PRESIDENT Mugabe of Zimbabwe has praised the Prince of Wales as a “real gentleman” for controversially shaking hands with him at the Pope’s funeral but has dismissed Tony Blair, who snubbed him, as a “tyrant”.

Vatican officials triggered a diplomatic incident when they gave Mugabe, Charles and Blair seats close to each other at Pope John Paul’s funeral in April. Blair switched seats, but the prince took the president’s outstretched hand.

He was later criticised for shaking hands with a man who has been widely condemned by the international community for suppressing human rights and ruining his nation’s economy.

Charles’s spokesman claimed at the time that he had been “ambushed” and that he found the Zimbabwean regime “abhorrent”. Mugabe has now given a sharply contrasting account of the incident, however, in a rare interview with a foreign journalist.

“The incident was more between me and the prime minister,” he told Daphne Barak, an Israeli television reporter. “We’d never met, but he deserted his seat because he realised that our own seats were next to their own. But Prince Charles remained in place. He’s a real gentleman.”

He said that he and the prince had met before. “We were not strangers to each other. So we sat next to each other. I did not expect that the prince would behave in the same crude way as the prime minister.”

Mugabe said that he chatted with the prince and the two of them “reminisced on the past”. It was a “social” rather than political conversation.

Herbert Murerwa, Zimbabwe’s finance minister, who had met the prince while high commissioner in London, was sitting between the president and the prince.

“I introduced my president to the prince,” Murerwa told Barak. “I said, ‘Meet President Mugabe’. They shook hands.”

Asked what they talked about, Murerwa said: “His wife. He was marrying Camilla [Parker Bowles] the next day. We talked about it. He said: ‘You know the British media. I hope it will go well’.”

Murerwa said: “It was a long conversation. We were sitting together for an hour and a half.”

Clarence House insisted yesterday, however, that Charles was forced into shaking Mugabe’s hand because of the religious protocol.

A spokesman for the prince said: “The prince was caught unawares during the peace-be-with-you part of the funeral, the traditional handshake part. Partly he was unaware and partly it would have been very disrespectful to the church at the time for the prince not to shake Mugabe’s hand.”

He added: “The prince was very much there as an official representative at the Pope’s funeral and certainly didn’t view the hour and a half as a time to start having conversations with people. To claim he had conversations with either Herbert Murerwa or President Mugabe is not true.”

In his interview Mugabe denied being a tyrant and accused Blair of being one.

“If there was judgment by some supreme power of the three of us — Bush, Blair and Robert Mugabe — I’d be the first to receive greater justice from the Almighty,” he said. “I’ve killed no one, like they are doing. You know, people are dying in Iraq.”

Mugabe argued that Bush and Blair should now leave Iraq to the United Nations. He is going to the UN summit in New York this week to discuss reform of the organisation. It is one of the rare foreign visits he is able to make, having been barred by many governments.

He may expect more handshakes at the UN, however, including one from Jacques Chirac, the French president. Are they friends? “Yeah, yeah. We have a rapport,” claimed Mugabe.

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