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. He is the kind of politician – one could add the names of Ken Clarke, Michael Heseltine and Douglas Hurd – with whom Sir Max Hastings might think it worthwhile to have lunch at Wiltons, or perhaps even go on a cruise to the Galapagos. He is still a kind of hero to some parts of the Tory party; and much admired by those, such as this writer, who don’t always agree with him.
That is because he is a big man; not just in the physical sense, though he has told us himself how he gorges on goose fat from his French farmhouse, and his face, in consequence, is more pink than jade. He is also what Sir Max would call a heavy-hitter, a man who thinks big, resting his blond-white-thatched skull on his fist and massively excogitating his ideas.
He is big, too, in the sense that he is welcoming to those who sometimes tease him.
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