The complex world of Peter Hain

摘要

Say what you will about Robert Mugabe and his election-rigging ways, Zimbabwe's president keeps cool in a crisis. You have only to remember his comportment during that extraordinary moment when the white minority running South Africa plotted to assassinate China's president during a visit to Zimbabwe, and then to use nuclear weapons against Zimbabwe's tiny army. Mr Mugabe's crisis-calming TV broadcast, to his nation and the world, will go down in history as a masterpiece of statesmanship. Or it would go down in history if these events had happened. But they happened only in the imagination of Peter Hain, who published his imaginings five years ago in a thriller, "The Peking Connection", when the Labour Party was still in opposition and its MPS had more leisure. Since this excursion into fiction, fate has played its usual duplicitous tricks on Mr Hain. It has lifted him up by making him minister for Africa (and some other places). This is a dream come true for a lifelong anti-apartheid campaigner, born in Kenya, who boasts even now in speeches that he is "a son of Africa" and graduate of "the freedom struggle". But it has also dropped him to earth by pitting him against his erstwhile hero. Mr Mugabe, lionised in "The Peking Connection", nowadays calls its author the arch villain in Tony Blair's "gangster regime of little men".