Robert Mugabe’s resignation fascinates because the fall of tyrants is always a family story, decline of the father, writ large. What a strange creature he is. Who else would give a speech of such orotundity that it contained archaic words like ‘pith’, ‘collegiality’, ‘comported’, ‘untrammelled’ and ‘vicissitudes?’ No British politician has used such language since the 1950s but Mugabe, well-educated by Jesuits, has the pomposity of a pedantic poetaster leavened with Marxist-liberationist arcana. As a teenager I had a weakness for freedom fighters. When Mugabe came to London to negotiate independence, I vanished from home to stand outside his hotel. I was very disappointed that he looked like a dorky teacher. My parents were nervous because when I was about 11, fascinated by the military prowess of General Giap, I had tried to defect to Vietnam. Its embassy was in our street, emblazoned with a red-starred flag. One day the temptation proved irresistible. Luckily I entered the basement where the staff lived and they gave me a bowl of their rice. Eventually I got bored and went home. That was end of my Ho Chi Minh Trail.
It is a characteristic of potentates that they don’t succumb to peaceful retirement. Instead they hold power in their hoary fists as judgment and grip weaken, destroying any successors except family members. In Zimbabwe, Mugabe’s instinct to crown his wife Grace almost spawned yet another republican monarchy to join those of Cuba, North Korea, Equatorial Guinea and Syria — but went too far.
With popular rulers, the wife can become the guardian of their greatness: Peter the Great was succeeded by his wife, Catherine I. Sometimes the wives are an improvement. The wife of Tsar Peter III became Catherine the Great — though he had to be strangled for her to pull it off. And opinion polls say that if beautiful Michelle Obama ran against Trump, she’d win.
Family politics always resembles a Mafia clan: I am gripped by the brilliant Italian drama series set in Naples, Gomorrah, which has a brutal Shakespearean, even Zimbabwean, poetry to it. King Lear, again.
This is an extract from Simon Sebag Montefiore's diary, from this week's Spectator