Today in Trinidad the Commonwealth leaders will for the first time in some years discuss whether or not they should allow their delinquent outcast – Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe – back into the 53-member club.

That this debate is actually taking place while the 85-year-old Mugabe is still president of the country he has ruined so dramatically is testimony both to the Commonwealth’s ability to forgive and forget and equally to the wily dictator’s instinct for survival. (Mugabe withdrew Zimbabwe’s membership in December 2003, in protest at its continued suspension for rigging the country’s elections.)

Despite setting new standards of tyrannical rule, socio-economic destruction and spectacular accumulation of personal wealth on a continent whose political leaders have cornered the market in such political malfeasance, Mugabe has managed not only to hang onto power but now appears to be a candidate for rehabilitation.

The Commonwealth caveat is that readmission will be linked to the reforms that Mugabe promised when he signed the so-called Global Political Agreement more than a year ago. The GPA was intended to be a power-sharing agreement that would lead to the completion of a new constitution by August 2010, followed by free and fair elections. Human rights abuses, state control of the media, illegal farm invasions and other undemocratic behaviour that has become the norm under Mugabe’s ZANU-PF regime for the past ten years was also to be abandoned with the forming of a new coalition government.

Although Mugabe reluctantly swore in his old enemy Morgan Tsvangirai as prime minister in February, there have been problems in the coalition government from the outset, and Mugabe’s ongoing autocratic behaviour offered sceptics evidence that he was using Tsvangirai and the illusion of power-sharing as a way of re-establishing himself on the world stage as an elder statesman rather than his current status of power-mad pariah. Insiders say that the travel sanctions imposed by the EU on Mugabe and many of his inner circle are a key factor in his show of democratisation. "Mugabe and his wife want to go shopping in Bond Street and the Rue Faubourg again. It’s as simple as that," said one insider this week.