THE benighted African state of Malawi you would have thought already had enough on its plate.
Certainly the appointment of spring-heeled Jack McConnell as our man in Blantyre won't butter many parsnips in a country swept by hunger, AIDS, unemployment, mass poverty and ill health.
It is an insult to the poor Africans, as much as it is to our diplomatic service, the way an expensively superannuated failed apparatchik has been dropped on them without ascintilla of ambassadorial bearing training or skill.
My only consolation - call it Schadenfreude - is that Jacko will be bored out of his tiny mind wishing he was back in our own Blantyre or even Cumbernauld - anywhere but Malawi. I was the last British politician to see the late tyrant.
Dr Hastings Banda that is, not McConnell. He was the former elder of the Church of Scotland (until the church very belatedly threw him out) who ruled Malawi by the rod.
He was much favoured by the West for what he was not - a Communist - at a time when the colonies like Mozambique, Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe and Zambia were booting out the Empire and spouting red flags or, in the case of Kenneth Kaunda, red 'kerchiefs.
They didn't care about the dirty little secrets Banda was keeping under his ubiquitous black Homburg hat. That he was a thief, a torturer and a murderer.
By the time I met him he was absolutely gaga. "How is the Prime Minister, Mr Wilson?" he asked me despite the fact Harold had left office nearly 20 years before.
Ididn't have the heart to tell the old boy Mr Wilson was in fact, er, dead. By that time Banda, and Malawi, were being run from behind the lace curtains by the brother of Banda's "official hostess", in fact his wee burd on the side. It could have been an Ealing comedy if it hadn't been so tragic.
Like Helen Liddell and Paul Boateng, McConnell is being given a diplomatic posting to ease him off the premises.
The difference is Australia and South Africa are plum postings, Malawi rotten fruit indeed.
It is a small dark corner where a very small man in a too-short black kilt with the wrong shirt and wrong socks has been made to go and stand to eat up his curds and whey.
'He'll be bored out his mind wishing he was back in our Blantyre or Cumbernauld'
g.galloway@dailyrecord.co.uk
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