The comb-over Soviet-style tyrant who could soon be one of the West's favourite allies

Get ready for the coming transformation of Europe's last official dictatorship into a smiley, freedom-loving friend of the West. Step forward Belarus and its President- for- Life Alexander Lukashenko, about to be repackaged as Mr Nice - and perhaps to be ushered gently into the European Union as his reward.

Stranger people have overcome such problems - much of the world continues to fawn on the blood-encrusted tyrant Fidel Castro - and the faults of nastier countries have been conveniently forgotten, especially in Africa, for the sake of wealth or power. But not often.

President Lukashenko seems intent on proving that absolute power can drive a man absolutely loopy.

He has recently taken to proclaiming that his four-year-old illegitimate son is also his heir. His wife lives a reclusive life as a milkmaid in a remote farmstead.

Meanwhile, the President's opponents suffer a variety of sticky ends - truncheons and teargas for the small fry, trumped-up charges and squalid jails for the bigger fish, total disappearance for others.

Troublemaking journalists vanish too, or are found mysteriously knifed to death by persons unknown.

How do you solve an image problem like this? Well, ex-Comrade Lukashenko has been chatting discreetly to none other than Tim Bell (Baron Bell of Belgravia to you), the man whose matchless PR skills smoothed the edges of Margaret Thatcher, helped defeat Arthur Scargill's coal strike and more recently alerted the world to the case of the murdered Russian exile Alexander Litvinenko.

Also paying court to President Lukashenko is veteran Thatcherite smoothie Lord Parkinson, who recently accepted an official invitation to the sinister Belarus capital Minsk and was welcomed into the presence of Lukashenko himself.

Another visitor to Minsk is Patrick Robertson, who once provided his services to Chile's unloved General Pinochet.

Belarus is one of the US State Department's proclaimed 'outposts of tyranny', a designation that quietly replaced the old axis of evil. Since January 2005, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has listed it along with Zimbabwe, Burma, Iran, North Korea and Cuba as a five-star pariah nation.

Should he take on the task of polishing Belarus, Lord Bell ought not to despair at this. For, as we shall see, the official rules about who is, and who is not, a tyrant are remarkably flexible.

And having visited quite a lot of prison states, from present-day North Korea and Uzbekistan to the old East Germany, I can vouch for the fact that, at first sight, this is the nicest despotism you are likely to find in a long time.

It even says 'I Love Belarus' on the police car number-plates. And Minsk looks like a child's picture-book version of the old Soviet Union.

But this is a Soviet Union that has, unlike the original, learned how to clean its windows and worked out how to make fridges that don't shudder all day, lifts that don't lurch and lorries that can move without emitting plumes of oily brown smoke.

There are no rust streaks on the freshly painted blocks of flats. The buses rolling along the well kept boulevards are new and shiny, if a little under powered when full of people and struggling to make it up the majestic slope of Independence Avenue.

The shops are full of food, clothes and furniture, and better still, you can actually buy them. The official Press boasts of how Lukashenko has raised the standard of living in a limited sort of way - the average monthly salary can now buy three times as many potatoes (1,425lb, since you ask) as it could 13 years ago.

There are jobs for everyone, though some of the jobs are a bit odd. And in the modern post office people are collecting their pensions on time, no small matter in a part of the world where millions connect the collapse of Communism with the end of their own financial security, and long for the secure past to come back.

See the troops of patriotic youth taking groceries to the old folk or sweeping the streets on Saturdays without pay. Look at the smart new village halls out in the countryside, see the proud young mothers collecting the keys of rent-free apartments as a reward for giving birth three times.

Look in vain for swaggering Mafiosi and their bodyguards, so common across the border in Russia.

Notice the almost total absence of Western brands of clothes, food and cosmetics which line the streets of modern Moscow. No Starbucks. No Pizza Hut. No KFC. No posters featuring foreign models.

The beauties of Belarus are officially protected from foreign competition, and encouraged by State-sponsored beauty contests in which the President takes a startlingly keen personal interest.

