The reasons for his downfall have little to do with the truth about the past. The real Rhodes undoubtedly had a morally mixed record. But he was not South Africa’s Hitler, as the Rhodes Must Fall campaign has claimed. Far from being racist, he showed consistent sympathy for individual black Africans throughout his life. Nor did he attempt genocide against the Ndebele during their 1896 uprising — as activists have sometimes claimed — which might be suggested by the fact that the Ndebele tended his grave for decades. And he had nothing whatsoever to do with General Kitchener’s ‘concentration camps’ during the Boer War of 1899-1902, which themselves had nothing morally in common with Auschwitz.

Moreover, Rhodes did support a franchise in the Cape Colony that gave black Africans the vote on the same terms as whites. He gave financial backing to a newspaper, Izwi Labuntu, that was the voice-piece of one of several black African political associations that were the forerunners of the ANC. And he established his famous scholarship scheme, which was explicitly colour-blind and whose first black beneficiary was selected within five years of his death.

But none of this matters to the student activists baying for his downfall, or even to the professional academics who support them. Since I published my view of Rhodes, substantiated by evidence and argument, in the March 2016 issue of Standpoint, no one has offered any critical response at all.

Notwithstanding that, when the Rhodes Must Fall campaign revived four years later in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, the same old false allegations revived with it, utterly unchastened. Thus, according to the Guardian newspaper, an Oxford doctoral student (and former editor of the Oxford University Commonwealth Law Journal) was still slandering Rhodes as a “genocidaire” just last month.

What matters is not fidelity to the truth, but the exploitation of political advantage. The statue of Rhodes has been demonised into a totem of the colonialist mentality that allegedly feeds the ‘white supremacism’ infecting our institutions. Among these are the universities, where racial prejudice is said to manifest itself in the unequal representation of Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME) people among students and professors, and in the ‘Eurocentric’ bias of what is taught. Pulling Rhodes down is merely the first psychological blow in the war to ‘decolonise’ the curriculum.

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‘Decolonisation’ would involve admitting more BAME students, appointing more BAME professors, and increasing the quotient of BAME authors on reading lists. It would also involve correcting the national amnesia over the evils of colonialism, by promoting teaching about the history of British slavery, the historic root of the racism that reigns among us today.

Little of this makes sense, either empirically or historically. Empirically, the claim that the admission of students is racially biased doesn’t survive contact with reality. On the latest figures, the BAME population of people aged 19-26 in England and Wales is 18.3%, but the non-white undergraduate student intake in UK universities is 26.2%, and even at stereotypically elitist and hide-bound Oxford it is 22.1 per cent.

Moreover, 9.7% of BAME academic staff are professors, only 1.4 percentage points lower than their white peers. Within BAME groups, the professorial proportion of black staff is just under five per cent, but for their Chinese colleagues it is over 16% — much higher than for whites. These figures simply do not support the claim of structural racial bias in British universities.

As for curricula and reading lists, of course it’s important to grow a graduate citizenry that is aware of the riches of non-European cultures and of how the history of Britain is intertwined with the history of the globe. But that’s long been happening, and if suitable university applicants want to devote the entirety of their student careers to African, South Asian or Chinese studies, no one is stopping them.

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But does racial justice truly require proportionate representation of non-whites on all reading lists, regardless of the subject? Must teachers really make the skin colour and ethnic provenance of authors a criterion for recommending them to students? For sure, if I were teaching a topic in African history, Indian economics or Chinese literature, it would be odd — and maybe even suspect — if the list of authors I assigned my students was exclusively populated by ethnic Anglo-Saxons.

But if I’m teaching Cicero, or late medieval Italian literature, or the ethics of war, or molecular biology, or linear algebra, do I really have to spend my time ferreting out BAME authors who have written on these things? And must I assign them, regardless of whether I think that what they say is worth listening to, and, since all reading lists are finite, necessarily displacing others who have better things to say? Besides, what would ‘proportionate’ representation mean here? Proportionate in relation to what? The non-white portion of the UK population, or of the world, or of authors on the relevant topic? The more one thinks about it, the less thinking it bears.

