The soft diplomacy of Belgian chocolates

26 March 2008

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Emily Maitlis reports from Libya on a land newly entranced by our brands — even M&S — where the West tolerates Gaddafi for fear of the insurgent alternative

At the British embassy — reopened after suspects in the Lockerbie bombing were handed over for trial — the diplomat dismisses talk of dictatorships and prefers to talk of deals. So much has changed, he tells me. He flinches when I mention the T-word (terrorism) and substitutes his own — those of Trade and Tourism. This, he assures me, is how relations work now: the hard currency of soft diplomacy.

And it’s true. Whatever the West now imagines of Libya, Libya is quite keen on the West’s little luxuries. Which is why I find myself breathing in the heady aroma of high-grade cocoa and gazing upon row after row of nuzzling ebony truffles. I had expected to find many things in Libya, but a Belgian chocolate shop was not one of them.

‘Libyans love their luxury goods,’ the owner, Ibtisam, tells me. A Muslim woman with an Italian dress sense, she is as perfectly packaged as the goods she sells. She stops to serve two customers — a man and his shuffling son who are seeking an engagement present for a friend. ‘You see,’ she continues after they leave, ‘they are not rich, but they like good quality. We love our brand names here.’

And bizarre as it feels to be munching imported Belgian pralines in Tripoli, she has a point. This is, for all its outward appearance of dusty poverty, a rich country, certainly by African standards if not by Middle Eastern ones. This is a land made prosperous on oil and gas, made green — in the unlikeliest of places — by its water reserves.

Over the last 18 months the capital has begun to attract the kind of fashion stores that wouldn’t — indeed don’t — look out of place in Regent Street or Rome. MaxMara, Mango and Calvin Klein are being lapped up by the young. The optimists talk of Libya one day rivalling Dubai. The fantasists even talk of it joining the EU.

So why am I still shocked to hear that Marks & Spencer, that bastion of Britishness, is to open a flagship store here in Tripoli next month? I am struggling to equate an isolated, despotic regime with the soft cotton briefs and rich tea biscuits of the English high street. But that is my problem. Things have moved on. Maybe they’ll even sell aviators in three-packs. Yes, this really is soft diplomacy at work now, with its first cousin, commerce, in tow.