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Tuesday 2 December 2008

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Britain has lost an empire and found a role: to faff on about pirates and biofuels

Political wisdom coming from Robert Mugabe is hard to swallow. Nonetheless, I think the leathery old butcher might be on to something. ‘Gordon Brown,’ he said last week, ‘is a tiny dot on this world.’

From some people, that might be mere insult. Yet, when foul Bob describes Gordon Brown as a dot on the face of this world, one cannot help but consider that other unexpected dot, on the face of Robert Mugabe.

Is it a moustache, do you think? I’m not sure. Ask many professed Africa experts about Robert Mugabe’s moustache, and about half of them will say, ‘He hasn’t got a moustache, are you thinking of Daniel arap Moi?’ It’s a tiny thing, nestling in the dimple of his upper lip. It can’t be a birthmark, because he didn’t have it when he was younger. I reckon he grew it in the late 1980s, when he decided to give dictatorial tyranny a proper crack. A dictator needs facial hair. The full Stalin can’t be pleasant in a tropical climate, and the Hitler, that’s just derivative. Nobody wants to be just another Saddam, and the African gentleman may often struggle with the full Fidel. Bob needed something new.

Well, that’s my theory. It could be a wart or a melanoma, or it could be that he just always misses it. Whatever. He sees it every day. Some people might think it makes him look stupid, but Mugabe doesn’t give a damn. It’s just a dot.

Now, let us talk about pirates. I know, it’s a leap. I could have made a stylistic Bluebeard-based link, I suppose, but it would have taken the best part of a paragraph and you’d have lost interest. Just go with it. Pirates. As you will probably know, the Royal Navy has been instructed not to detain pirates, because doing so could breach their human rights (bits and bobs being chopped off under Somalia’s sharia law, in particular), and thus lead to them claiming asylum in Britain.

It’s a strange call, this, and I’ve spent a while trying to untangle the thinking behind it. So, here goes: 1) We might catch pirates. 2) If we do, we certainly don’t want to keep them. 3) But somebody else might not treat them very nicely. 4) So let’s not bother catching them in the first place.

More articles from: Hugo Rifkind | this section

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