What is more, a ‘Eurocentric’ bias in British education is surely justified. Britain is not Anywhere. It is located in north-west Europe, has a particular history, and has developed particular institutions and traditions. It’s vitally important, therefore, that school education, and even undergraduate studies, should focus on helping budding citizens understand the cultural and political environment for which they are about to become directly responsible — including the contemporary fact of ethnic diversity and its history.

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But whether they also need to have their noses rubbed in the facts of slavery, I doubt. It’s difficult to believe that many Britons know nothing about it or that many approve of it. But if they are going to learn more about the story of British involvement, they need to hear the whole story, not just the politically useful part. In addition to the appalling 200 years of transporting slaves to the West Indies and the American colonies, they need to hear about the dogged, 50-year campaign to abolish the trade and the institution within the British Empire two centuries ago.

And they also need to hear that British ‘colonialism’ then spent over a century in deploying the Royal Navy to stop slave-ships crossing the Atlantic and Indian oceans, and in suppressing the Arab slave-trade across Africa. Maybe they’d even learn that the Empire supported action against Arab slavers in Nyasaland in the 1880s through the British South Africa Company. And guess who ran the BSAC? Cecil Rhodes.

The citizens of Bristol have been arguing for years about what to do with the statue of Edward Colston, a big noise in 17th-century mercantilism who built schools and almshouses with the cash made in the slave trade, converting one form of property — human flesh and souls and sinews — into another.

In 2018 Bristol City Council agreed to the addition of a panel explaining the source of Colston’s wealth. Nobody could concur on the wording. Then, last month, a white police officer in Minneapolis exerted nine fatal minutes of pressure on the throat of a man named George Floyd, and the decision became academic: Black Lives Matter supporters in southwest England responded by dragging Colston’s effigy to the pavement, rolling it towards St Augustine’s Reach and pitching it into the docks. Another white police officer, Superintendent Andy Bennett, watched the statue swallowed by the water. “I do understand why it’s happened,” he told a BBC reporter who asked him why he did not order his officers to intervene. “It’s very symbolic … there’s a lot of context that sits around it.”

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The context, however, is not just that of the 17th century. The Colston statue is not the Cenotaph. It is not the statue of Churchill in his greatcoat in Parliament Square. It was not built by Colston’s contemporaries or near-contemporaries. It was erected over 170 years after his death, thanks to the efforts of James Arrowsmith, a Bristol businessman and Colston superfan whose fundraising campaign didn’t reach its £1,000 target even after the statue was unveiled in November 1895. (Having failed to guilt-trip Bristol’s inhabitants into coughing up, Arrowsmith seems to have stumped up the last £150 himself.) The message inscribed on the plinth — “erected by citizens of Bristol as a memorial of one of the most virtuous and wise sons of their city” — does not speak for all those citizens.

Bristol in the early 1890s was not a city at ease with itself. On Friday 23 December 1892 it was the location of a “March of the Workers”, held in support of the women of Sanders Sweet Factory on Redcliffe Street — who were employed on such bad terms that they were nicknamed “Sanders’ White Slaves”. (If they tried to join a union, they received their cards.) On the day of the demonstration, the dragoons steamed in. Two hundred mounted officers tried to split the march. At the end of the night, 57 demonstrators and 51 police had been injured. Those present on that day might have taken a sceptical attitude to a public artwork celebrating Colston’s philanthropy. Their ideas about how to alleviate poverty in the city had been answered with violence.

So it would be wrong, I think, to read the Colston statue as an embodiment of civic or imperial confidence. Better, perhaps, to see it like one of those Porsches bought by men in the thick of a midlife crisis — a gleaming expression of self-doubt and anxiety.

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A world map from the 1890s shows the vermillion expanse of British Empire. But in the year that the statue went up, a strong note of pessimism had already entered the culture. HG Wells published The Time Machine, depicting a world in which all human achievements ended, twitching in the mud. Degeneration, a doomy treatise by the Hungarian social scientist Max Nordau, had became an unexpected bestseller in England, perhaps because he argued that, having been the fastest to develop, it would be the first to decline.

