Paul Hopkins reported from Rhodesia for Irish media from 1977 to 1980

The fact is that Mugabe throughout his long reign was more useful to the West clean than exposed as a tyrant. It made sense to keep the Zimbabwean leader onside — and ignore that he had dirtied his copy book.

Four decades on unemployment is around 90%, civil liberties and political freedom, as assessed by the Freedom House organisation, are well below those recorded in the 1970s under white minority rule. Life expectancy is now one of the lowest in the world.

When I went there in 1977 as a young journalist to cover the last three years of the ‘Bush War’ that eventually ended with Mugabe rolling down Salisbury’s main street in 1980 in his armoured tank, I fell in love with what was a paradise of sorts.

Today Zimbabwe is a failed state with a non-functioning economy, a once-flourishing agricultural sector in tatters and a people on the verge of starvation. The first 20 years of Mugabe’s reign saw a slow decline, so slow the rest of the world, hardly noticed what was happening — and those who did chose to ignore it.

In his autobiography Smith, who died in 2012 aged 88, talked about the loneliness of having to break from the former colonial power because he, unlike Britain, did not believe the majority blacks were yet ready to be the architects of their own destiny.

He believed, to his last breath, that “fair-minded” whites had been betrayed by just about everybody he could think of — the Tories, Labour, the Afrikaaners, the Organisation of African Unity, the UN. No surprise then, that he called his biography The Great Betrayal.