My old friend Richard Ingrams was said always to write The Spectator’s television reviews sitting in the next-door room to the TV set. I’m more assiduous: I have actually read this book under review. And Chris Patten’s latest memoir is a very enjoyable read — the account of a life of considerable privilege.
Born into a middle-class family in suburban London, Patten won an exhibition to Balliol before — after a brief dalliance with US politics — he became a Conservative apparatchik and, in due course, an MP. Once he’d reached the cabinet, he was a made man — and from his middle years onward garnered a succession of agreeable posts, as the last governor of Hong Kong, European commissioner, the odd university chancellorship and chairman of the BBC Trust, while enjoying since 2005 a well-padded berth on the red-leather benches of the House of Lords. But though his memoir is more concise and less ponderous than his speaking tone, it is also often wrong-headed and delusory.
I must at the start declare an interest, having spent five unhelpful years with Patten negotiating the future governance of Jardine Matheson, an old established firm of Scottish merchants trading in the China Seas. We did not see eye to eye.
Nor do we now, as regards the future of Hong Kong. Patten continues to be fearful for the territory; and he’s wrong. For 20 years the rule of law, as designated in the Joint Declaration, has been sustained: the judiciary has maintained its complete independence and the Hong Kong government has kept its transparency. Foreign merchants have thrived and have not had rings run round them by local tycoons, as Patten envisages in his book. Of course there are some blemishes.
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