The idea had already occurred to the Victorians: it emerged from the writings of thinkers pondering the implications of Darwinism. In 1880 the zoologist Edwin Ray Lankester suggested that for “the white races of Europe” evolution might be switching into reverse. “Possibly we are all drifting, tending to the condition of intellectual barnacles”. Lankester had read his Edward Gibbon, and recalled the idea that Rome had fallen because it had conquered and consumed too much. “Rome degenerated when possessed of the riches of the ancient world. The habit of parasitism clearly acts upon animal organization in this way. Let the parasitic life once be secured, and away go legs, jaws, eyes, and ears; the active, highly‐gifted crab, insect, or annelid may become a mere sac, absorbing nourishment and laying eggs.” This is the language of the lecture theatre, but these ideas were not the preoccupation of a minority of intellectuals. They had become mood music of the culture — played out most memorably, perhaps, in Kipling’s Recessional (1897) — a poem for Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee that read like an elegy for a dying country.

In 2017, protesters in Durham, North Carolina, used a rope to topple a Confederate statue, and provoked both outrage and approval. But the ease with which it fell told the most interesting story. The monument was less than a hundred years old. It wasn’t erected to General Robert E Lee by those who fought beside him. It was the product of a much later moment — one in which Jim Crow laws were entrenched across the south, and the Ku Klux Klan were enjoying a boost from the success of DW Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915). Colston’s toppling tells a story of similar recency.

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The statue of Edward Colston is not a pure object upon which later generations have imposed an anachronistic argument. The statue is an argument. About the relationship between the individual and the state, about employers and workers, about civic responsibility and Britain’s place in the world. Its construction was a political gesture. So is pushing it into the River Avon.

The protesters of Black Lives Matter did not drag Colston’s figure out of the city and smash it to pieces. When they submerged it in the docks, they were making a decision about its proper place in the environment — a decision accepted, tacitly, by the officers present on the scene. Perhaps this was not an act of destruction, but a form of endowment. One that may bring wealth to the city far greater than the kind that can be extracted from a black body with the use of a whip.

The 19th century, however, has a caveat to add. The Victorians celebrated their record on the abolition of slavery. Mid nineteenth-century popular culture buzzes with self-regard on this issue. Charles Dickens’s American Notes (1842) railed against the “accursed and detested system” of slavery — without noting who might have picked the cotton used to make his shirts. Visitors to JR Planché’s spectacular burlesque Mr Buckstone’s Voyage Round the Globe (1854) would have congratulated themselves as they laughed at the anti-American gags in its script:

To the west, to the west, to the land of the free –
Which means those who happen white people to be –
Where a man is a man –  if his skin isn’t black –
If it is, he’s a n—–, to sell or to whack…

But a joke from a later line in this song should give us pause for thought. America, for Dickens and his contemporaries, was a zone of racial violence and exploitation — but it was also the country of laughable prudishness.

Where the legs of the table in trowsers are drest:
Away, far away, to the land of the west.

No 19th-century Briton ever covered up a piano leg for decency’s sake, but in the course of the 20th century, this fiction became one of the most tenacious exemplars of their attitudes. A smug joke that backfired.

The Victorians used American racism as a way to feel good about themselves. So do we. It’s a habit that dissuades us from genuine moral introspection. Another solid fixture we might hurl into the water.

Yesterday in Plymouth one such statue was unveiled of Nancy Astor, the first female MP to take her seat in the House of Common. Viscountess Astor had won the constituency of Plymouth Sutton in 1919, and after Sinn Féin’s Constance Markievicz had refused to take her seat the previous year, became the first woman to sit in the House.

Both the former prime minister Theresa May and her successor Boris Johnson posed by the statue of the former Tory MP, who held the seat until 1945; Mrs May said the whole country should be “proud of the great strides Nancy Astor made for equality and representation”.

But the unveiling is not just an opportunity to commemorate the centenary of women being involved in Parliamentary politics in the UK. Its erection — like that of any statue — reveals several interesting facets of our age.

In recent years Britain, like the United States, has had an ongoing set of “statues wars”. In the decade before this, while he was Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone (sadly so often ahead of his time) had an outburst when he chose to dismiss some of the plinth-dwellers of Trafalgar Square.

