Chris Patten is used to rudeness. When he was the last governor of Hong Kong, the Chinese used to call him a ‘jade-faced prostitute’ and a ‘tango-dancer for a thousand years’, and other baffling insults. In these very pages he is called EU Marshal Chris PZtain, a byword for general sell-outery. To the neo-conservatives of Washington, he is the consummate Euro-weenie, ever warning us of the dangers of American ‘unilateralism’ and the risks of duffing up Iraq.
To a certain kind of British Conservative polemicist, he shows an excessive willingness to listen to the claims of Palestinian terrorists and Irish republican murderers. In some quarters he has never been forgiven for telling Mrs Thatcher, on that dreadful day in November 1990, that the game was up and that she was finished as prime minister.
He is, in short, the ultimate wet Tory ‘grandee’, or ‘big beast’, as the species is often described.
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