Politicians have a long history of embarrassing themselves on trips to foreign lands. Boris Yeltsin famously offended his hosts in Ireland in 1994 when he refused to get off his plane at Shannon airport. The Russian president suggested afterwards that he had simply ‘overslept’ – an excuse the Irish Press suggested should be taken with ‘a large measure of vodka’.
But even if a legless Yeltsin was unable to meet the Irish Taoiseach that day, one hopes at least that he knew which country he was offending. The same cannot be said of Britain’s Africa minister, James Duddridge, who was in Zambia this week to attend the funeral of the country’s founding president and liberation leader, Kenneth Kaunda, who died last month.
Speaking at the ceremony, the minister extolled the virtues of Kaunda, whom he described as a ‘great man, an African hero, and a highly respected friend of the United Kingdom who helped end apartheid in South Africa and was firmly committed to the Commonwealth.
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