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From news article:
The silliness was legendary. But behind it, and far more important than it, was a deadly delusion. And here was the problem for the international community. At any time, throughout his four decades of dictatorship, Gaddafi always managed to find some leader somewhere, and on occasion several, willing to hail him as the great leader of his time, a continent-wide King or a Caliph, destined alternately to unite Africa or revive the Caliphate. Across Africa, and as far away as Pakistan, there were those who would acclaim him and regard him in the manner he clearly felt to be his due. What they wanted of course was the cash.

For the same reason Gaddafi also found some receptive audiences in the West — and never more-so than in recent years. The bloodshed of the last year has at least reminded people that Gaddafi was not merely a clown. But the pandering to Gaddafi’s whims cannot but have helped prolong his view of himself and so prolong the misery through which he put his people.

When the Blair government decided to restore relations with Libya they did it for decent reasons. But the manner and extent of the un-freezing of relations — the sending of dignitaries to meet him and so on — went far too far. When the international community sat through his rambling multi-hour-long speeches at the UN, and world leaders allowed him to pitch his tent on their lawns, the misconception that there were different rules for him — that he was a case apart — can only have hardened.

Perhaps one occasion should particularly epitomise this. Only last December, Gaddafi made a live video appearance in London at the London School of Economics (LSE). Students and academics at that institution (incidentally a bastion of academic attempts to boycott Israel) had a chance to ask some questions of Gaddafi. They behaved miserably.
Gaddafi was introduced by Alia Brahimi, a Research Fellow at LSE. Grinning throughout, she presented Gaddafi to the auditorium saying ‘You are most welcome here Colonel Gaddafi’. She referred to him as ‘Brother Leader’ and described him as ‘the world’s longest serving national leader’. And she read a message from the then head of the LSE, Howard Davies, who said that Gaddafi was ‘most welcome’ at the LSE and that the LSE was ‘pleased’ to be able to help train Libyan officials and ‘very much hopes’ that the relationship can continue. It is worth remembering that these were not professors and students sitting in Libya forced to pay these dues to the dictator. They were free people in a free society doing this voluntarily.

At the end of the lecture Brahimi presented Gaddafi with an LSE baseball cap, telling the ‘Brother Leader’ that he is in ‘good company’ since Bill Clinton, ‘your friend’ Nelson Mandela and Kofi Annan also have them. She thanked the ‘Brother Leader’ for ‘grappling’ with the questions from the floor. Gaddafi thanks the students for their ‘very insightful questions’, and was ‘honoured and pleased’ to have been hosted there, discussing questions that would lead to ‘world peace’. He then thanked the ‘excellent management of the university’.