When talking to Conservative friends who (unlike me) think it was wrong to go to war to remove Saddam Hussein from Iraq I usually ask if they believe military action to remove Mugabe would be justified. I am interested by how often they agree that such action would be both moral and practical.
But would it be necessary? Peter Oborne was correctly identified earlier today by Cameron Watt as a hero, presented a Channel 4 documentary from Zimbabwe in 2003. It was filmed, of course, undercover showing Oborne to be a man of some courage and the subsequent interviews he undertook with Government Ministers in Whitehall showed really anger. Hitherto I had just thought of him as one of those genial but cynical drunken hacks you come across at the lobby of the Imperial Hotel during Party Conferences in Blackpool.
Oborne's key point, repeated in a Centre for Policy Studies pamphlet is that we allow South Africa to allow Mugabe to stay in power.
"There is an almost exact parallel between Mbeki's situation today and President Vorster's in the 1970s," he wrote. "For more than a decade Ian Smith's illegitimate Rhodesian Government was able to survive thanks to South African collusion. But the moment Henry Kissinger persuaded Vorster to pull the plug Rhodesia fell. Zimbabwe is a land-locked state, and dependent on South Africa for trading links, and above all, for oil."
I hope that by the time William Hague becomes our Foreign Secretary after the next election that Mugabe will already have gone. If not I hope Hague reads Oborne's CPS pamphlet.
