that.
Some of the essay titles are unintentionally revealing. There’s a piece on "Bravery" from 17 March 1986, two years after his father’s diplomats in London gunned down WPC Yvonne Fletcher in cold blood. According to a Libyan soldier interviewed by the BBC's Panorama earlier this year, Saadi ordered troops to fire on unarmed protesters in Benghazi at the beginning of the revolution. Owning nine lions is easy if you are a dictator's son, but it takes rather more guts than Saadi possesses to behave like one. Taking a leaf out of his daddy's book, he has always been a coward.
Then there are essays on "Oil and Gas" and "War is a trick". My favourite is "The Happy Man", written on 26 November 1986, which begins:
Last year Saadi was ordered by an Italian court to pay an unpaid hotel bill of €392,000. Judging by his hideous beachside villa in the VIP Regatta compound, which still reeks of perfume and is strewn with bottles among the black rugs, white sofas and mirrored bodybuilding equipment, much of this would have gone on whisky and prostitutes."I'm a rich man. I have earned all my money and everything I own entirely honestly since I was a small boy. I don't have a dishonest dirham to my name. I didn't steal or seize anything but worked patiently in a law-abiding way, prayed to God and gave to charity."
If Saadi is missing his loofah, liberated by The Spectator’s correspondent in Tripoli, he can come to collect it from Room 1324 of the Radisson Mehari. The exercise book is not for sale.
