So Robert Gabriel Mugabe is dead. Social media yesterday was full of hate-fuelled rants and expressions of joy at his demise, but I feel that his death is both a travesty and a tragedy. He died in a luxurious hospital, surrounded by his family, but if there was any justice in this politically correct world, he would have died alone in a prison cell or better still, at the end of a rope.

If ever the leader of a nation deserved to appear before the Hague for genocide, it was Mugabe but in the British newspapers today, he is inevitably described as a freedom fighter who went wrong.

That is arrant nonsense I’m afraid. Mugabe did not fight for his beliefs. He snivelled and stole his way to power and was aided and abetted throughout by the British and Americans as well as the Chinese. Ian Smith warned the British what would happen if they gave the country to Mugabe and his cronies. Smith was proved correct in every detail but I have never read or heard a word of apology from the Brits.

Mugabe massacred many thousand Matabele innocents (I was in Matabeleland for much of Gukuruhundi and was told to ‘wind my neck in’ when I complained about events taking place) but the world ignored it and continued to laud this bestial leader for fear of appearing racist.

No, I am glad Mugabe has gone but I wish it had been in different circumstances and his passing will not help Zimbabweans, still suffering under a similar, if not more brutal leader in Emmerson Mnangagwa.

Successive British governments have a great deal to answer for.

I have always looked on Oliver Cromwell as a puritanical, humourless leader and in my youth, would always identify in my daydreams with the dashing cavaliers rather than the stern-faced roundheads, but oh how this country could do with a Cromwell now.

I am not going to go into the debacle that is the current British Parliament as other far more learned scribblers have held forth in the newspapers today, but let me just quote from Cromwell’s speech to the equally corrupt parliamentarians of 1653.

“It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonoured by your contempt of all virtue and defiled by your practice of every vice. Ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government. Ye are a pack of mercenary wretches and would like Esau, sell your country for a mess of pottage, and like Judas betray your God for a few pieces of money. Is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? Is there one vice you do not possess? Ye have no more religion than my horse. Gold is your God. Which of you have not bartered your conscience for bribes?

Is there a man amongst you that has the least care for the good of the Commonwealth? Ye sordid prostitutes have you not defiled this sacred place, and turned the Lord’s temple into a den of thieves, by your immoral principles and wicked practices? Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation. You were deputed here by the people to get grievances redressed, are yourselves become the greatest grievance.

Your country therefore calls upon me to cleanse this Augean stable, by putting a final period to your iniquitous proceedings in this House; and which by God’s help, and the strength he has given me, I am now come to do. I command ye therefore, upon the peril of your lives, to depart immediately out of this place. Go, get you out! Make haste! Ye venal slaves be gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there and lock up the doors.

In the name of God, go!”

His words could apply equally to the snivelling wretches who sit in Westminster today. They too have ‘grown intolerably odious to the whole nation’ but we don’t have a Cromwell to do anything about it.