No wonder New Yorkers hate it so much when the UN General Assembly comes to town.
I myself have sore feet after I had to make a 12 block detour to get back to my hotel room, all because Colonel Gaddafi was arriving in town and New York’s finest took this as an excuse to close many of the streets.
Whether this was to protect the Libyan leader from a handful of angry protesters or to protect innocent passersby from the Libyan security services wasn’t clear.
I’d been waiting to catch a glimpse of him arriving – hoping I might be able to shout a question or two at him as he got of his car. But his security detail had other ideas. And it soon became obvious that Gaddafi is not a popular visitor to this city
He was arriving at the Libyan diplomatic mission to the UN – an office block where he is having to stay.
It will be a great disappointment for the man who usually takes an enormous air-conditioned Bedouin tent with him wherever he goes.
The city of New York would not give him permission to pitch his tent in Central Park.
So he was going to stay in the grounds of a grand Libyan owned mansion just over the river in New Jersey. But residents there are so furious about the release of Lockerbie bomber Abdel Basset Al-Megrahi (a lot of those who died on Pan Am 103 came from New Jersey) that he was refused permission there too.
His people couldn’t find him a New York hotel with a big enough garden for his tent so they had to start looking at more conventional accommodation.
But that proved problematic too. A suite at the Pierre hotel was booked – but cancelled when other guests complained. And attempt to rent a house fell through when the owner realised that Gaddafi’s people were not the Dutch diplomats they were pretending to be but really from the Libyan embassy. It was their Libyan embassy email addresses that gave them away!
So, on his first ever visit to the UN Colonel Gaddafi he has to stay in an office building that doesn’t have a garden.
But just because he doesn’t have his usual tenet or a 5-star hotel doesn’t mean the Colonel will be lonely. The leader of the Nation of Islam organisation, Louis Farrakhan did pop in for a cup of tea just after the Gaddafi arrived.