A letter to the Times which was published on 11th April 2008.

Daniel Emlyn-Jones’s absurdly unbalanced description of our colonial rule as a “history of humiliation, exploitation and degradation of native peoples” as in some way explaining the chaos in Zimbabwe (letters, April 8th) can be refuted by literally millions of documented actions to the contrary.

The 1922 White Paper on the colonies, for instance, set the tone for all the remaining colonial territories by roundly declaring in respect of Kenya, where there was substantial European immigration, that the interests of the native population were “paramount”.

To describe Robert Mugabe (born 1923) as “our monster” is likewise absurd.  Mugabe was educated in a Catholic mission school in what was then Southern Rhodesia, which enjoyed complete internal self-government over which the Colonial Office had no control whatsoever.

If anything created the monster in Mugabe it was his proclaimed belief in Marxism, which really is responsible for untold misery, death and degradation all over the world.