Unrest in Arab world

For a moment there it seemed like he might have grasped, if precious little else, at least the essentials of a successful speech. By the admittedly exceptional standards of the Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya,Muammar Gaddafi's television appearance on Monday night was cogent, coherent and, most important, brief. Still pretty weird, certainly, but with hindsight – and the explanations of more knowledgable colleagues – it kind of made sense.

But then, sadly, the Brother Leader and King of Kings blew it. Tuesday saw the Libyan leader back at his barking best.

If Monday was a low-key, artfully lit, subtly played arthouse teaser, Tuesday was a blood, guts and gore B-movie shocker, painfully overacted and unforgivably under-edited. In a rambling, incoherent and, most important, agonisingly long speech, Muammar Gaddafi observed that the whole world looked up to Libya. He had brought glory to this land, he raved, which was now threatened by drink and drug-crazed "rats and cats … traitors and cowards".

Brown-robed, fist-banging, by turns shouting and cajoling, he urged: "Come out of your homes, attack them in their dens." He swore he would never leave, but "die a martyr".

It was wild, bombastic, foaming-at-the-mouth, mad-as-a-hatter stuff; all, sadly, that we've come to expect of the self-styled Figurehead of a Thousand African Nations. He would not stand down, he said, on the logically unassailable grounds that as he isn't actually president, he hasn't got an official position to step down from.

On Monday, Gaddafi was intriguing. The spot on Libyan state television lasted less than 20 seconds, and appeared to raise as many questions as it answered. Where exactly was he? What WAS that car? Why, since he was sitting in it, did he need an umbrella? Was that really the best they could do for lighting? And how come he no longer looks like Tom Jones?

"I want to show I'm in Tripoli, not Venezuela," Gaddafi began, seated in a buff-coloured vehicle of unexpectedly agricultural appearance. Lada? Trabant? Pre-war Jeep? Tractor? Whatever it was, it was parked outside an alarmingly shell-pocked building and a doorway apparently draped with an attractive string of fairy-lights. The umbrella, large, off-white and oddly upmarket, was thrust aloft through the open door; an embarrassed flunkey, off to the right, held an identical one in his left hand and the wrong kind of microphone in his right.

"I wanted to say something to the youths on Green Square; stay up late with them," the colonel said helpfully, before adding: "But it started raining."

Which would at least explain the umbrellas. If not the delightfully cryptic conclusion: "Thank God, I think it's a good thing."

(In fact, it seems the location had a rational explanation. The appearance, says our former Middle East editor Brian Whitaker, was filmed outside Gaddafi's family house, bombed by the US under Reagan. It is in the middle of an army camp, and is now a kind of museum.)

Other mysteries remain. His face looked somehow smoother: more of the Michael Jackson, less of the Mickey Rourke. The brevity that was bracing. (His 2009 speech to the United Nations was supposed to last 15 minutes but went on for 100, during which he accused the security council of terrorism, demanded $7.7tn in compensation for colonialism, and asked whether swine flu was not a biological weapon.)

But yesterday he went on for an hour and a quarter. He confirmed he would fight his opponents to the death, warning that the death penalty awaited all those who "undermined the constitution" (from which he read, at length). If he wasn't still in charge of a country in which, according to his opponents, as many as 500 people may have been killed by his mercenaries over the past few days and several thousand are missing, it might have been funny. But Gaddafi hasn't, sadly, grasped a bloody thing. Not even how to make a speech.