In the vastness of Minsk there are two branches of McDonald's and perhaps ten Coca-Cola advertisements. Everything else is - or appears to be - local.

A monumental new underground shopping mall is free of the Western cargo cult that has taken over every other city in the former communist world. Yet it is not a grimy dump, smelling of old fried potatoes and cabbage soup. Far from it.

If you want them, Minsk has all the clubs and modern restaurants you could desire.

If only the old USSR could have provided such things, the whole of history would have been different.

Lee Harvey Oswald, assassin of JFK, complained about the absence of such things when, after defecting to Moscow in 1959, he was given a job and a (rather agreeable) flat in Minsk. But as he wrote in his diary: 'The work is drab, the money I get has nowhere to be spent. No nightclubs or bowling alleys, no places of recreation except the trade union dances. I have had enough.' So he headed home, with the result we all know.

The former bureaucrat married his wife Galina during the Soviet era but she now lives a reclusive existence on a farm, below

Drabness is banned. See the joyous, yet modern posters, using techniques - perhaps learned from New Labour - to make them look sunny and homely.

The methods are new but the slogans are old: 'Prosperity to our city! Prosperity to our motherland! This is a state which exists for its people! We are Belarus!'

Yet some are openly and blatantly like those of the old days - vast red and gold placards celebrate the long-ago liberation from Hitler, using all the old signs except the hammer and sickle.

Policemen and the KGB guards who haunt the deserted streets near the President's office wear enormous peaked caps once popular with Red Army generals, only perhaps a size or two bigger.

A glowering monument to State security 'heroes', built in the shape of a sword and shield - the old KGB coat of arms - is piled with fresh, costly official wreaths.

And there is even a bust of the grisly old monster Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the KGB, whose statue in Moscow was the first victim of the crowds when communism fell.

Opposite it is the huge yellow-ochre building where Belarus's KGB still functions under the old name.

Lukashenko's physician, Irina Abelskaya, allegedly the mother of his illegitimate son

Be very careful with your camera round here. Among the happy, happy crowds are an astonishing number of middle-aged men just walking up and down with mobile phones in their hands and nothing much to do.

No wonder there's so little unemployment and so much order.

There's hardly any graffiti, either. Banksy would not flourish in Minsk.

And, good heavens, even the local lager louts put their empty cans in the litter bins before staggering (quietly) home. Anyone would think they were being watched.

Please don't think this is a recommendation. Belarus is very nasty indeed if you are mad or brave enough to challenge the State.

In 1999, opposition leaders Viktor Gonchar and Yuri Zakharenko simply 'disappeared' and are believed to have been murdered and buried in trackless forests by death squads.

Journalist Veronika Cherkasova was unwise enough to investigate an arms deal between Belarus (which still produces a lot of military equipment) and Iraq. On October 20, 2004, she was stabbed 40 times by persons unknown and left for dead in her Minsk flat, with a blade still stuck in her chest and bloodstains on her address book.

Rule of fear: Belarus's police deal ruthlessly with those who criticise the President or think they can hold peaceful protests

Insultingly, the authorities tried to pin the killing on her distraught family.

Another awkward journalist, Dmitry Zavadsky, simply vanished from the face of the Earth on his way to the airport in 2000.

Sometimes, foolhardy people take seriously the country's claim to be a democracy and contest elections. This is unwise.

If they try to hold rallies, phalanxes of riot police come jogging out of secret barracks, clubbing and gassing anyone who cannot outrun them. Prison and spiteful humiliation await anyone who pushes things too far.

Alexander Kazulin, a one-time colleague of Lukashenko, became too popular and was jailed in 2006 on ludicrous charges of 'hooliganism' and 'incitement to mass disorder' after taking part in a wholly peaceful demonstration against the dictatorship.

He even offered flowers to the police, who responded by knocking him to the ground, beating him up and throwing him into prison.

