Last updated 19:42, Thursday, 10 July 2008

THE phrase “be careful what you wish for” has never been more apt than when applied to Gordon Brown.

I am starting to feel quite sorry for the poor man who made it so obvious for so long that he wanted to be Prime Minister.

If he could take that wish back, make it all go away, I wonder if he would?

I heard him being interviewed during the Nelson Mandela birthday concert at the weekend.

At one stage he was asked if he was going to be rocking to Queen and his reply was: “You never know.”

I think he would have gained a lot more respect if, instead of trying to be cool, he admitted that he would probably look like a “dad dancer”.

The poor man is trying so hard to market himself, but it is just not working.

That aside, there was a time when the polls showed that the majority of British people wanted Tony Blair to stand aside for Gordon Brown because he was going to be the answer to all our ills.

Since then there has been a worldwide recession, starting in the United States. You can’t really blame Mr Brown for that.

Without any political bias, I can’t really see that he has done much wrong or that anything that has happened can be directly levelled at his door.

All became clear last week when I rang a friend in New Zealand.

The cost of living there is spiralling, food and fuel cost more, and crime violent crime is rising. And, she said, the country’s Labour Government and its prime minister Helen Clark are on their way out.

She said that the Labour Party there had not really done anything terrible but all the polls indicated that it will lose the next elections.

I think that has what has happened here. The population is ready for a change and poor Gordon just happens to be the guy in charge as the groundswell starts.

The thing is, though, that if we don’t like our politicians, if we want to change them for good reason or on a whim, we can. We have the democratic right to go and vote and our votes can change governments.

That is not what happens in Zimbabwe.

In the very week that we celebrated the birthday of an African politician who has taught the world about love, tolerance and forgiveness, we have seen a farce of an election in Zimbabwe ending in the self-declaration of presidency by the only candidate, Robert Mugabe.

There has been such huge change in Africa over the past 40 years and never have we seen a starker contrast of the results of that change that we do when we compare Mugabe and Nelson Mandela.

Mandela has so much reason to be bitter - as do most black people in an African continent where their rights were taken away by the colonists. Mandela, though, was put into a miserable, isolated prison for over 25 years. He lost his family, he lost the right to a normal life and when he finally emerged from his jail he was already an old man.

He had reason to hate and nobody could blame him if he did. Once he became president of South Africa, he had reason to try and take back something that he had lost.

Instead, he forgave his enemies, called on all South Africans to form a rainbow nation and he, who was feted by the world, remained a humble man who does not even recognise his own greatness.

Then there is Mugabe, the personification of evil. He starves and cheats and steals and even kills not only his enemies but his own people who had shared his dream of a Zimbabwe that could provide a decent life for all its people.

But Mugabe wants more - so his people get less.

We may or may not like Gordon Brown at the moment. Some may want a change of Government in the next elections and some might want to stay with the one we have.

That is our choice. But at least we have a choice, and let us be forever grateful for that.