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Nelson Mandela: a shining lesson that politics can be a tremendous force for good | Andrew Rawnsley

The world's current leaders would best honour Nelson Mandela's life by learning from his noble example

Nelson Mandela was a politician. He was also the personification of the struggle against apartheid who inspired millions to take up his people's cause as their own, the father of his nation, a global icon, a conscience for the world, a legend in his own lifetime and the many other things that have been justly said. But first and foremost, and without which he could not have been any of the other superlatives, the most revered man on the planet was a brilliant politician. At a time when that pursuit is held in such disdain – in his own country, in our own and in so many others – it seems to me important to register that his life is a shining lesson that politics can be a tremendous force for good.

Our current working definition of what constitutes politics encompasses little that is noble and a lot that is tawdry: MPs fiddling their exes; shouty, crimson-faced men braying puerile insults at each other across debating chambers; world leaders haplessly flapping when confronted with events and decisions that seem too large for them. No wonder that the current crop compete to express their awe for him and try to fold themselves into his history. They will be acutely conscious that when they pass away no one is likely to say of them: "A light has gone out in the world." In an era when politicians think themselves "brave" when they do something slightly unpopular with their focus groups and the placing of wind turbines is discussed as if it were a life-and-death struggle, the example of Mandela is a rebuke to such pettiness. He showed that politics can be a noble calling for noble men to pursue noble causes. The sincerest way to mark his passing would be for those he leaves behind to try to do their own politics better.

What made him such a titan? Among his more obvious gifts, he had natural charisma and authority. These are qualities that are difficult to source or define with precision, but you know them when you see them and anyone who had the privilege of meeting Mandela felt their presence. Bill Clinton put it well when he said that he made you want to be a bigger, better person. He had grace, a sense of humour and of the ridiculous, and he had charm. He was very well endowed with what John Carlin calls the "seducer's arts". He made friends of his jailers. Then the apartheid regime that had imprisoned him was persuaded into submission. And then he seduced white supremacists to accept – and even to cheer for – a multiracial democracy.

A kingly countenance, an air of dignified command and exquisite manners were the beguiling face on a bedrock of moral courage and clarity. His life spanned a century of engagement against bigotry, persecution and bloodshed during which he never wavered from his core belief. At his trial on treason charges in 1964, he stunned the court and first attracted the world's attention when he declared: "I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die." He repeated exactly those words when he finally walked to freedom nearly three decades later.

That was allied with a powerful sense of destiny, which is a polite way of saying that he had a massive ego. His image was of courtesy to all and spartan simplicity – and it wasn't a false one. As president, he still made his own bed. But at his core was a level of self-belief extraordinarily elevated even by the standards of politicians. He predicted that he would be his country's first black president. And he did so at a time, the mid-1950s, when this sounded incredible even to his comrades in the ANC. That iron will gave him the resilience to endure all those years of brutal incarceration without surrendering his soul to despair or to bitterness.

What made him so very rare was that his ego was pressed into the service of an idea, not self. The process of global deification was well underway by the time he fulfilled his own prediction. Where most other leaders might have succumbed to megalomania, he kept his promise to walk away from office after just one term, a potent example on a continent that had already had too many presidents-for-life.

Guile is one of the aspects of his character that has not received the attention that it deserves. This was not the low scheming of the spin-doctor who concocts petty plots to smear opponents. This was the classy cunning in pursuit of a great mission that is often a hallmark of outstanding leadership: Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill are others who had this quality. When Mandela first entered into secret negotiations with the white dictatorship, he knew his comrades in the ANC would disapprove so he concealed it from them. Three times he rejected conditional offers of release, telling the apartheid government: "Only free men can negotiate; prisoners cannot enter into contracts." For he was also hugely gifted at the sound-bite and the other theatrical aspects of politics. He was correctly calculating that the pressure on the regime was now building so intensely that they would have to free him on his own terms before long. Many of his biographers remark on the combination of steeliness and shrewdness he displayed in negotiating the birth of a democratic South Africa.

He couldn't have done it without empathy. These days, all leaders are advised by their image consultants that they need to show they care, but his was not the fake "I feel your pain" deployed by politicians when confronted with a grumpy voter. Mandela got inside the heads of his opponents: the men who had subjugated 40 million Africans and incarcerated him for all those years. He learned Afrikaans, he read their histories, he developed relationships with his guards, the better to work out how the white population might be induced to move towards the peaceful dissolution of racial tyranny.

He was a rebel, a warrior against the established order. In old age, he liked to remind people that Rolihlahla, his given first name, means troublemaker. There would have been no Mandela, the healer, had he not been preceded by Mandela the fighter. There's some danger of this being forgotten as he is embalmed in universal approbation. At the height of the struggle against the white supremacists, nasty young Tories wore "Hang Nelson Mandela" T-shirts. Margaret Thatcher echoed the Pretoria regime's denunciations of him as a terrorist and communist and resisted tightening sanctions, something worth remembering as her sons and heirs now weave their word wreaths about Mandela. Convenient though it now is for some to try to gloss this, a lot of the British establishment chose the wrong side as did other politicians in the west.

Yet to them was offered the same hand of friendship that he extended to the Afrikaners. Mandela had the wisdom to know when fighting needs to turn into talking. To everything there is a season. A time to love and a time to hate. A time of war and a time of peace. He put into practice the advice of the Book of Solomon and won over to it those comrades who had thirsted for retribution against the white population. Every tribute celebrates his transcendental forgiveness and superhuman magnanimity. Rightly so. But it is essential to remember that the balm of reconciliation that marked his presidency wasn't a gooey kumbayaism. This was a hard-headed appreciation that binding the whites into his "Rainbow Nation" was the only sure way to secure a peaceful and prosperous future for his country.

Being a politician, being a human being, he had his frailties. He was loyal to a fault to old comrades who were mediocre and corrupt. There is an increasing volume of complaint from black South Africans, especially the younger generations, that the settlement preserved too many of apartheid's economic inequalities. He was not flawless. It diminishes him to plonk him on a saintly pedestal, an error he never made himself. He chafed against being "raised to the position of a demi-god because then you are no longer a human being". It also disrespects the huge personal sacrifices he made. Whatever the mistakes, they are trivial in the face of his colossal achievement: saving his country from racial civil war and building a stable democracy in a context in which both had seemed so unlikely to so many.

When he is buried next Sunday, they will flock to pay their respects to the politician who was loved. Presidents and prime ministers will fly in from around the world. There will be many more eulogies. It would be good to hear one of their number repeat his call for leaders to raise their eyes to high horizons: "There is no passion to be found playing small." Let's hope that a little of that Madiba magic rubs off on the lesser mortals he leaves behind.

Andrew Rawnsley