New Zealand's Prime Minister when Robert Mugabe seized power in Zimbabwe in 1980 was another tough guy named Robert Muldoon, and he'll be chortling in his grave as the 93-year-old African dictator finally steps aside.
Muldoon caused a diplomatic furore at the 1981 Commonwealth leaders' meeting in Melbourne the following year where Mugabe was treated by most with kid gloves but by our Prime Minister with boxing gloves.
It was my first overseas trip with Muldoon and it was an eye opener with him reminding us that Mugabe had been shooting people in the bush not too long before.
When the comments were reported, they were taken exception to by the then Secretary General of the Commonwealth Sonny Ramphal who was always lauded by the black African countries.
Muldoon was having none of it, telling Ramphal through us to "stick to keeping the minutes."
Our PM was playing to his constituency back home on the eve of the 1981 election, and the Springbok tour here a few months earlier, when he threatened the black African states that if they criticised him for hosting the rugby he'd unload a dossier of human rights abuses they'd been inflicting on their people.
To say Mugabe was brutal on his people is a gross understatement.