IF IT’S BAD form to speak ill of the dead, it seems to be even worse form to speak ill of the almost-dead tyrant. When I’ve written before about the monstrous regime of Fidel Castro — one of the longest-standing abusers of human rights on the planet — I’ve been deluged with e-mails and letters accusing me of everything bar incest.

Despite the pictures of him that appeared on Monday, it’s clear that he is on his last legs. And when he does finally pop his clogs, the mourning of left-liberals will be intense.

Such hero worship of so brutal a tyrant would seem beyond rational explanation. As Amnesty International puts it in its 2006 report on Cuba: “There was increasing international concern about Cuba’s failure to improve civil and political rights . . . Restrictions on freedom of expression, association and movement continued to cause great concern. Nearly 70 prisoners of conscience remained in prison.”

Cuban prisoners are detained under the catch-all peligrosidad predelictiva, defined as “a person’s special proclivity to commit offences as demonstrated by conduct that is manifestly contrary to the norms of socialist morality”. Castro also operates a pretty basic form of censorship: he imprisons journalists to whom he objects. Twenty-four journalists were in prison at the end of 2005. And no Cuban is allowed to travel abroad without permission.

Rationally, those who describe themselves as “progressive” ought to be campaigning for Castro’s departure. Instead, when he does die, his image is likely to outsell even that of Che Guevara on the ubiquitous T-shirts. But rational explanation is the wrong place to start. Ever since Robespierre, the original left-wing tyrant, large sections of the Left have allied themselves with oppressors. Even when the evidence of Stalin’s butchery was known, for example, George Bernard Shaw continued to praise him, condoning Stalin’s purges by arguing that he was merely getting rid of those who weren’t up to their jobs, and that “they often have to be pushed off the ladder with a rope around their necks”.

There is a further, more modern, incongruity: the willingness of elements of the Left to ally with Islamists who exemplify everything they ought, rationally, to be campaigning against. So when Ken Livingstone sings the praises of the Muslim cleric Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Mayor of London is eulogising a man who — quite apart from supporting suicide bombing — argues that it is a husband’s duty “to beat her (his wife) lightly with his hands” when she does not obey him, and who proselytises that a homosexual should be given “the same punishment as any sexual pervert . . . Some say we should burn them, and so on. There is disagreement . . . The important thing is to treat this act as a crime.”

The roots of such bizarre hero worship are complex, but for all its apparent incompatibility with a Left which claims to promote freedom, equality and prosperity, there is a linking thread. Whether it be Robespierre, Stalin, Castro or al-Qaradawi, all their actions stem from the same certainty that the broader Left holds: that the ends it seeks are so incontrovertibly proper that the means are justified for the greater good.

It might not be a very deep philosophical explanation, but it works even for relatively prosaic obsessions of the Left such as high taxes. Because it is, to most of the Left, self-evident that only the State should run schools and hospitals, so it is perfectly proper to take people’s money to finance it. The ends make the means entirely justified.

• HAVING moved house recently, my thrice-weekly run is no longer on streets but in a park. I was worried about all sorts of things when I moved, but one development has taken me entirely by surprise. I want to shoot on sight every dog I see.

  Why do dog owners think that their animals have the right to run freely off the leash in a park? I can put up with the faeces that they deposit on the pathways. It’s possible, albeit unpleasant, to run around them. What one can’t ignore is when a hulking beast of teeth and jaw, or even some puny yapping squirty thing, decides that the thing running in front of it — me — is its prey.

  Dogs chase after things, especially when those things are moving. Their owners are either too stupid or too selfish to care. On second thoughts, it’s not the dogs that should be shot . . .

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