The De Beers founder  wasn’t simply a man of his time, argues  Peter Lewis, but a self-serving lone wolf who used his power to violate the human rights of South Africans and tear away at the rule of law in December, at the height of the Oxford Union debate on the Rhodes Must Fall controversy, public intellectual Will Hutton wrote a letter to The Guardian in which he commented on the call for the removal of the Rhodes statue from the façade of Rhodes’s alma mater and philanthropic beneficiary, Oxford’s Oriel College.

In his letter, Hutton approves of the fact that college authorities had instituted a six-month inquiry into the matter, but he points out that they cannot expunge Rhodes from the history of the college, or from history in general. He acknowledges Rhodes’s “flawed” liberal imperialism and racism, but against this balances his philanthropy, and the “values” which he bequeathed to South Africa and the world. These, he asserts, are “checked and balanced government, freedom of the press, presumption of innocence and the rule of law”.

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