Egg on face of Labour minister who called deposed leader 'ranting demagogue'

The Labour minister who likened Venezuela's president, Hugo Chavez, to Mussolini after his fall from power on Friday welcomed his return to office yesterday.

Denis MacShane, the Spanish-speaking Foreign Office minister in charge of relations with Latin America, called the failure of the military coup a blow for democratic values and appealed for social dialogue.

"Last week's coup has failed. Any change of government in Venezuela as elsewhere in Latin America and the world should come about by democratic means. In my talks with President Chavez last week he spoke of his admiration for the European model," he said in a statement posted on the Foreign Office website.

Diplomatic nimble-footedness could reconcile the comment with Saturday's website statement in which the MP for Rotherham appealed for "the swift return to a legitimate, democratic government in Venezuela" - but gave no indication that it might be the charismatic populist Mr Chavez he had in mind.

Less susceptible to nuance was the article the minister, a former journalist, contributed to Saturday's Times when it looked as if Mr Chavez was as much history as his 19th-century hero, Simon Bolivar.

Under the headline "I saw the calm, rational Chavez turn into a ranting populist demagogue" Mr MacShane described how his official 20-minute meeting with the Venezuelan leader on Monday had turned into a two-hour session in the presidential palace.

"As we spoke about Latin America - I felt I was talking to a normal, worldly-wise political leader. He sounded positively Thatcherite in his desire to slim down the bloated Venezuelan oil industry and welcomed the bids by BP and British Gas to bring global expertise to his country's energy sector," the minister wrote.

He went on to contrast that with a "bizarre three-hour TV speech" in which Mr Chavez sacked six oil executives and raised the minimum wage by 20%.

As a general strike was mounted against him Mr MacShane reported: "He was dressed in a red paratrooper's beret and rugby shirt and waved his arms up and down like Mussolini - an odd, disturbing spectacle. The calm, rational Chavez had been replaced by a ranting populist demagogue."

It was not his ties to Saddam Hussein or Fidel Castro that brought Mr Chavez down, but his failure to deliver "economic efficiency, social justice and political freedom", Mr MacShane averred on Saturday.

Yesterday he suggested that the president might just have stepped down temporarily to avoid bloodshed.