In 2000 Livingstone explained that the statues of Major General Sir Henry Havelock and General Sir James Napier should be removed from their plinths because “I have not a clue who two of the generals there are or what they did”. Needless to say, Livingstone saw the fault here as being Havelock’s and Napier’s, rather than his own. By contrast generations of schoolchildren yet unborn can be expected to sing choruses and roundelays about the noble endeavours and accomplishments of Ken Livingstone while Mayor of the capital.

By the time that Marc Quinn’s statue of Alison Lapper Pregnant was unveiled half a decade later it was perfectly uncontroversial to say that the likenesses of Havelock and Napier should be removed because they had been responsible for imperialist oppression and that Trafalgar Square should have no room for such imagery.

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Without any explicit governmental announcements an important transition had already taken place within the nation, and “diversity” had replaced heroism as the most celebrated virtue in British society.

The ensuing years have embedded this impression. During this decade Britain has seen the arrival of a Gandhi statue in Parliament Square and a campaign to pull down that of Cecil Rhodes in Oxford. As with the statue wars in America none of this is completely new, since such effigies have always come and gone. But the question of who goes up and who goes down — or at least who’s targetted for pulling down — reveals an interesting cross-section of our current priorities.

The figure of Gandhi must have seemed like a godsend to the Conservative Government that announced and oversaw its construction. It was also a useful little diplomatic tool; the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, found it diplomatically helpful to announce the memorial while on an official visit to India in 2014. But Gandhi’s arrival in Parliament Square was definitely helped by a wider sense that the statuary in the centre of London needed to be “diversified”. The statues of the nation must — like everything else — be less male, stale and pale.

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Yet even if this is the main impetus, the determination with which we are holding to it also tells us something more about our current orders of priorities. Nancy Astor, for instance, was a very remarkable woman: determined, witty and accomplished. She was also the beneficiary of considerable privilege, through birth and marriage — none of which is generally looked on with forgiveness in our age.

More significantly, in her day she also had views which we would not ordinarily now encourage. She was, for instance, intimately bound up with the upper-class appeasement movement of the 1930s. And as Harold Nicholson (among others) noted in his diaries, she was perfectly willing to indulge in the kind of ugly, reflexive anti-Semitism that was thought to be “smart” in aristocratic circles in those days.

None of this is to take away from Astor, or to indulge in the kind of gleeful hindsight-presumption that now laces nearly all writing about historical figures. But it is interesting, because ordinarily in the current era people are neither admired nor forgiven — let alone celebrated — if they are deemed to have been racist. Ordinarily when any tribute is paid to a dead person — however great their accomplishments — a slew of critics emerge to counter that said individual had bad opinions which must neither be overlooked nor celebrated.

Gandhi — whose statue happily strides aloft his plinth in Parliament Square — was also a type of racist. As students at the forever right-on Manchester University noted when a bust of him was given to their city, he had views about black Africans which would not be forgiven in a person today. In his early writings while in South Africa, he had repeatedly referred to Africans in highly derogatory terms.

So perhaps the choice of statues reveals something which, if accepted, could be potentially helpful for our current era — that perhaps our society has a better understanding of human complexity than we are currently willing to let on. In the present day we are obsessed with “cancelling” and otherwise lambasting people if they have got even one thing wrong in their life, even if that “wrong” thing is something that everyone used to get “wrong”.

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But with some historical figures perhaps we recognise that things are messier than that. That good people do bad things, and that there are more complex weight and balance systems than the loudest voices in our societies might now like to pretend. If that is the case, then it might be worth trying to learn from it, and discover how an air-pocket of subtlety around the past might be extended into the present.

More likely is that there is simply a pecking order among the priorities of the age — as in every age before. A woman may be celebrated even though she had racist views. An Indian may be forgiven even if he had racist opinions. But it seems unlikely that any more statues will be going up to a heterosexual white male who had a single abhorrent thought in his life.

And that is not just because there are enough pale, male statues already. It is a simple demonstration of the fact that we are keener to stress diversity than any other value in our age — even anti-racism. The importance of celebrating women in politics or Indian political figures in London supersedes everything else; the virtue and goal of the age is diversity, and it turns out that — like the gods of previous ages — it will be pursued whatever the contradictions: indeed in spite of them.