A few minutes after the result of Monday’s vote of confidence in the Prime Minister was announced, I spoke to Chris Patten by phone. The former Conservative party chairman and current rebel Conservative couple were dismayed to see that the “Johnson cult is still pending.” He described the government as “shameful and of poor quality”. “The most depressing thing is that I’ve been watching interviews with ministers tonight,” he said, “and only the headlines are so depressing. Brexit Minister Jacob Rees-Mogg. And no one should ever see the words “Nadine Dorries” and “secretary of culture” in the same sentence. “
I suggest the fractures date back to the 1990s. John Major’s bastards have long since taken over.
“It simply came to our notice then. And I don’t see what unites the party again. In politics, a distinction must be made between people who are doing things that are wrong and people who are trying to do things that are right. And I think Johnson is very wrong. It’s hard to beat Dominic Grieve’s description of him as a moral void. “
A few minutes later he called me back. “What I should say,” he said, “is that we have nothing but a Conservative government, but an English nationalist party that is populist, but fatally unpopular.”
Patten has become a kind of living reminder of this change on the right. He was the architect of Major’s 1992 election victory, based on the belief that, after Thatcher, the party should be “tolerant, efficient and generous-minded.” These are three values for Notepad. Had he not lost his own seat in Bath in those elections, in part because he was associated with the election tax, he would have become, at 48, Chancellor of the Exchequer. His later career has been a tour of threatened institutions and imperial relics, the most adult version of Portillo on a Train. He was, of course, the last governor of Britain in Hong Kong, criticized by the Private Eye as the great poobah, before being handed over to China in 1997. He continued with the work he is most proud of: establishing a new sectarian police in Northern Ireland, as part of the Good Friday deal. He was then EU Commissioner, partly responsible for the Union’s foreign policy. He was then chairman of the BBC Trust, fighting a backlash against the cuts. For the past 19 years he has been Rector of Oxford University. In each of these roles, he has not faced the left, but mainly the Daily Mail and the ideologues and jobs of his own party.
Patten lives in a large villa in Barnes, south west London, next to the Common Forest. There is a village atmosphere from the 1930s, where bankers and lawyers pay £ 5 million to live. Visiting it is like stepping into a lost conservative interior. His wife, Lavender, and his terrier, Bobby, are at the door. The elegant, book-lined living room opens onto a generous garden. Below a painted portrait of Patten and his 51-year-old wife are photographs of their eight grandchildren. Turn off a muted symphony when I arrive. On the table is Julia Boyd’s newly published book, A Village in the Third Reich: How Ordinary Lives Were Transformed by the Rise of Fascism, and a copy of her own book, The Hong Kong Diaries. ‘occasion of our meeting.
The book was a confinement project. He kept a diary of his historical years in Hong Kong, partly on tape recordings. The plan was to deliver the lot to the Bodleian Library in Oxford, but he thought he should put it in order. “It meant turning 850,000 words into 250,000. And checking my wife’s diary to make sure I had the right days.”
With Margaret Thatcher (and Michael Portillo, far right) as Secretary of the Environment in 1989. Photo: Tony Harris / PA
It is a strange thing to relive the years of Patten’s book, the last ornaments of the British Empire dissolving in a series of insoluble negotiations with the Beijing government. Great promises made about “one country, two systems” mixed with anecdotes about the Patten’s three daughters and two dogs. Reading it, you can’t help but reflect on an essential loss of rigor in Britain’s dealings with the world; contrasts people like Douglas Hurd and Malcolm Rifkind as foreign secretaries with incumbent Liz Truss.
“It’s too depressing to think about,” Patten says. “A lot of good people were kicked out of the Conservative party by Brexit. There are still a few. I look at people like Jeremy Hunt, though I’m afraid he’ll ruin his leadership opportunities by saying he’s perfectly good and decent.”
Patten looks like a consummately relaxed 78. Do you ever get angry watching the work of your life unfold at home and abroad?
