KWASI Kwarteng, elected in 2010 as the Conservative MP for the safe seat of Spelthorne, is by common consent a rising star of the right. His CV bears academic distinctions in the same way that a Russian general's chest bears medals: scholar at Eton, good degree then a history PhD at Cambridge, Kennedy scholar at Harvard, even a place on the college team that won University Challenge, a brainy television show. He has positioned himself on the crunchy right of the new intake, and is co-editing a book to come out soon setting out a new vision for the right, with a title that amounts to the slapping down of a gauntlet, "After the Coalition". The left of centre Observer, in a very friendly profile, notes that he is tipped to be the "first black Tory cabinet minister", a tiresome millstone of a prediction that must dismay as much as it cheers, I'd have thought.

Before his policy book, though, Mr Kwarteng has just published a work of history, "Ghosts of Empire", which is less a conventional history of imperial rule than a biography of the men (and a few women) who built the empire: an ambitious, often hard-driving caste of minor grandees, younger sons, clergymen's offspring, middle class strivers and (often) oddballs who—far from their theoretical masters in Whitehall—ran vast tracts of foreign territory more or less as they pleased.

A truly ambitious Tory MP might be tempted to join the recent revisionist chorus of historians arguing that the British Empire was essentially a Good Thing, and a marvellous vehicle for promoting democracy and liberal free trade. Mr Kwarteng promises in the opening of his book that he is not about to take sides in what he calls the rather sterile debate about whether the empire was good or bad.

I think he breaks that promise, and have written a review to that effect in the latest print edition. The nub of his argument is that—after wading through reams and reams of old colonial office memorandums, papers and letters in the British national archives, and poring through shelf-loads of long-forgotten memoirs—he finds that the old imperial elite damned itself in its own words. There was no liberal master plan, or democratic ideal at work. Instead, he finds an empire run by free-traders and protectionists, good men of missionary bent, bad men of missionary bent, philanthropists, racists, sadists, commercial visionaries, crooks, wise and gentle scholars, snobs and nutcases. And crucially, the "anarchic individualism" of the empire allowed them all pretty full rein. That was not a flaw of the system, Mr Kwarteng argues, it was the system. He traces how policy could be reversed and re-reversed by the arrival of a new colonial governor or political secretary. He examines, convincingly, how some thorny geopolitical crises, from Sudan to Kashmir, have their roots in decisions taken by British colonialists, often in some haste or in response to personal prejudice or self-interest.

I found the book pretty damning. Interestingly, it is clearly more of a Rorschach blot that I realised, because shortly after filing my review to the books editor, I read in the Daily Telegraph a review by Charles Moore that finds that on balance:

his book proves how snobbery can be a good way of keeping order without violence. The Indian princes were gripped by how many guns each was allowed in their salutes. General Wavell invented the mnemonic, Hot Kippers Make Good Breakfast, to remind himself of the precedence – Hyderabad, Kashmir, Mysore, Gwalior, Baroda. These five alone were entitled to 21 guns.

The immensely rich Hong Kong middleman, Robert Hotung, was knighted in 1915. But he fretted for a grander order of knighthood, and wrote to the King's private secretary in 1927 a long letter demanding a KCMG. He had to wait another 28 years, by which time he was 92, to be made a KCB. The power of the mother country to bestow and withhold marks of favour was useful

Though I agree with Mr Moore that Mr Kwarteng is too harsh on the last governor of Hong Kong, the politician Chris Patten. "Ghosts of Empire" criticises Mr Patten for his 11th hour move to extend something close to a universal franchise for elections to Hong Kong's Legislative Council, and gives much space to a brilliant, learned but dessicated Foreign Office Sinologist, Sir Percy Cradock. Sir Percy accused Mr Patten of "inexcusable self-indulgence" for defying the Chinese government in Beijing, two years before Hong Kong was to be handed over to them, when Mr Patten knew he was leaving in the royal yacht, leaving the people of Hong Kong behind to face the consequences.

Mr Kwarteng notes that the Chinese simply dissolved the LegCo elected under the Patten rules, and then held new elections under the old, colonial rules that packed the place with establishment-friendly types chosen by business and professional lobbies. He thus writes of Governor Patten:

His friends argued that he had brought democracy to Hong Kong; his detractors thought it was a pointless and futile gesture. In terms of what actually happened, his detractors were proved right.

Mr Moore argues:

What he forgets is that the Governor's duty, ex officio, was not to the British government but to Hong Kong. Patten did right to try to entrench more rights for Hong Kong people, making it harder for China to trample all over everyone after 1997

And Mr Moore is right. Mr Kwarteng is correct that when it comes to changing the LegCo election rules, Mr Patten's efforts were futile. But they were not pointless. Given the chance, the Hong Kong public showed Beijing (and perhaps most importantly) themselves that they strongly supported democratic parties, and were not simply a collection of worker ants, only interested in money and getting rich (the common charge levelled by drawling tycoons in their company junks, or at the bar of the Mandarin hotel).

