How did Colonel Gaddafi get away with such evil for so long?

What a vile piece of work Colonel Gaddafi was.

For some of you, perhaps, this will be a statement of the glaringly obvious. But I suspect there will be many others for whom, like me, this week’s Storyville documentary on the barbarity of his regime — Mad Dog: Gaddafi’s Secret World (BBC4, Monday) — was something of a revelation.

Sure, we’d all heard about the funny stuff: the time John Simpson went to see him and he farted noisily (Gaddafi, not Simpson) through the interview; the ridiculous outfits; the bullet-proof Bedouin-style tent that he insisted on bringing on his last world tour, complete with live camels to graze decoratively outside.

But the nastier stuff came as news to me: killing his foreign secretary, then keeping him in a deep-freeze in his palace so that he could regularly have a gloat over the body; visiting classrooms of 15- and 16-year-old girls, patting the ones he fancied on their heads, then having them dragged off by his security, gynaecologically inspected and shown pornographic videos (to educate them in his expectations) before raping them and then having them put away in asylums; deliberately shooting down one of his own domestic airliners, partly for the sheer hell of it, partly as a ruse to show the West that its sanctions were hurting Libya so badly that it couldn’t afford to maintain its own aircraft…

Perhaps I’m being naive here, given the murder outside the Libyan embassy in London of PC Yvonne Fletcher, not to mention the destruction of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie. A dictator capable of such barbarities, surely, would be capable of anything? Well, yes, indeed. But how could we be sure he was personally responsible? Maybe the former was the work of ‘rogue elements’? Maybe the latter — as has occasionally been suggested — was really the work of Iran?

What becomes pretty clear watching this fascinating, supremely well-researched documentary — filmed everywhere from South Africa to Cuba, interviewing everyone from his arms dealer Frank Terpil to his head of protocol and one of his female bodyguards — is that Gaddafi was in it up to the neck in all these crimes and more.