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The rotters' club

Hob-nobbing with dictators, robbing graves and shaking hands with the devil - it's just another week in politics

Eamonn McCann, 11 Jul 2008

I am surprised that Tony O’Reilly hasn’t been asked to intervene in the crisis sparked by Robert Mugabe’s murderous clamp-down on anyone suspected of flirting with democracy. The flabby boss-man of Independent Newspapers is a long-time chum of the demented Zimbabwe dictator.

In 1982, O’Reilly travelled to Zimbabwe for a business meeting with Mugabe, which he later described as “friendly” and “constructive.” He might have added “lucrative.” The deal struck involved the acquisition by Heinz – O’Reilly was CEO at the time – of a State-sponsored company Olivine, which used local farm produce to make edible oils, margarine and soap. Heinz invested $13 million in the project, and was soon recouping its outlay every year.

In 1988, O’Reilly hosted a press conference for Mugabe at a hotel near Wall Street in New York. Publicists hired and paid for by Heinz ensured an impressive attendance of US business reporters. A jocular O’Reilly presented Mugabe with a giant tin of Heinz baked beans, quipping that he didn’t recommend Mugabe devour its entire contents at one sitting, considering the “anti-social side effects when consumed in too large quantities.” Ho.

The first question following the public love-in between the two Jesuit-educated pals came from a Newsweek reporter who inquired: “If you are liberalising the economy, why not have free elections and a truly open political system?” Mugabe had just abolished the office of prime minister and appointed himself “Executive President” – the post he still, at the time of writing, continues to cling on to. Mugabe’s responded: “We don’t waste our money and time on these types of elections. We know what the people want and need.”

O’Reilly appears not to have been put out or put off by this brutal rejoinder. In 1992, Mugabe joined him for a weekend at O’Reilly’s castle in County Kildare, where the two celebrated high mass in the medieval private chapel built around a crusader’s tomb, and took communion together. The late John Junor coined the appropriate response to this repulsive occasion: “Pass the sick-bag, Alice.”



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Eamonn McCann

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