“I heard Sheila Hancock talk before about how one of the things about aging is getting angry. And yes, I’m angry about things. And it’s probably just because a lot of the things I think my generation took for granted now they are being left in the trash. “
Patten was not a silver spoon Tory. He was born into an Irish Catholic family by his paternal side. His father was a drummer in a jazz band that became a music publisher, before running a precarious business doing jingles for television. “We never talked about politics or religion at home,” Patten says. “It was an extremely apolitical home; my parents would have voted conservative. They bought the Daily Express in the days when it was a decent newspaper. “
His vocation was shaped more by the moment of his birth, which came with tragedy and hope incorporated. Patten was born in 1944 the day the German army was expelled from the Crimea. His wife’s father competed in the 1936 Olympics, “part of that generation of Chariots of Fire,” and was murdered in 1944. “For people my age, it was a bit like being born just after the Congress of Vienna. [of 1814]to live after a period of growing stability and prosperity, longevity, better health, in which there was a series of data: Europe or welfare democracy or what Peter Hennessy writes, leaders who, in the absence of a constitution written, could be trusted to do the right thing “.
Patten receiving the union flag after lowering it for the last time at the Government House, the official residence of the governor, during a farewell ceremony in Hong Kong in 1997. Photo: Emmanuel Dunand / AFP / Getty Images
Part of the reason he despairs of seeing our own democratic norms threatened – extending parliament, undermining the independence of the judiciary and the neutrality of the civil service, threatening to ignore the treaties in Northern Ireland – is that he knows which is more difficult to criticize other regimes.
After leaving Hong Kong, Patten was part of the EU team that negotiated China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2002. Tony Blair suggested that he made “the path to democracy. “. [in China] unstoppable ”.
Does this belief seem ridiculously naive now?
“When the Chinese leaders said that Hong Kong could still be itself for 50 years after 1997,” he says, “he asked if they knew what it was in the first place. In the newspapers I talk about trying to explain my opposite. in Beijing what was the rule of law, which was not a government by law, and he looks at me puzzled, concepts like that were mysterious to them, I think they thought that Hong Kong was just about allowing people to get rich “.
Do you think they also believed that the British government had been deceived about its own purpose? I mean, it was a colonial project. Do you think they always saw it?
With his wife, Lavender, and daughters (from left) Kate, Laura, and Alice, after receiving the Order of Fellowship at Buckingham Palace in 1989. Photo: Fiona Hanson / PA
“Well, there are two elements. I think first of all, people talk about American exceptionalism, proof of Chinese exceptionalism. They had the mandate of heaven and I didn’t even have the mandate of the voters of Bath. But “There was a bigger question, which I think framed the whole problem. It was politically and morally difficult for both them and us. This was not a colony like any other. We were not preparing for independence. be part of China.The black clock [the last British military unit to leave] they were not going to hold Hong Kong against the People’s Liberation Army. I kept saying that the only bunkers in Hong Kong were on the golf courses. “
The events of the last decade, not just in China, have shown how the liberal idea that market freedom goes hand in hand with political freedom has been rejected. Patten believes that Western governments have been wrong – “out of greed” – to give Xi Jinping’s regime an easier path than Vladimir Putin’s. He fears that the results will be played in Hong Kong. “You can see it in the language used by [former Hong Kong chief executive] Carrie Lam and now this terrible cop who is her successor, John Lee. That gloomy communist speaks. “
Patten, a practicing Catholic, has been particularly concerned about the recent crackdown on religion and the arrest of Cardinal Zen, the church’s primate in Hong Kong.
“I met the cardinal when he was there,” he says. “That’s exactly what the authoritarians don’t like: fighter, tough, pastoral, funny.” Zen reminds him, he says, of another “brave person at your disposal,” Jonathan Mirsky, the former Observer correspondent who covered the Tiananmen Square massacre. “Mirsky had many Chinese friends, but he denounced the Chinese Communist Party as bad.” Patten believes both politicians and businessmen are too slow to say that. “What the Russians are doing in Ukraine is bad. What the Chinese are doing in Xinjiang is bad. What they are doing in Hong …