He means Tesco.

Mr Hain (below) says that supermarkets which sell produce from Zimbabwe must stop forthwith. "We need a blanket ban which includes supermarkets to bring about pressure on the regime. Consumers can impose their own boycotts if supermarkets fail to act," he said.

I'm all for the concept of every little helps. But the notion that you can bring down a despot with sugar snap peas is surely stretching it a bit.

The argument in favour goes like this. A number of big supermarkets (Tesco is only one) currently stock foodstuffs — the likes of the aforementioned sugar snap peas, mange tout, runner beans, corn and broccoli — which have been grown in Zimbabwe. But many people in that beleaguered country now face starvation.

Surely it has to be wrong that we are eating their food — and more pertinently that companies here are doing business with Mugabe's corrupt regime?

Except of course that it isn't quite that simple. Tesco, to take that one example, say they do business not with Mugabe's government but with small farmers. The firm indirectly employs around 4,000 workers in Zimbabwe. What happens to those people and their families if this one company decides, as it surely could, to source replacement veg from elsewhere?

If other businesses choose to pull out of Zimbabwe it will certainly cause chaos and create shortages. But it could be some time before any of this filters through to the madmen running the show. In the meantime further misery will be heaped on an already starving population. How many more of them will die? And when Mugabe's replaced, what then? Do the boycott callers really believe big business will flock back to pick up the threads from where they left off?

The irony is that Peter Hain is an MP (and former Cabinet member) in the British government. A government that actually could and should be doing something to sort out Mad Dog Mugabe.

The onus should not be on your average shopper steering a trolley around the Taste the Difference veg section to take up the slack and step up as the vanguard in the assault on Harare. The onus should be on the Foreign Office.

Thus far government 'sanctions' have included taking away Mugabe's knighthood and supporting a ban on one day cricket. (That'll have the old tyrant fair quaking in his boots.)

In Northern Ireland, the same government's strategy towards terror chiefs consisted of bribing them away from violence. The Government here handed out more reward points than all our supermarkets put together.

In a recent speech Mr Hain himself outlined a seven-point plan (!) for dealing with conflict resolution. I won't bore you with details but it included the old 'good to talk with enemies' stuff.

Clearly though a bit of jaw-jawing and fawning in Downing Street isn't going to work with Mugabe. Something a mite more robust is called for. But with Iraq and Afghanistan already to contend with, calling for action is about as far as the British government is ever likely to go.

Mugabe must surely know that. And far from hitting him hard, the threat of business boycott merely reinforces his claims of victimhood. While at the same time it stands to hurt the most needy.

Boycott is a simplistic, often brutal weapon that is usually about making those who demand it feel they're doing something constructive.

The starving and desperate people of Zimbabwe deserve real action not 'gestures of solidarity'. They deserve better than international dithering — and what amounts to a sugar snap peas process.