For those who like their irony raw and bloody, I recommend The Herald, the state-run newspaper mouthpiece of Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s brutal, ageing autocrat. Earlier this week The Herald declared: “The state has been lenient with Tsvangirai,” referring to Morgan Tsvangirai, the Zimbabwean opposition leader. “Why should Tsvangirai be treated with kid gloves?” Working himself into a righteous lather, the editorial writer gave warning that if Tsvangirai continued his campaign of defiance it would “result in misery for himself and his family and those among his supporters who are prepared to follow this political corpse into the grave”. Here was a violent threat, disguised as journalism.

On the day that article was published, Tsvangirai and opposition colleagues (who had tried to attend a banned prayer rally) were already being methodically beaten and tortured by Mugabe’s thugs in a police station south of Harare.

All tyrannies have a tipping point, a moment when the power of the dictator crumbles and he reads the writing on the wall, finally hearing the voice that tells him: “Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.” Usually, that point is marked by a symbol, an image, an event that seems to capture the weakness and barbarity of the despot: the destruction by sledgehammer of the Berlin Wall; the raising of the Soviet flag over the Reichstag in 1945. In Iraq, the moment came with the toppling of Saddam’s statue, leaving two vast and trunkless legs, as hollow as the regime itself. For Nicolai Ceaucescu, nemesis came as he gazed over a balcony to address the crowd and heard, not the regimented chants of cowed subjects, but the susurration of revolt and mockery: his look of angry bewilderment was his own death warrant.

For Mugabe, the symbolic image that marks the end may be the photograph of Tsvangirai, emerging from police captivity, head gashed and face swollen, and his wrist broken. Violent suppression of dissent is routine in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. What makes this incident special is the sheer incompetence with which it was inflicted. This was meant to be another obvious warning to Mugabe’s enemies; instead, it has surely emboldened them.

When Tsvangirai and his bruised and broken colleagues were brought to court, the judge took one look at their injuries and dispatched them to hospital. Charges, if there ever were any, appear to have been dropped, and any pretence of a genuine legal process has gone. This was not the cool, cruel misuse of state power to sustain a dictatorship, but a vicious and panicky response by a brittle and nervous tyrant.

Adding to the chaos, the regime has sought to suppress the truth about what happened to Tsvangirai, but with only partial success. One newspaper has dared to publish a photograph of the mauled opposition leader, but everyone in Zimbabwe knows the reality of what was done to him.

Totalitarian regimes rely on artificial control, the consistent projection of omniscience, strength and permanence: the stoking of fear, underpinned by lies and fake grandeur. The secure dictator exudes calm and decisive menace. Last week’s events, by contrast, were messy, disorganised and self-defeating. Mugabe cannot kill or even silence Tsvangirai, but only hurt him. “We must make him cry,” his torturers allegedly shouted as they beat him. These are the actions of a regime spiralling out of control.

The fall of Mugabe has been prophesied repeatedly over the past seven years as Zimbabwe has descended into dystopia, a nightmare of armed gangs, government corruption, famine and chaos passionately evoked by Peter Godwin in his new memoir When a Crocodile Eats the Sun. No peacetime economy has ever disintegrated so fast. The number of Zimbabwean dollars needed to buy a single brick today would have purchased a three-bedroom house with a swimming pool in 1990.

Yet demographic and economic disaster alone will not remove Mugabe. Indeed, the 83-year-old crocodile is manoeuvring to extend his rule to 2010 and beyond. No amount of condemnation from the international community will budge him, particularly while South Africa, disgracefully, declines to exert its full influence on this repellent regime.

Mugabe will only go if he hears, for himself, the whisper of rebellion, as Ceausescu heard it on the balcony in Bucharest, that indefinable sound promising that tomorrow will be different from today. The signs are building: Mugabe’s sometime allies are jockeying for position, anger is spreading among underpaid police and troops and, as hunger bites, the protests are growing more violent.

On Wednesday Mugabe went to visit his ailing sister Sabina in hospital. This was the same clinic where Tsvangirai was being treated for his multiple injuries. In another moment of hefty symbolism, Zimbabwe’s President chose not to see the victim of his own brutality. But Mugabe’s freedom to choose what he wishes to see in the country he has wrecked is steadily narrowing.

Instead of the writing on the wall, Mugabe can still read the fantasy adulation in The Herald, which recently ran a five-part series extolling his “legacy” as “a source of inspiration to millions of Zimbabweans”. He can ignore the groundswell of fury and hear only the voice of his own self-deception.

But Mugabe is a tyrant, not a fool. He can try to prevent his people from witnessing what he has done to his opponents, but he has seen it himself. Mugabe knows that when he sees the photograph of Tsvangirai, bruised, battered and half-blinded, he is looking not at a vanquished enemy, but staring defeat in the face.

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