Playboy Saif Gaddafi, the Tory donor and girls in bikinis – how the Libyan dictator’s son does business

Smiling, in his swimming trunks, the sea calm and sparkling, the heir-apparent to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi relaxes with his minders and a key business associate whose firm gave more than £125,000 to the Conservatives in the last 18 months.

These extraordinary pictures, some taken by an unknown bikini-clad young woman – one of several scantily-dressed girls who joined the party – are a unique glimpse of the playboy lifestyle of the Western-educated son of the Libyan dictator.

Now, 12 months on, Saif and his father are in hiding, targeted by allied air strikes backing the popular uprising against their regime.

Befriended by the Duke of York and once a guest at Buckingham Palace, Saif shocked those who feted him in the West by claiming the civil war now raging across Libya was caused by Islamists and the “drunken and drugged” and echoing his father in promising tens of thousands dead and “a river of blood”.