The price of fuel is not the main issue. That main issue is the cause of the price rise: the growing unrest in the Middle East and the total cessation of oil production in Libya following the exodus of expatriate workers.

Even as the crisis increases in magnitude, there are still comments on the internet to the effect that it has nothing to do with us, that we should stay out of other people’s problems. Others say that we are hypocritical to show concern about Libya when we don’t bother about Sudan. Both are wrong, and for the exact same reason.

Tripoli is roughly 250 miles away from Malta, which would make it a comfortable three to four hours’ drive if there were no sea in between. It is in our immediate neighbourhood. But beyond that –Tunisia is in our immediate neighbourhood too and Tunis is even closer – we are embroiled with Libya in every possible respect. It is because of the constant contact and the geographical proximity that Libya’s problems are Malta’s too, and this is also why we are involved in a way that we could never be with Sudan.

This is not a Playstation game or a film on television. We cannot control the outcome and we don’t know how it will end. It was obvious from the outset that Muammar Gaddafi was not going to step down. Those who imagined he would play by their rules were idiotic to do so, because this is a man who has always played by his own rules, abiding by those of others only as a chess-move to enable him to achieve his own ends.

With everything to lose and nothing to gain by stepping down – and I’m speaking here in terms of him personally and not Libya – he is going to stick to what his anointed son described as Plan A, Plan B and Plan C: to live and die in Libya, even if that means wholesale slaughter and violence, and the descent of his country into anarchy.

Meanwhile, international leaders continue to emerge from their offices to announce that Gaddafi must go at once. Really? In the language of the school playground: “And who’s going to make him? You and whose army?” Muammar Gaddafi has never cared what international leaders think of him, and he is not about to start bothering now.

Yesterday morning, he spoke to an audience of ashen-faced men and slogan-chanting women, while out in the east of the country his forces began the aerial bombing of rebel towns. Even the journalists and cameramen there to record his speech looked frozen with unease and trepidation. Gone was the relaxed and smiling man who spoke to the BBC and Christiane Amanpour only the day before.

I think that rather a lot of people need to look up the definition of psychopath, and then work out at last that they are dealing with one. It isn’t because he is delusional that he laughed in denial while Libyans were being shot in the streets, as the US delegate to the UN said a couple of days ago. It is because he is psychopathic. People like that feel no emotion but are capable of simulating any emotion at will, switching from brutality to merriment in seconds.

Muammar Gaddafi is in the mould of Saddam Hussein and Josef Stalin – not of Mubarak and Ben Ali. So one day he sits and smiles at the man from the BBC, and the very next day he speaks to an audience of people who were trucked in for the television cameras and talks about sticking his fingers in David Cameron’s eyes.

Can we please stop pretending now? I know it’s embarrassing to admit that this is the very same man to whom prime ministers and presidents, and certainly not just our own, kowtowed and smarmed. But we have to come to terms with it instead of manifesting a very curious form of loss aversion. Gaddafi did not suffer a psychotic incident and suddenly become a bloodthirsty, power-hungry maniac. He was one from the beginning.

Yesterday he declared it high treason to say that Libya needs food, medicines or other forms of humanitarian aid. He said it was a way of opening the door to colonialism. You can see what’s coming next: high treason is punishable by death without trial under his regime and the Green Book he wrote. So now anybody – possibly even expatriates – who cooperates in the humanitarian aid effort is at immediate risk of death. And Libyans are going to be far too fearful to ask for help. They are going to find themselves reduced to even worse misery than before. So perhaps now people in Malta (and elsewhere) will understand why they never heard any Libyans complain about Gaddafi. They didn’t want to disappear into the night and die.

Hilary Clinton has said that the United States of America must lead the international response to the Libyan crisis. Two US Navy amphibious assault ships have come through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean and are making their way towards Libya. The idea, one imagines, is that Gaddafi will be intimidated – but it’s gone beyond that now. US defence strategists have said that a no-fly zone over Libya – which will stop the aerial bombing of rebel towns – will be difficult to organise. It will mean first destroying, in airborne attacks, Gaddafi’s military planes and fighter jets. Then the no-fly zone has to be enforced by US jets and those of its allies, flying across Libya. It can’t all be done from the Mediterranean, because Libya’s hinterland is too vast.

Meanwhile, Gaddafi’s forces have taken Sabratha already and have launched an attack on Az-Zawiya. The nightmare isn’t ending. It’s only just begun. And, far from Gaddafi’s end being just a matter of days away, as the analysts suggested on the international news networks last week, it is now clear that, unless there is external intervention, it is not going to be Gaddafi who is wiped out.