Robert Mugabe was on typically outrageous form last week. Invited by the United Nations on a jolly to attend the 60th anniversary of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation in Rome, the Zimbabwean president laid into his old foes. George Bush and Tony Blair, he said, were “the two unholy men of our millennium”, responsible for war, pollution and, since the event was to mark World Food Day, hunger. Quite what the UN was doing inviting this corrupt and vile man to attend the event is beyond comprehension. For him to use the occasion to blame others for creating hunger is beyond parody.

Posing as a tourist, our reporter Christina Lamb has just visited Zimbabwe and has seen the effects of Mr Mugabe’s policies on his own people at first hand. Thousands and thousands of Zimbabweans are living like animals in the midst of rubble in southern Harare, foraging among rubbish for food or forced to prostitute themselves. They are the victims of their president’s urban beautification programme, which the UN itself estimates has left 700,000 homeless or destitute. Kofi Annan himself said that Operation Murambatsvina — “drive out the filth” — had done a “catastrophic injustice” to many of Zimbabwe’s poorest citizens “through indiscriminate actions, carried out with disquieting indifference to human suffering”. This again begs the question of why the UN keeps sucking up to this tyrant.

In her report today Ms Lamb describes the misery of those forced out of their homes by his policies, doomed to existences that, to adapt Hobbes, are “nasty, brutish and short”. Aids and hunger have reduced life expectancy to less than 40. The country’s once-thriving commercial farms are going to waste. Mr Mugabe continues to inflict man-made disasters on his people, while refusing to accept humanitarian assistance from outside, or allow emergency food supplies in Zimbabwe to be distributed to the hungry. A catastrophic injustice is occurring. How long before somebody does something about it?