There are, despite predilections to the contrary, an increasing number of public figures for whom I have great sympathy. I’ve no doubt this knowledge will bring them great succour. 

Watching this year’s snooker World Championship – a niche occupation, but, as they say in call-centres, ‘bear with me’ – my sympathies were aroused by Stephen Hendry. It’s distasteful, I realise, to put ‘snooker’, ‘aroused’, and ‘Stephen Hendry’ in the same sentence, but it can’t be helped. 

This is a former seven-times world champion, the highest-earning snooker player of all time, a man with two hundred more century breaks than the next nearest competitor, yet the commentators couldn’t stop telling both viewers up and down the country that Ronnie ‘The Rocket’ O’Sullivan was the bestest player ever to pick up a cue. 

I’m not saying that Hendry’s fun to watch (it’s all relative), or that he’s got a Dad in jail for murder, or that he tends to ask Chinese journalists whether they want to ‘suck on this’...

but in his own irretrievably boring way, he gets the job done.

Which leads rather neatly to the subject of Robert Mugabe. He and Hendry, despite their differences, must in their darker moments wonder what they did wrong.  

Probably Gordon Brown has similar worries. ‘I’ve followed the formula for success, yet everybody’s banging on about the other fellow and how amazing he is.’ 

‘I’ve headed up a paramilitary terrorist organisation which has attacked military, government and civilian targets, and I’ve been imprisoned on unproven charges and, whilst incarcerated, earned a law degree from a British university. Upon release from jail I’ve helped rid my country of the minority white imperialists, and have – and with some justification – been accused of cronyism and embezzlement. I have protected those minority white imperialists who are rich enough to deserve my protection despite my published beliefs, just as I have praised Mahatma Ghandi for his philosophy of non-violence whilst remembering fondly blowing things up.’ 

I admit that the bit about Ghandi isn’t true of Mugabe, but the rest is. What troubles me, however, is that it’s all also true of one N Mandela esq. Even the bit about Ghandi. 

 

 

So spare a thought for poor, demented Robert Mugabe. He probably wonders why nobody will ever put up a statue of him in Parliament Square, or hand over a much-needed £750 000 and a Nobel peace prize.

He’s probably sitting about right now, the poor old chap, eating skittles and watching The Last King of Scotland, wondering whether Larry Fishburn will ever have the acting chops to portray him with the requisite charm and ebullience.

‘Oh,’ thinks he, ‘and I should remember to remind those holier-than-thou twats at the various embassies that there’s a qualitative difference between mismanaging an economy and killing 40,000 people every month in the Congo, so piss off up there and help the French, and leave me alone.’ 

Then, whilst he’s got aides bothering him with suggestions about how rig yet another election, he’ll get to how unjust it is that it’s all very well for Mssrs McGuinness and Adams to indulge in a spot of murder now and then (3000 RUC so far, but, as Hendry will testify, the stats ain’t everything), but when his chaps kill 60 MDC supporters, or fill their pockets at a UN buffet, everybody in the Fourth Estate gets in all of a tiz-woz and says that he’s a villain of the first order. 

And when he detains someone without trial for a couple of weeks, it’s all ‘oh, Poor Morgan Tsvangarai’, and yet when British politicians want to do it for six weeks, it’s all ‘oh, but there are bad people out there, so shut up’. 

But these double standards are nothing new. Head somewhere edgy like Soho (or SoHo, it’s all much the same) and chassay about wearing a swastika and see what happens. You’ll be lucky if what’s left of you fills a bucket. 

Before you run off and do this, though, you might consider giving the experiment an air of academic rigour, and for comparative purposes slip on a CCCP t-shirt to compliment those simply fabulous skinny jeans, and see if advertising a regime with three times as many confirmed kills as Hitler’s gets you into the same kind of trouble.