Zimbabwe's dictatorship

12 April 2012
Evening Standard editorial comment

Robert Mugabe is no longer the democratically elected President of Zimbabwe. He may keep the office of president; he may keep the power and the trappings of power, but he is a sham. He knows it, his people know it and the whole world knows it, and however much he continues to bully and oppress the majority of Zimbabweans who voted against him - or would have voted against him if they had been granted access to polling booths - he sits in his presidential palace today not as a democrat but as a dictator who rules by fear alone.

His is a pyrrhic victory, not least because Mugabe himself yearned for democratic legitimisation by his countrymen, and only started beating, torturing and killing his political opponents, expelling election monitors and rigging the vote when it became clear that most Zimbabweans were determined to vote him out of power, disgusted as they were by the way he was running their country into the ground while hugely enriching himself and his cronies.

The saddest sight, during the past few days, has been the tens of thousands of Zimbabweans who, having endured months of intimidation by Mugabe's armed thugs, have queued for hours in milelong lines outside polling booths, despite knowing that their faith in the democratic process would almost certainly count for nothing. Their determination to fight for democracy, and the courage of the opposition leaders who are today at greater risk than ever of being imprisoned and murdered, light a beacon of hope for the future.

The test now will be to see whether the Commonwealth can encourage that hope by suspending or expelling Zimbabwe. If it fails to take such action, because of cynical manipulation by African friends of Mugabe's such as South Africa's President Thabo Mbeki, it no longer deserves to survive.

Shard of glass

London is wary of towers, and rightly so, given some of the blots of the past. But we should welcome Southwark Council's decision to grant planning permission to the 1,000ft London Bridge Tower, otherwise known as the "shard of glass". Designed by the Italian architect Renzo Piano, its tapering form will lend distinction to the London skyline.

It will be taller than any other building in the capital (or Europe), but that is not an argument for opposing it: there is no reason why central London's skyline should be stuck at the level it reached in the 1970s. There are those who argue against any new skyscrapers, but this is a Canute-like attitude, as London is already and always will be a city of towers. Yes, the shard of glass will change some views of the Tower of London, and distant views from Parliament Hill and Kenwood, but not for the worse.

These views are characterised by their variety rather than their classical perfection, and it is better to have an elegant skyscraper appearing in them than the mediocre stumps like the towers that now stand around London Bridge Station. There are, however, two caveats. The first is that Southwark's decision does not release a flood of consents for pale imitations. The second is that we do indeed get the Piano design as advertised, and not a dumbed-down version by hack designers, as has often happened in the past once celebrity architects have won a controversial planning permission.

Early Wintour

The French are renowned for robust anti-Americanism and Parisians are especially unreceptive to bossy Anglophones. So it's surprising that Anna Wintour, the glacial editor of American Vogue, has managed to persuade the organisers of Paris Fashion Week to cut the nine-day schedule of the fashion shows into six short days, so that she can get back to her punishing work schedule in New York that bit earlier.

Suzy Menkes, of the International Herald Tribune, another colossus of the fashion world, has indignantly protested that this will effectively exclude young, small-name designers from the fashion editors' round and describes the revised, intensive programme - 13 shows in one day - as "inhumane and unacceptable". Certainly, this battle shows where the real power lies in the heady world of fashion.

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