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The Sunday Telegraph - Why has China bought Mugabe a mansion? By Christopher Booker

It may not be surprising that, as befits any mad dictator, President Mugabe is now the proud owner of a palatial £4.5 million mansion in Harare and a similarly lavish country hideaway, each fitted with the latest electronic security systems, including anti-aircraft missiles.

But why should all this have been provided for him by the People’s Republic of China?

The explanation lies in a deal struck in 2005 whereby Mr Mugabe handed over to China his country’s mineral rights, including the world’s second largest reserves of platinum, worth £250 billion.

So the fact that, knowing this, we still tried to go through the China-seated Security Council to deal with Mugabe, or anyone else, makes us look like the world’s biggest saps. (And given the forum, would mean that we really are.)

In return for allowing the Chinese to cart away more than half a billion pounds’ worth of minerals a year, Mr Mugabe not only makes a vast personal fortune for himself and his henchmen, but is given all the arms he needs to keep his criminal regime in power, including guns, jet fighters and military vehicles. (For further details, see my colleague Richard North’s EU Referendum website.)

Contrast this with our own Government’s response to Mugabe’s tyranny. Since Zimbabwe is included in the 28 areas of “common foreign policy” we have ceded to the EU, we can do nothing except in conjunction with our EU colleagues.

So, about that, Mark Steyn came out of hiding for a few minutes last week to appear on the Hugh Hewitt show:

HH: Do you expect they will ever get out of their sloth and do anything about this butcher [Mugabe]?

MS: Well, in fairness, Mugabe isn’t Europe’s problem. It’s Britain’s problem. It was Britain that ushered in Robert Mugabe to power after the Lancaster House talks in 1980, supervised by Lord Carrington, who was then the foreign secretary in Britain. And he has turned one of the wealthiest and most bountifully endowed jurisdictions in Africa into this basket case, which now has, I believe, the highest proportion of billionaires on the planet, simply because the currency is now worthless.

And this is, and it would be a simple matter for Britain to actually remove this guy, and supervise free and fair elections over there.

Well evidently someone told the Brits that so they got rid of that problem with an EU treaty or two. Very handy.

Anyway, back to Mr Booker:

All this provides a remarkable parallel to what is happening elsewhere in Africa.

In Sudan the tyrannical government is given full support by China in return for a monopoly on its large reserves of oil. Meanwhile, EU politicians wring their hands over the tragedy unfolding in Darfur, while a pitiful EU military force in Chad notably fails to protect a million helpless refugees from the genocide waged on them by China’s friends in Khartoum.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as we learned from an excellent report in The Daily Telegraph last week, China last January signed a “minerals for infrastructure” deal, worth £2.25 billion, under which it bought the rights to some of the world’s richest copper and cobalt reserves, in return for building roads, railways, hospitals, dams and airports.

This is the country where, five years ago, the EU proudly sent its first military force bearing the ring of stars insignia - to achieve precisely nothing.

We now learn that the Congolese government had first proposed such a minerals deal to the EU but, according to the country’s deputy minister for mines, the EU replied that it “did not have the muscle that was needed”.

All over Africa we see a similar story. The ruthless but canny Chinese dictatorship props up equally ruthless and corrupt governments, as in Angola, in return for that continent’s fabulous mineral reserves. Britain, which once ruled much of Africa, has handed over its policy-making to the EU, which does little but make sanctimonious and irrelevant gestures.

And then he points out that this is a continent (Africa) that since all those rock concerts is “at the top” of their international agenda, and a country (China) that they’re flying politicians over to all the time in order to form a strategic partnership. Looks like it’s going really well. Depending on what they want, exactly.