Claire Short's chickens come home to roost............

The egregious Clare Short’s rant about the Chilcot inquiry almost certainly means that she is going to get roasted. Her come-uppance has been a long while in coming. No doubt Chilcot will make some reference to her threat to resign from the Blair Cabinet over war in Iraq and then voted to support it.

She first gained notoriety during the crisis in Montserrat when nearly half the island was destroyed  by the eruption of its volcano. The capital completely disappeared under volcanic mud. This included the only viable port. The airport was totally destroyed. Most of the good agricultural land remains in the ‘no-go’ area. The entire population of 15,000 was evacuated to the US and UK (it now stands at 5,000).

And how did the Secretary of State for International Development react to this disaster  in what was and still is a British Colony?

She refused to pay it even a short visit.

When faced with the need to construct a new airport, her Department selected a site after minimal local consultation, which the people said was in absolutely the wrong place. It is.

Her response to this was that ‘They will be wanting golden elephants next’, whatever that was supposed to mean. Not that she was very receptive to advice from any quarter. When she visited South Africa, her DFID advisor told me that she was the easiest Minister to brief ever. She never listened to anybody!

But her lasting achievement was the betrayal of white farmers in Zimbabwe with repercussions that will continue to be felt well into the future.

The Lancaster House Agreement that settled the new constitution had a clause that protected the private property rights of white farmers for the first 10 years. The Thatcher led government undertook  to provide the money needed to purchase their land for redistribution. The US Government provided funds to enable land to be redistributed on a ‘willing buyer, willing seller basis’.

By the end of the 10-year moratorium the promised Funds  had not materialized. Only £44 million had come through against a budget of $US 2 billion..

The new Labour Government ratted on the Agreement.

In a letter to the Zimbabwe Minister of Agriculture, Clare Short said that "we do not accept that Britain has a special responsibility to meet the costs of land purchase in Zimbabwe." She went on to write "We are a new government from diverse backgrounds, without links to former colonial interests. My own origins are Irish and, as you know, we were colonised, not colonisers."

She further informed the Zimbabwean government that the election of a Labour government “without links to former colonial interests” meant Britain no longer had any “special responsibility to meet the cost of land purchases

The inevitable consequence of this cynical repudiation of a binding agreement by Labour had its inevitable consequence.

Mugabe confiscated 4,500 white-owned farms without any compensation and  the main plank of the economy was ruined. Farmers were murdered if they resisted the confiscation of land which had been wild bush before they arrived. The whole economy became a total basket case, and the currency collapsed. The country was totally impoverished.

That is her lasting legacy.