LONDON, Jan 18: “Why would she leave it to me if she didn’t think I was fit enough?” President Asif Ali Zardari is quoted by Sunday Times correspondent Christina Lamb as she recounts a recent meeting with him in her article, One Year On: The lives Benazir left Behind.

According to Ms Lamb, many of Benazir’s colleagues were shocked by her will. …since its reading, Zardari, who keeps the hand-written will framed on the wall, has proved to be a remarkably skilled politician.

“I had a great teacher,” he smiles ruefully.

That Mr Zardari, 53, is now president is a remarkable turnaround, even by the standards of South Asia’s dynastic politics.

His refusal to allow a post-mortem, and the sidelining of some of those closest to Ms Bhutto, even led to wild speculation that he was involved in her death.

Discussing his failure to launch an inquiry into Benazir’s assassination, Ms Lamb quotes Zardari insisting that only the UN has the capacity to investigate.

“The problem is larger than anyone thinks,” he says. Citing Ms Bhutto’s own words -- “Democracy is the best revenge” -- he adds: “I don’t want nine people strung up to avenge her death. It’s the whole system. Only when we’re Singapore and prospering will she be avenged.”

That moment seems far off. Pakistan is almost bankrupt. The country is so plagued by terrorism that it vies with Iraq for the largest number of suicide bombings.

With so many problems, Mr Zardari admits he finds it hard to be a single father to teenagers he barely knows.

“I have to get to know my children again,” he says. “I find their pain over their mother the hardest thing.”

He has little time for his own grief. “I need hibernation for at least three years, and don’t have the luxury to do that. But Benazir is all around. I dream about her and wake expecting her to come in. But I don’t think she’d be unhappy. I think she’s looking at us now, saying, ‘Tell me, Asif, now do you think it’s easy?’ ”

On the anniversary of that terrible afternoon of December 27, when one minute Benazir Bhutto, 54, was waving to crowds after an election rally and the next she was laying slumped on the floor of her vehicle, her widower and children went to give blood, as they vow to do every year.

At the family home in Dubai, where she lived in exile, Benazir’s bedroom is locked. On the bedside table sits the manuscript of a book she finished writing a day before she was killed. “I sleep in the next room, because the children and I don’t want to lose her scent,” says Mr Zardari.

On that fateful day in 2007, he and the children were in Dubai when they got a phone call saying Benazir was hurt. Zardari bitterly regrets that his wife refused to let him do the campaigning after she narrowly avoided a bombing in October. “I told her to bunker down after that and I’d take over. But she didn’t want anything to happen to me.”

“I know I’m in danger. I can feel it,” says Mr Zardari. “One father, two brothers, thousands killed and imprisoned; that’s what PPP’s about. Whoever killed her wants to kill me?”

Bakhtawar, a talented rap singer, wrote a song about her mother, but Zardari can’t bear to listen to it. Nor has he read Ms Bhutto’s book. “I’m too weak. We mourn her as long as I’m alive,” he says.