Remember this one about South Africa’s peaceful transition from apartheid?

Try to imagine the howling of fury had apartheid leader PW Botha denied the African population of S Africa the drugs needed to give sick people a chance to fight HIV – and 300,000 people had died as a result.

You’re right.

One can not imagine it.

Genocide indictment maybe?

See by contrast the mumblings of embarrassment when T Mbeki does just that.

And he is still hovering around claiming to be a credible mediator for Zimbabwe, where the health system is collapsing as the Mugabe clique crash the country into the ground.

Forner President Carter says that the plight of Zimbabwe is ‘worse than we could have imagined’. True no doubt. But that says more about the impoverishment of his knowledge and imagination than it does about the enforced impoverishment of Zimbabwe.

Back in the mid-1980s when the AIDS drama had not yet soared up the policy agenda, our High Commissioner in Zambia wrote a famous Despatch back to London about the likely devastating impact of AIDS on that part of Africa.

It was probably one of the most influential FCO reports ever written, in lurching policy thinking in a quite new direction.

Despite this prescient warning well before the ANC came to power in S Africa, we alas are now reduced to modest gestures after incalculable damage has been done.

By the leading architect of that famously ‘peaceful transition’.