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.