Pakistanis now fear that anyone who speaks out will be silenced

Benazir Bhutto’s son has none of his mother’s glamour, says Christina Lamb, but he must now do his dynastic duty in a country cruelly deprived of its only pro-Western, liberal leader and in which no one feels it is safe to criticise the establishment

On top of the bus carrying Benazir Bhutto from Karachi airport last October, at the start of the journey that had been planned as her triumphant return from exile but was to end so tragically, I fell into conversation with her amiable cousin Tariq, who told me his wife had begged him not to board. As we waved at the cheering crowds holding banners of Bhutto and her late father, I asked if he had ever been tempted to give up farming and go into the family business. He laughed grimly. ‘No way’, he said. ‘Our family is cursed. All the Bhuttos who get involved in politics end up dead — my uncle, Benazir’s father; both her brothers….’

Nine hours later it seemed he was going to be proved horribly right when the bus was hit by two suicide bombs leaving more than 140 dead. Benazir escaped that first attempt but last Thursday — just ten weeks after her return — her luck ran out and she too joined that sombre list.

The latest family member to take over the hazardous Bhutto mantle is her son Bilawal — a shy 19-year-old Oxford undergraduate who succeeds her as leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party. The glasses from which he gazed out owlishly as he was presented to the world’s media may have been Armani, but he has none of his late mother’s glamour. That, it seems, did not matter.

‘The party has to have a Bhutto face,’ said Wajid Shamsul Hasan, former Pakistani high commissioner to London and long-time adviser to Bhutto.