What Next? Surviving the Twenty-first Century | Chris Patten

Other issues pose very similar dilemmas. Patten has a low opinion of Europe’s colonial interventions in Africa and Asia, born of much experience as England’s development minister in the 1980s. But, seeing the former colonies pursuing policies on the environment or public health that strike him as unenlightened, he is all for manipulating their governments through such quintessentially European and American institutions as the IMF and the World Bank. He recognises the force of the economist P. T. Bauer’s argument that aid is useless, because if the right economic conditions exist it is not needed while if they do not exist it will fail. But that will not do, because Something Must be Done. In much the same way, Patten believes in markets, because a great deal of experience suggests that they allocated resources more efficiently than administrative command. Yet confronted by the fact that markets naturally generate repugnant disparities of income, he runs for the regulated solution, which would inhibit salaries and bonuses that a political manager might regard as immoral or excessive. The trouble about pragmatism is that it allows politicians to evade important questions by proposing contradictory answers to them.

Inevitably, a book like this provokes the question what would have happened if Chris Patten’s parliamentary career had not been cut short in 1992 by the electors of Bath. He would unquestionably have been a more convincing flag-bearer for liberal Toryism than any of the other candidates in the four leadership contests since 1997. In opposition he would, on the strength of this book, have been appealing and articulate but occasionally incoherent. In government, his innate curiosity and objectivity would have combined with his strong sense of moral purpose to make a formidable prime minister in an age in which the electorate has come to value management over ideology.