UK to award Mugabe honorary degree then strip him of it

LONDON. The British government has confirmed that it will drastically increase the pressure it is exerting on Zimbabwean tyrant Robert Mugabe by awarding him an honorary degree before stripping him of it in absentia in a London ceremony.

"European governments don't get tougher than this," said a spokesman this morning.

"If this doesn't cripple him, nothing will."

The move signals a dramatic policy shift in Britain towards a more confrontational response after years of rewarding African despots for human rights abuses.

"We suspect the old approach might not be working any more," said Downing Street spokesman Alistair Throb-Mongrel, adding that the Thatcher government's response to Mugabe's 1984 ethnic cleansing massacres in Matabeleland – doubling British aide to Zimbabwe – had "probably not been the best thing to do at the time".

Likewise, he said, Britain "may have fumbled the rugger ball" in its response to Mugabe's violent and corrupt presidential run-off election in 1994. "As a nation we had two clear choices, once Mr Mugabe had stopped cracking open women's heads with half-bricks.

"One, we could hit him with sanctions or charges from the International Criminal Court.

"Or two, we could make him a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath." He said the second option had "somehow seemed less supportive at the time". As a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath Mugabe was awarded a scroll, a velvet hat and a free ball-and-claw bath.

However reports from Harare suggest that he has been unable to use the bath since 2004 as it has been converted into a reservoir for cholera-free drinking water. But Throb-Mongrel said that the days of appeasement and diplomacy were over.

"The gloves are coming off," he said. "Mugabe is a monster. He is out of control, a murderous, corrupt cancer killing the heart of his people, and he needs to broken right now.

"Which is why we're going to make him an honorary Doctor of Agriculture at Leeds University.

And then we're going to take it all away from him. "The scroll, the velvet hat, the graduation photos. "All of it." He said that the awarding and stripping of honorary degrees was working relatively well in most conflict areas in Africa, but conceded that the warlords of the Democratic Republic of Congo had refused to surrender their scrolls and velvet hats.

He said they were also insisting on being called names such as Papa Deathmonger PhD and My Learned Colleague Bundu The Slaughterer.

"They just haven't understood that they're beyond the pale academically," he said.

"It's really terribly gauche of them."