Later, shortly before being locked up for more than five years, Kazulin said: 'We're not afraid of tanks and violence; we're afraid of prisons and having no freedom. We're tired of living in a spiritual prison.'

Mikhail Marinich, another former Lukashenko colleague who tried to oppose him, was preposterously accused of stealing computers from the US Embassy. Despite the embassy pointing out that no computers had actually been stolen, Mr Marinich duly went to jail.

Peter Hitchens at the state security memorial in Minsk

Still more shameful is the case of Yuri Bandazhevsky, a scientist who criticised the State's response to the Chernobyl disaster (a large part of Belarus remains severely contaminated). He got an eight-year sentence for supposedly receiving bribes, though there was no material evidence that he ever did so.

The blatant, unrepentant repression continues even now. Several people who put themselves forward as candidates in 'elections' planned for September 28 this year instantly lost their State-controlled jobs.

You have to wonder why Mr Lukashenko, who made himself permanent leader in a 2004 referendum, bothers to hold these doomed polls at all. They seem designed mainly to encourage democrats to step forward and get clubbed over the head.

Recently, things took a distinctly fishy turn. On July 3, an independence day celebration in Minsk was interrupted by an explosion, just where a large number of young people were dancing to rock music.

Thousands of people all over the country, including many who could not possibly have been anywhere near the scene, were arrested, interrogated and fingerprinted on the excuse of a 'war against terror'. The idea that the opposition were behind the bomb was carefully fostered by the State.

You can still see the small scar in the turf where it went off and, despite a strong feeling of being watched, I went to examine the scene.

Clearly, many are not fooled by the official version that this was anti-government terror - or the official story that nobody was seriously hurt.

A woman working nearby, falling into the hysterical rumour-mongering that always infects censored states, claimed to me that nine people died. Who knows? Though, judging from the small size of the crater, it seems far-fetched.

Most amazing of all, some incredibly brave soul managed to write the words 'Stop Terror' in blue chalk on the pavement outside the KGB headquarters - the writing facing towards the building's main entrance. I was lucky enough to see it during the few minutes it was allowed to exist. It was obviously an accusation.

I wouldn't give much for the chances of the culprit, who must surely have been spotted by Minsk's secret army of plainclothes men, and whose life will now be systematically ruined by the State.

Like Russia to the east, Belarus is ready to crush anything like the 'Orange Revolution' that convulsed Ukraine.

Yet at first sight, you can only tell it's not a free country from President Alexander Lukashenko's continuing failed attempts to conceal his baldness. In any country with a free Press, Mr Lukashenko would long ago have been mocked into rethinking his hairstyle.

But discreet portraits of him, proudly combed-over, are to be seen all over the place - a strange, small-scale personality cult that is gradually becoming a serious problem.

In the many State shops, with their large, uniformed staffs, you will find a little corner containing one (or sometimes two) portraits of the President, next to the national flag and the words of the national anthem, which declares 'We are Belarus ... We are free to work!' And you may buy your own copy, as I did. In which case the staff will reverently roll it up and wrap it in tissue paper, lest it get damaged on the way home.

As yet, no statues have been raised to him. He is still not Kim Il Sung, but it may not be long before he is.

A series of startling weird events suggest that absolute power has gone absolutely to his head.

He has begun appearing in public, at ice-hockey games and church services, with his four-year-old illegitimate son Nikolai, proclaiming that the bewildered child is his anointed successor.

'He is going to be President,' he cackles. Then, irritably but incredibly, he all but confirms rumours that the boy is the result of an affair with his personal physician, Irina Abelskaya.

Lukashenko, at least, can say what he likes - the one free man in a country of nearly ten million who must do his will.

Lukashenko is mysterious, an insignificant functionary risen to extraordinary heights. It is hard to work out how he rose to his position, just as it is hard to work out why tiny, indefensible, economically unviable Belarus even exists as an independent country.

It just seems to have been left lying around unclaimed after the Soviet Union collapsed in a cloud of rust in 1991. Both are anomalies.

