Major Western powers have given up on President Robert Mugabe ever agreeing to share power in Zimbabwe.

Mugabe had become an "absolutely impossible obstacle" to power-sharing, a senior British government minister said on Monday.

Mark Malloch-Brown, Britain's minister for Africa, agreed in a radio interview with remarks made by his American counterpart, Jendayi Frazer, who told a news conference in Pretoria on Sunday that the power-sharing deal signed by Zimbabwe's political leaders in September could work, "as long as Mugabe is no longer the president."

Speaking to the BBC's principal morning radio news programme, Malloch-Brown said Mugabe was "so distrusted by all sides that I think the Americans are absolutely right, he's going to have to step aside if Zimbabwe is to get a government."

He said Mugabe's political allies and neighbours needed "to go to him in one of those kind of famous political delegations and say, 'You've got to go.'"

Remarks Mugabe made at a party rally at the weekend showed that he "really just doesn't understand... the state he's brought his country to."

Frazer suggested that the Southern African Development Community - South Africa in particular - could secure Mugabe's removal from office within a month through the exercise of its political and economic power.