Muammar Kaddafi is one of those people you can never read too much about. Witness his failure to find lodgings in New York this past week, his call for Barack Obama, "son of Africa," to rule "forever," and so forth. Anyway, here's a great story told to me by John Burton, who was Tony Blair's constituency agent in the north of England for many years: "[T]here’s a lovely tale Tony told me about [Muammar] Kaddafi of Libya. Tony’s going to meet him in a tented caravan—oasis, palm trees, sand, camels. So Tony said, “I go out and he greets me in English and he does the interview in Arabic for the local television.” And half way through, Kaddafi stops, puts his hand on Tony’s knee and says “Tony, why did you want camels?” And Tony said “Pardon? Camels? I don’t know anything about camels.” And Kaddafi says, “From Downing Street. They said you wanted camels.” And Tony says, “Oh. They’ll just be … it’ll be for a picture.” And Kaddafi says, “Well, it’s just it was a bit of a problem because we don’t have any camels here. So we’ve had to import them.” [Burton laughs] They’d had to import them from another part of Libya! That was wonderful!"
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