When, as minister for Latin America, I met Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez in 2001, we talked for hours into the night in the Miraflores Palace, the seat of the Venezuelan presidency in Caracas.

He questioned me about Tony Blair and the Third Way and had books by the New Labour guru, Anthony Giddens, on his desk. I also met the Venezuelan Right-wing opposition — and a nastier bunch it was harder to imagine. They were smooth and rich, had apartments in Miami and Madrid and not a single word to say about the grinding poverty of most Venezuelans.

So what went wrong? Venezuela is in the top 10 of global oil producers. Like Norway, it could have used its oil riches to create a sovereign wealth fund and a functioning market economy. But today, petrol under President Maduro is sold at US$0.01 per litre compared with a world average of US$1.16. A succession of populist demagogues forged an alliance with the military and the Catholic Church — abortion is illegal — to keep themselves in power.

According to the UN, more than two million people — a sixth of the population — have fled Venezuela to seek sanctuary elsewhere in South America, and the UN reckons 1.3 million are undernourished.

With hyperinflation of one million per cent, civil society has broken down. Unions organise giant strikes to persuade Maduro to change course. The UN says the rule of law is “virtually absent” and accuses the security police of killing hundreds.

One might have thought this human tragedy was worth concern on the British Left. But Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party has seen the once-proud tradition of Labour internationalism put in the deep freeze. The Venezuelan ruling clique seems beyond criticism and Labour leaders have appeared on Venezuela Solidarity Campaign platforms backing Maduro’s regime.

Professor Mike Gonzalez of Glasgow University wrote a friendly biography of Chavez but now he describes “the systematic undermining of democracy, the demonisation of dissent, the death of trade unionists, the erosion of popular confidence in the government, and the growing violence”. Of those on the Left who “have chosen to say nothing, their silence amounts to complicity with a new ruling class that hides behind the language of socialism”.

As with the mishandling of the anti-Semitism saga, the support of Corbyn for the anti-socialist regime in Venezuela is a gift to the Conservative Party, which can portray him as a two-faced man who claims to be a friend of progressive politics in Latin America but ends up backing a thuggish, misogynist, semi-military ruling clique that is destroying one of the best countries on Earth.