CURRENT AFFAIRS: Surviving the 21st Century by Chris PattenAllen Lane, pp491, £25
HERE IT IS. In 15 highly digestible chapters, a coherent and utterly credible assessment of what is wrong with the world and how we might fix it if we aim to survive much beyond the next 100 years. Chris Patten's book might also have been titled Species Destruction and How To Avoid It.
There is no Machiavelli to Patten. In my experience, he tells it mainly as he sees it, which means I am much readier to trust him over most of his peers. The real substance of his distinguished career developed after his 1992 electoral defeat at the hands of the Liberal Democrats in Bath. This was in itself a delightful historical irony, as there are few public figures in British politics so relentlessly liberal in every word, deed and thought as Patten.
What he was doing sitting in Margaret Thatcher's cabinet (whence a few of the evils he describes in his book sprung) is a mystery as unfathomable as the fate of the Marie Celeste.
In retrospect, his premature exit from parliament was a lucky escape. Hong Kong, Belfast and Brussels, where he has worked since, were infinitely more interesting and important than the torpor of Westminster. As a consequence, Patten has succeeded in grasping the complexity of the political and economic challenges facing the world than almost all of his peers. Uniquely among them, he is able to articulate these challenges in a comprehensible and largely accurate fashion, as he has done in this book.
Although the actual title is perfectly good and snappy, I had another urge to rebrand it when half-way through. A century after the original was first published, I thought the author might want to resurrect Lenin's rhetorical question as a title, Shto dyelat? (What is to be done?) Rather annoyingly, Patten had anticipated just this, arguing in his conclusion that "The puzzle is not What is to be done? But rather Who is to do it and how?" As such, we might hope that this becomes a handbook for all the most senior politicians in the world on taking office so that we might head off another catastrophe on the scale of George W Bush and his administration before it is too late.
Another thing that baffles - how does Patten remain so upbeat? He is well into the age of the grumpy old man but his humour, judiciously sprinkled throughout these pages, is quite undiminished. Similarly firm is his belief that we can overcome the multiple afflictions of poverty, nuclear proliferation, organized crime, terrorism, disease, corporate greed et al, which he so expertly surveys in the book.
He is aware of this paradox: "I realize that describing, one after another, the world's problems may engender a certain lowering of the spirits and the trajectory of the argument can spiral into melancholy. Pile problem after problem onto mankind's shoulders and it is easy to feel that we are tottering towards the precipice of an outsized, world-shaped earth-wreck."
Earlier in his central chapter on climate change, he has addressed this issue. Like Patten, I am absolutely convinced that this challenge is not just of a different magnitude to all the others; it lies in a different realm of disaster because it evidently threatens the organic basis of life on this planet (or certainly of higher life forms, homo sapiens included).
The prevention of global meltdown is not an issue, he argues, "for partisan confrontation. It requires consensus-building on the grand scale. It must be done. It must be done now. And as I shall argue, it can be done." A few lines earlier, he predicates this success on a rather frail proposition: "It requires political leadership as brave and resourceful as we have seen."
This profound truth does not demolish Patten's arguments for action peppered through the book. Yet in our current situation, it is perhaps the greatest challenge of all and here I am less sanguine than Patten seems to be.
The last decade has seen a crop of political leaders - Blair, Schröder, Berlusconi, Chirac, Yeltsin, Putin, Mbeki, Sharon, Ahmadinejad and the rest - whose failings are many. It says a lot about Europe that at present the towering figure in the EU is Angela Merkel, a reasonable woman with sensible policies but hardly Nelson Mandela.
Of course, pride of place in the reckless irresponsibility stakes is reserved for George Bush or, perhaps most pertinently, Dick Cheney, or Darth Vader as he is known colloquially. We are now watching the Nero-like end of the former as his policies from Waziristan to Wall Street burst in flames around him. But among my greatest concerns is that Vader has unfinished business that he intends to complete before the next president assumes office in January.
We all know how easy it is to beat up on the Americans but as long as they elect leaders who are in complete denial about climate change; who believe that the world's resources are there to be ripped out of the ground and into their consumer durables before being excreted as toxins; and who think that you can invade countries and ride roughshod over human rights when you want to get at those resources; as long as this pattern continues then Houston, yes, we have a problem.
I'm not sure how the next generation of leaders will fare but they could do much worse in preparation for their responsibilities by reading Chris Patten's book.
• Misha Glenny's book McMafia: Crime Without Frontiers was published earlier this year by The Bodley Head