The Sketch: Michael Ancram has gone incognito. But would we spot the difference?

It's our last day, can you bear it? Our leader will be addressing the nation this afternoon. I'll be there, savouring the last parliamentary moments before having to go and spend the summer with my family.

It's a summer that lasts three months. A fully paid trimester, with taxpayer-supported pension contributions. Robin Cook wants to restart work in September. This dangerous madman must be stopped!

Yesterday, Jack Straw was asked whether he'd been in touch with his opposite number in Zimbabwe. It sounded like the start of one of those sketch jokes. One politician upbraiding the other about a rapacious clique of vicious apparatchiks looting the country and dividing up the spoils among their supporters. How dare you talk about the Prime Minister like that, they'd both say. Arf arf.

Michael Ancram had just come back from Zimbabwe. He'd gone incognito. No one recognised him. He might have presented himself at the border shouting: "I am Michael Ancram, shadow Foreign Secretary of the Conservative Party!" and he'd still have been incognito. Cram what? Shadow who? Conservative huh?

He told us about his visit. He asked Jack Straw whether he was aware of the obscenity of famine. The obscenity of displaced families without jobs, possessions or homes. There were 85,000 such farm workers over there. Soon there might be 300,000. That was obscene.

It's easy to despair of the Tories when you see them close up. They just haven't got it.

It is possible, is it not, to imagine a grave party elder standing at the dispatch box and making us see what he had seen; making us weep, indeed, by seeing what he had seen. He might have shamed us for our moral sloth. He might have thrilled us with what might be done. He might have dwarfed the Foreign Secretary. That can't be as difficult as it sounds.

Mr Straw pointed out that the Mugabes had been humiliated and inconvenienced. What had we missed? They'd been made to wait in an aircraft on the tarmac at Madrid airport. It takes a politician to realise that another politician would feel this punishment so keenly. Did the dictator writhe, do you think? Did the humiliation turn his eyes into his soul? Did they close the bar at the same time? Mr Straw also claimed his great victory. He had "multilateralised" the international opposition to Mugabe.

When others asked for sanctions to be stepped up – perhaps banning Air Zimbabwe (the same had been done for Air Libya after Lockerbie), Mr Straw drew breath sharply. It was important to act proportionately. And he had trebled the list of Zanu-PF mobsters to whom travel restrictions applied. There were now 72 people who weren't allowed to travel to the European Union. Except for conferences. The humiliated Mrs Mugabe was inconvenienced in this way. "Their very efforts to get round the restrictions show that they are working," he claimed, to a snorting, scowling press gallery.

But Mr Straw didn't want to be dragged into "diversionary questions". That is, real sanctions to really humiliate and actually inconvenience Mugabe and his financial backers. Never humiliate financial backers. Word might get around and that really would inconvenience New Labour.

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