By Nico Hines

President Robert Mugabe made one of his most ludicrous ever denials today. And this man has made some fairly unconvincing statements in the past.

This morning, he denied international and domestic consensus that his people were struggling to cope with a cholera epidemic. He claimed that “there is no cholera” in Zimbabwe any more because the country’s doctors had cured the outbreak.

Buoyed by his inspiration we have selected our Top Ten favourite denials of all time.

Richard Nixon

The master of the denial.

From the lips of the same man: “There will be no whitewash at the Whitehouse” and “I am not a crook”.

Jonathan Aitken

The disgraced, lying, Tory MP should have learnt from the great presidential denials: do not issue your denial in a memorable soundbite – it only encourages people to repeat it.

Aitken’s “whitewash at the Whitehouse” moment came before his failed libel action against the Guardian.

“If it falls to me to start a fight to cut out the cancer of bent and twisted journalism in our country with the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of British fair play.”

Nice wordplay, but he was soon jailed for his lies.

Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson keeps a straight face (this is not a laughing matter – ed) as he tells Martin Bashir that he has had no cosmetic surgery.

“It’s stupid, come on, none of it’s true,” he whimpers.

Charles D B King

If you are going to lie in public – one tactic favoured by our denial heroes is to lie big.

When Charles King was asked in 1927 if he had been beaten in the election to become the president of Liberia, he did not just deny it. He claimed to have received 234,000 votes – almost exactly 16 times the entire registered voting public of the West African nation.

Gillian Taylforth

Gillian Taylforth, an actress in Eastenders at the time, appeared in The Sun newspaper in January 1994. The sensational story said that she had entertained her fiance with oral sex in his Range Rover on the hard shoulder of the A1.

So she sued for libel.

She lost, however, when the court chose to accept the testimony of a policeman who saw them instead of the claim that her man had been forced to undo his belt and trouser zip in a bid to relieve the pressure on his stomach caused by a particularly severe attack of pancreatitis.

Bill Clinton

“I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I’m going to say this again: I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”

No further explanation required.

Brad and Angelina

Pitt and Jolie denied and denied and denied that their relationship had started while he was still married to Jennifer Aniston. Only after the divorce, countless paparazzi pictures of the pair and a mid-term pregnancy did they eventually concede that they were in a relationship.

Still they maintained that nothing had happened while the previous marriage was in tact. They repeatedly insisted that there was no truth to rumours that an affair began during the filming of Mr&Mrs Smith.

But in an interview sometime later, Jolie accidently told a reporter that she couldn’t wait to show her six children the film because: “not a lot of people get to see a movie where their parents fell in love.”

Ah.

Tony Blair

In 1997, Blair told the House of Commons that his decision to exempt Formula One from a ban on tobacco advertising did not come straight after discussions about an enormous donation from Bernie Ecclestone, who, coincidently, owned Formula One.

Eyebrows were raised – so the Prime Minister ventured onto television to reassure the public that he was a “pretty straight kind of guy”.

Case closed. Until this year, when it emerged that the compromise may have come rather sooner after that meeting than it was claimed at the time…

Amy Winehouse

Amy Winehouse became a household name on the release of her hit record “Rehab,” a song about her point blank refusal to check into a rehabilitation clinic.

It seemed she was being quite open about her peccadilloes. That is, until she was rushed to University College London Hospital in 2007 and her spokespeople, including her father, claimed that she was only suffering from “exhaustion”.

Comical Ali

Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf was always facing a tricky task. It was his job to put a positive Iraqi spin on the American bombardment and invasion of Baghdad in 2003.

The Information Minister responded with the kind of admirable bluster that earned him cult status and his face on a thousand items of memorabilia.

He kept denying US success even as American tanks were rolling into the Iraqi capital.

“There is no presence of American infidels in the city of Baghdad,” he declared to journalists as gunfire echoed across the city and tanks fired just a few hundred metres away.

As the bemused reporters pointed at the fierce firefight within eyesight, he continued: “There is no presence of the American columns in the city of Baghdad at all. We besieged them and we killed most of them.”

“Today, the tide has turned,” he said. “We are destroying them.”