In the London of 1966, an Arab wearing traditional robes was still a rare sight. His official biography published in Tripoli claimed that as Gaddafi walked from Piccadilly Circus, "eyebrows were raised and remarks exchanged by curious passers-by". Gaddafi himself found Piccadilly "an anonymous, faceless place with the people going in all directions and not taking any single path". 

The young lieutenant began to revise his opinion about Britain, "a country he had been taught during his elementary school days was so great". 

At the time Libya was ruled by King Idris, an ally of the West. Gaddafi was sent here as a graduate from the Royal Benghazi Military Academy to be trained, not at Sandhurst-as is often reported-but on a five-month course at the Army School of Education at Wilton Park in Beaconsfield. During the Second World War, Wilton Park had been used as a top-secret interrogation centre for prisoners of war. Its main building, where Gaddafi was taught, was a three-storey Palladian mansion, known, ironically in view of later developments, as the White House.

Before arriving in England, Gaddafi had already aroused the suspicions of the British Military Mission in Libya. He had developed a strong sense of destiny and had cultivated a number of zealously Islamic young officers who shared his hero-worship of Colonel Nasser of Egypt. And he had indented for signals equipment considerably more powerful than his unit needed.