No biography of the President is permitted and his apparently dull past life as a collective farm chief is lost in Soviet murk.

But we do know he already has two sons - Viktor, 29, and Dmitri, 25.

Viktor is a 'national security aide' but Lukashenko jeers at him in public, dismissing him as a useless weakling who will soon become even weaker.

Meanwhile his spurned wife Galina toils as a sort of milkmaid, in official obscurity, at a remote dairy farm deep in the forests of Belarus.

She is probably better off there. For here is another curious thing about this bizarre country.

I took elaborate steps to find an ordinary citizen, to find out how the people of this unusual country really view their leader and his policies. For fear of giving the Belarus KGB any clue to her identity, I will not go into the details of how I found her or where our conversation took place, but if she knew she was talking to a Western journalist, it wasn't me who told her.

Was she really genuine? In this spy-infested nation, it is impossible to be sure. It is conceivable that Viktoria, as I shall call her, was an official plant, cunningly introduced to me by an immensely subtle and all-embracing secret police. But what if she was not?

I discovered her in a small town remote from Minsk. She was almost blissfully happy to be in Belarus.

'I am proud I was born and raised here,' she said. 'I never miss a chance to tell people I am Belarussian.'

She was particularly keen to stress this to Russians, who she thinks have got a much worse bargain.

'Life is good here. I'm concerned that outsiders view my country as somehow strange. They say we are not democratic. Well, I know that in a democracy you have the right to criticise those in power. But I have nothing to criticise them for.'

She knew all about Lukashenko's peculiar family life and chatted in a relaxed way about his goings-on much as a Westerner might speak of a Hollywood star's scandals.

She spoke of a carefully and thoughtfully revived countryside - unlike the blighted, drink-sodden, dying villages of Russia.

She was full of praise for the strong, Soviet-style community spirit - people look out for their elderly neighbours and do voluntary work, patrolling and cleaning up the streets at weekends. She believed that corruption was punished.

A lot of what she said sounds ludicrous but is almost exactly what many former East Germans now say, as they muse nostalgically about the days when there was order and everything tasted better.

This kind of thing comes naturally from grizzled old Stalinists. It is rather odd hearing it from a tanned, leggy brunette with a smart new mobile phone.

And yet I am not sure that most British people are that different. There is strong public support for the steady suppression of British liberty.

Tory MP David Davis's resignation, which prompted a by-election, left more than half his constituency unmoved. Most people seem relaxed about identity cards and 42-day detention, and the Government has quietly piled up near-dictatorial powers with very little protest.

A government that promised to get rid of street disorder and to look after the old properly would get a lot of votes, with not too many questions asked about how it would do the job.

If only President Lukashenko could discover oil or prove useful to the United States or the EU, I think he would quickly find that his status as an 'outpost of tyranny' was cancelled.

Uzbekistan, a grim hellhole of repression, was for years a US ally because it hosted an American airbase.

Azerbaijan, another former Soviet republic with severe North Korean tendencies, is an honoured friend of the United States, its election-rigging blithely overlooked. And it receives, though rather quietly, visits from the Duke of York. Its leader, Ilham Aliyev, inherited power from his KGB-veteran father. But he can beat up his opponents as much as he wants, for he has oil and gas.

Belarus has one strong card to play. As well as being on the main invasion road between Russia and Germany, and so naturally rather insecure, it is also the route by which huge amounts of oil and gas reach the West from Russia, costly and difficult to bypass.

Probably thanks to this, it has for years received cut-rate fuel from Moscow - and made a tidy living by selling it elsewhere at a big profit.

But relations with the Kremlin are now not so good, and nor are the prices.

With the subsidies from the East drying up, Lukashenko knows that the arms trade alone will not keep him going.

He will have to look West for the cash and investment he needs to keep his tight, cunning little state in being. That means us.

Which is presumably why Lord Bell and Lord Parkinson have become so welcome in the dark corridors of Minsk. That comb-over will have to go, though.