When everyone was best pals with Gadaffi, Tony Blair came to Libya with the famous smile and a pocket full of deals, including a communications system which could now be keeping Gadaffi safe.

Nobody, just now, can find the colonel. And everyone has an answer as to why not, in this land of so much sand, so few people. Which is right, because the elusiveness of one of the world’s last “designer tyrants” is because of many factors.

One of those, bizarrely, could possibly be down to deals done by the UK with the former dictator. Our story begins a few days ago when, even as we tried to drive through the vast gates of the notorious Khamis military base in south Tripoli, a gunman thrust a dozen or so ID badges into our vehicle.

To our astonishment were names and photos of British men. The passes were headed “Collaborators With The 32nd Brigade”. What was the nature of their “collaboration” with the elite and feared 32nd – run by Khamis, the colonel’s son?

We had one clue – two of these men were linked to General Dynamics UK which makes and exports sophisticated command and control systems similar to the Bowman System used by the British Army.

Essentially it’s a laptop-based comms network which, in essence, allows everyone from commanding officer down to the soldier in a ditch to communicate with nobody hacking in and listening. Pretty vital to any army.

A little digging and there it all was. General Dynamics signed one of the biggest deals of all with the colonel – a whopping $165 million for just this kind of kit.

So where do Tony Blair and Sir Vincent Fean come in? Well, you’ll recall that once the colonel decided nuclear weapons were Very Naughty Indeed, off came the arms embargo in 2004 and suddenly Tripoli became one giant soft play area for arms dealers and comms-wallahs worldwide.

Everyone was best pals with the colonel by now and soon, in 2007, Tony Blair was in Tripoli putting out for the Gold Braided One with the zillion-watt Blair smile and a pocket full of deals.

Centre table: General Dynamics and that massive communications deal. From Blair down it was time to reel in the Tripolitans. Enter Vince – Her Majesty’s Ambassador to Tripoli, Sir Vincent Fean. And it appears Vince certainly bent his back to the task at hand, batting for Britain to get the deal signed.

Letters released by the Foreign Office under Freedom of Information requests reveal a company much in debt to Vince.

“Dear Vincent,” gushed an exec from General Dynamics even as he was on the plane flying from Tripoli, “I wanted immediately to write to thank you…for your interest and support on the rocky road towards success in the programme”.

Other correspondence thanks Our Man in Tripoli for his “sponsorship of the deal”.

And yet…and yet…just a year or so later Vince’s Foreign Office would urgently review selling sophisticated military communications systems to Tripoli.

All this needs to be seen in the wider context of a big increase in arms and military equipment sales from the UK to a series of regimes from North Africa to the Gulf, up until the current unrst started earlier this year.

Today the Foreign Office press office claimed the UK has one of the most rigorous regimes in the world governing defence exports. It said it did not export equipment where there is a clear risk it could be used for internal repression. It added it cannot comment about individual deals, nor about what happened under previous governments.

Some will say this is life in the real world and that’s just business. Others will say it illustrates again that when it comes to arms and military exports the essential British position is “if we won’t some other country will.”

So it is that Libyans today feast at Eid. They welcome friends. Families gather. But they cannot find The Colonel. And could the reason for that be – in part – because of the secure comms Tony, Vince and General Dynamics worked so hard to provide for him?

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