All the VIPs in world politics and the media feel it our solemn duty to attend. I am here to assess the mood of the people of Hong Kong as the great day looms. From here in my suite in the Mandarin Hotel, I assess that the people of Hong Kong are determined to keep going as normal, carrying on doing what they do best: arriving at a moment’s notice with trays of sweetmeats and beverages, always ready to polish shoes, press trousers and mix cocktails. In 1930, the leased port of Weihaiwei was returned to China – the first Union Jack to be hauled down.There has been no real post-imperial backlash. And yet uncritical pride in that vanished Empire remains wrong. It was at times the best of empires but at moments the worst of empires.

The blaring rhetoric about “Imperial Destiny” and “Make Thee Mightier Yet” was short- lived too.Destiny to what destination? Mightier than whom? The will to Empire was dying by 1914. Only a few years later, an Atlas of the British Empire answered the destiny question like this: “A uniform movement towards that goal of self-government already attained by the United Kingdom and its Dominions”. Compared to it, the rest of the structure seems almost flimsy; a world-wide market kept open by the Royal Navy, a spread of British settlements in North America and Australasia, then a short-lived lion’s share in the scramble for Africa. The great exception was India, run in a quite different way: no laissez-faire there, but a huge system of bureaucratic planning designed to cream wealth off India’s export trade and tax revenue. By 1914, cash siphoned from India was keeping Britain’s whole balance of payments out of the red.The Indian Empire was a true “possession”, the sort of imperial province a Roman emperor would have understood.

So when they were lost, the British did not suffer agonies about being diminished.This is linked to the riddle of whether the Empire made money for Britain. It certainly made many British people rich, as territory after territory was opened to free trade – which meant to British exports But for the state, Empire was mostly a financial burden. Although those territories were sometimes called “possessions”, the British were not convinced that they really possessed them. They were proud of it, they earned well from its markets, they often found themselves fighting to defend or extend it. But their nationalist emotions – English, Scottish or “British” – seldom reached out to include these vast territories overseas, which once covered nearly a quarter of the globe and included over a quarter of its population. Even today, the callousness of the French police towards immigrants and the racialist abuse cultivated by Jean-Marie Le Pen and the National Front owe something to the sinister influence of what happened in Algeria over 30 years ago But Britain, in comparison, was immune. The Empire vanished, but the Tavys and their like came home and dissolved – almost without trace – in the mild pond of British indifference.Why was this? Perhaps because, unlike the French, the British public found it hard to identify with their Empire.

In Malaya, East Africa and Rhodesia, I came across police intelligence officers who had served in Palestine and were feared even by their colleagues for their cruelty during interrogations.In France, the virus of colonial atrocities attacked the mother-country itself. The Algerian war led to the routine use of torture by the French security forces, heightening a climate of hysterical fear and hatred which crossed the Mediterranean and for a time disfigured public life. Some of them brought evil practices with them.Officially, the Palestine Police had been much respected, and its morale was high. But somewhere during the struggle against Jewish terrorism in Palestine, a moral barrier had collapsed. I remember the late Sir Maurice Oldfield, who became head of MI6, ending a good lunch with a description of his techniques for torturing Jewish suspects into confession.