That experience, and the experience of a governor who behaved like a modern politician in his openness to the media, or in his willingness to meet and debate with ordinary voters, left a legacy, long after Mr Patten sailed away on the Royal Yacht Britannia. You can see it in the way that the people of Hong Kong chafed under the aloof, out-of-touch shipping magnate chosen to be Beijing's first chief executive, Tung Chee-hwa. You can see it in the way that Hong Kongers essentially rebelled against a troubling internal security law which democratic activists said would have given the authorities the right to crack down on vaguely-defined "subversion", eventually causing Beijing to back down.

Anyway, that is probably enough detail about Hong Kong in a blog about British politics. Apologies. Here is my review:

IN MODERN Britain, it is bad form to speak too highly of the British empire. Yet beneath such squeamishness, an undercurrent of relative pride still pulses, defiantly. Of course, today's educated Briton murmurs, the empire was wrong. But at least the British learned the languages, schooled the sons of native chiefs and tried to do some good, didn't they? Surely, other imperialists were worse, the British tell themselves: those savage Germans or outright villains such as King Leopold II, running the Congo not as a Belgian colony but his own private property, unaccountable to any parliament back home?

A new work by Kwasi Kwarteng, a bright young Cambridge-trained historian (and rising political star of the right since his recent election as a Conservative member of Parliament), purports not to take sides in what he languidly terms this “rather sterile debate” about whether the British empire was a good or a bad thing. He explains that his intention is to recapture the world view of the men (and a sprinkling of fearless, extraordinary women) who shaped and ran the empire, with the aim of teasing out the imperial roots of some of today's thornier geopolitical puzzles, from Kashmir to Myanmar or Sudan.

Mr Kwarteng's ambitions are only partly achieved. His book is a successful and convincing biography of the empire's ruling elites and their modern-day legacies. Where it promises neutrality, it fails.

Ghostly ranks of imperial warriors, administrators and diplomats stand exposed and damned by their own memoirs and memoranda to London, and by their carefully minuted actions. Time and again, these “men on the spot” are observed taking decisions for reasons of caprice, snobbery, cynicism or—in the case of the British police chief obsessed with photographing the exact moment a bullet punctured the skin of Burmese rebels sentenced to death—something bordering insanity.

Still more damningly, Mr Kwarteng concludes that the arbitrary, individualistic nature of so much imperial decision-making was not a weakness of the system, but the system itself. There was no “master plan”, he writes at one point, after observing how policy could be reversed by the appointment of a single colonial governor, or even by the lobbying of energetic mavericks, such as Gertrude Bell, an Arabist caught exulting “We've got our King crowned” in a letter home after planting a Hashemite prince, Faisal, on the newly invented throne of Iraq.

Wicked King Leopold looks less of an outlier after a while. If his Congo was a personal fief, the British empire stands revealed as a scarcely more representative oligarchy, organised on avowedly “aristocratic” lines by a clique of white men on the make. In theory, Whitehall officials and ministers back in London oversaw the empire. In practice, professional imperialists ruled through a caste system alien to anything seen at home.

In Sudan, a notably snobbish spot, one-third of all colonial political officers were the sons of clergymen and half of those recruited between 1902 and 1914 had a “Blue” (a sporting distinction) from Oxford or Cambridge, leading to the quip that Sudan was a land of “Blacks ruled by Blues”. In the 1930s, only officials able to play polo could hope for advancement in the Sudanese province of Darfur: in the same period, Darfur had just one primary school. In 1916, Mr Kwarteng notes, David Lloyd George, the humble son of a Welsh Baptist minister, could become Britain's prime minister, but would have stood no chance of being governor of colonial Nigeria.

Men from the same narrow, middle-class band of society crafted oligarchies with the British crown at the top and, at the bottom, a tier of native chiefs, maharajahs and princelings granted wide and autocratic powers over their own peoples. They then inserted themselves in between as viceroys, governors and pith-helmeted district commissioners: raised to a form of quasi-aristocracy by their race and education. The same colonial officials who liked sporting, Harrow-educated native princes actively disliked educated Africans and Asians, above all those shifty, resentful urban “examination passers” who made it to British universities or law schools. I suppose we felt the local intellectuals were aiming to take our place, Sir James Robertson, a former Sudan official candidly reflected, years later.

When the British scrambled for the exits, lingering chaos was often the result of this hearty ad-hoccery, Mr Kwarteng sadly concludes. It is a surprising moral for an ambitious young Tory politician to draw. Pop-psychology is always dangerous, but Mr Kwarteng is himself quite the examination passer, the son of successful Ghanaian émigrés who became a star scholar at Eton. That tension is the making of the book: it reads like the guide of an outsider who is also an insider. Witty and cool, it is immune to nostalgia, and in the end rather angry. That anger is to its author's credit.