In 1990 he was exiled by the junta of Major-General Justin Lekhanya, which had toppled Jonathan. The king was replaced by his eldest son, Letsie David Mohato. Moshoeshoe was allowed home in 1992 but not to reclaim his title.Letsie, embarrassed at being king while his father was still alive, staged a palace coup and dissolved the country’s first democratically elected government. Presidents Mandela, Mugabe and Masire stepped in to resolve the issue and also to return Moshoeshoe to the throne, which he again ascended on 25 January 1995.According to the eulogies yesterday, the king was working to resolve tension between the political parties and the military, still said to harbour political ambitions. He was also praised for his struggle against apartheid in South Africa, which surrounds his kingdom.The Commonwealth Secretary, Chief Emeka Anyaoku, called the king a Basotho patriot who kept Lesotho “on the side of justice, human rights and decency” during the struggle. “King Moshoeshoe died all too young, at the end of his youth and in the full maturity of his potential,” Chief Anyaoku said. “He died still a promise, when the best was yet to come.”The king was born Constantine Bereng Seeiso on 2 May 1938, grandson of Moshoeshoe I, the founder of the Basotho nation, who willingly made his country a British protectorate in 1868 as a defence against the Afrikaner settlers of the Orange Free State.

Basotholand was ruled by Britain until independence in 1966, when the 27-year-old graduate of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, was named King Moshoeshoe II.Mr Mohale said the king’s schooling in Britain gave him the air of an intellectual and an English country gentlemen, as well as that of a monarch. But if he enjoyed the sport of kings, his love of horses had more to do with his Sotho blood than Ascot He also enjoyed keeping cattle, sheep and goats. It was his love of his livestock that led to his death: he was returning from visiting his ranches when his car crashed.. NIGEL COPE

Sainsbury’s shocked the City yesterday when it issued its first profits warning since it floated on the stock market in 1973. The company said profits in the current year would be “below earlier expectations” due to increased spending on customer service measures, keener pricing in its supermarkets and a poor performance from Texas Homecare, which is struggling in the cut-throat DIY market.
The announcement forced analysts to downgrade their full-year profit forecasts from as high as pounds 810m to between pounds 750m and pounds 760m. This is significantly lower than last year’s pounds 809m and breaks the company’s unbroken run as a public company, during which it has reported higher trading profits each year.The profits warning wrong-footed City analysts, who had felt the group was turning the corner after a difficult 1995 during which it lost ground to Tesco and Asda. In a modern, well-polled democracy, getting elected depends on promising your supporters more at the expense of the worthless parasites on the other side.

The moral absolutes propounded by Christian teaching have very little to do with traditional values, and this becomes increasingly clear as the churches in the West slide back into a pre-Constantinian state of ineffectual purity.The values that keep society going and which get governments elected are not universalist at all. The image of Philip Lawrence after his death was of a staunch defender of traditional values and moral absolutes against relativism Yet the two don’t go together at all. If Christianity is a universal religion, then Christian schools, like families, should teach people to live together who would not if they had any choice in the matter share the same continent, let alone the same classroom.Only last week, Bishop David Konstant of Leeds told a conference of Catholic independent schools that if forgone tax cuts meant that fewer parents could or would choose to have their children privately educated, this was “a sacrifice that should be made for the greater good of the whole community”.Joe Dromey’s elder brother attends a Catholic school in the archdiocese of Westminster, so Ms Harman’s decision must be seen as a slight on Catholic education policy as well as on that of old Labour. Like the rest of us middle-class types, she believes that even if society depends on the labour of heroes like Philip Lawrence, it is better for our own children to rely on the efforts of more average teachers.That the Catholic Church finds itself to the left of new Labour in this matter is yet another illustration of the extraordinary divide between what the churches actually believe and practice, and what public opinion believes of them. He loved women, too, and was married four times; first in 1938 to his compatriot Gloria Gordon.