I suggest the fractures go back to the 1990s. John Major’s bastards have long since taken over. “It was a very long nervous breakdown. And I do not see what the party is gathering again. In politics, one has to distinguish between people who do things that are wrong and people who try to do things that are right. And I just think Johnson is making a terrible mistake. It’s hard to beat Dominic Grieve’s description of him as a moral vacuum. “ A few minutes later he calls me. “What I have to say,” he said, “is that we have no conservative government at all, but an English nationalist party that is populist, but – fatally – unpopular.” Patten has become a living reminder of this change on the right. He was the architect of the Major election victory in 1992, based on the belief that, after Thatcher, the party must be “tolerant, efficient and generous.” These are three values for the album. Had he not lost his seat in Bath in this election, in part because of his election tax, he would have become Chancellor of the Exchequer at 48. His later career was a tour of endangered institutions and imperial remains, Portillo’s most adult version on a train. He was, of course, the last British governor of Hong Kong, who stood in the Private Eye as the great pumbaa, before being extradited to China in 1997. He followed this with the job he is most proud of – creating a new, non- sectarian police force in Northern Ireland under the Good Friday agreement. He was then EU Commissioner, in part responsible for the Union’s foreign policy. Then president of the BBC Trust, fighting a rearguard against the cuts. He has been Rector of Oxford University for the past 19 years. In each of these roles, he has not confronted the left, but mainly the Daily Mail and the ideologues and the works of the tender in his own party. Patten lives in a large villa in Barnes, south-west London, next to a wooded public. There is a village atmosphere of the 1930s, in which bankers and lawyers now pay 5 5 million to live. Visiting it is like entering a lost conservative hinterland. I am met at the door by his wife, Lavender, and their terrier, Bobby. The polite, book-filled living room leads to a generous garden. Below a painted portrait of Patten and his 51-year-old wife are photos of their eight grandchildren. A mute deal goes off when I arrive. On the table is the book he just put down, A Village in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd: How Ordinary Lives Were Transformed by the Rise of Fascism and a copy of his new book, The Hong Kong Diaries, which is the occasion for our meeting. The book was a lockdown project. He kept a daily diary of his historical times in Hong Kong, partly in recordings. The plan was to deliver the lot to the Bodleian Library in Oxford, but he felt he had to sort it out. “It included the conversion of 850,000 words into 250,000. And by crossing my wife’s diary, to make sure I had the right days. “ With Margaret Thatcher (and Michael Portillo, far right) while she was secretary of environment in 1989. Photo: Tony Harris / PA It is a strange thing to relive the years of Patten’s book, the latest crimes of the British Empire, which are dissolved in a series of unresolved negotiations with the Beijing government. Great promises made for “one country, two systems” mixed with jokes about the three daughters and the two Pattens dogs. As you read it, you can only think of a substantial loss of rigor in Britain’s dealings with the world. contrast Douglas Heard and Malcolm Rifkind as Secretary of State with the current Liz Trass. “It’s too depressing to think about,” says Patten. “Many good people were expelled from the Conservative Party because of Brexit. There are still a few. “I look at people like Jeremy Hunt – although I’m afraid he’ll ruin his leadership chances to say he ‘s perfect and decent.” Patten looks completely relaxed 78. Does he ever go crazy, seeing the work of his life, at home and abroad, unfold? “I heard Sila Hancock talk earlier about how one of the things about getting older is getting more and more angry. And yes, I’m angry with things. “And it ‘s probably just because so many of the things that I think my generation took for granted are now falling into the trash.” Patten was not a Tory with a silver spoon. He was born into an Irish Catholic family on his paternal side. His father was a drummer in a jazz band that became a music publisher, before running a precarious company that makes TV ringtones. “We never talked about politics or religion at home,” says Patten. “It was an extremely apolitical household. my parents would vote Conservative. “They bought the Daily Express when it was a decent newspaper.” His profession was shaped more by the time of his birth, which came with tragedy and hope. Patten was born in 1944 the day the German army was driven out of Crimea. His wife’s father participated in the 1936 Olympics, “part of this generation of Chariots of Fire”, and was killed in 1944. For my peers, it was a bit like I was born right after the Vienna Congress. [of 1814]to live then a period of stability and growing prosperity, longevity, better health, in which there was a lot of data: Europe or welfare democracy or what Peter Hennessy writes about, leaders who, in the absence of a written constitution, could trust is doing the right thing. “ Patten receives the union flag after last descending on the Government House – the governor’s official residence – during a farewell ceremony in Hong Kong in 1997. Photo: Emmanuel Dunand / AFP / Getty Images Part of the reason he hopes to monitor our own democratic norms under threat – by obstructing parliament, undermining the independence of the judiciary and the neutrality of the public service, by threatening to ignore the conditions in Northern Ireland – is that he knows he finds it difficult to criticize others. After leaving Hong Kong, Patten was a member of the EU team that negotiated China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2002. Tony Blair suggested that he made “the road to democracy”. [in China] unstoppable “. Does this belief seem ridiculously naive now? “When Chinese leaders said that Hong Kong could remain the same for 50 years after 1997,” he says, “the question was rather whether they knew what it was from the beginning. I talk in the diaries about trying to explain to my opponent in Beijing what the rule of law was, that it was not a rule of law. And he looks at me strangely. Such concepts were mysterious to them. “I think they thought Hong Kong was just about allowing people to get rich.” Do you think it was their belief that the British government had deceived itself for its own purpose? I mean, it was a colonial project. Do you think that they have always seen this? With his wife, Lavender and daughters (left) Kate, Laura and Alice, after receiving the Order of the Fellowship at Buckingham Palace in 1989. Photo: Fiona Hanson / PA “It simply came to our notice then. I think, first of all, people talk about American excellence, try Chinese excellence. They had the command of heaven and I did not even have the command of Bath’s voters. But there was a bigger question, which I think framed the whole problem. It was difficult politically and morally for them and for us. This was not a colony like any other. We were not preparing it for independence. It was going to be part of China. The black watch [the last British military unit to leave] he was not going to hold Hong Kong against the People’s Liberation Army. “I kept saying that the only shelters in Hong Kong were on 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 dispelled. Western governments, Patten believes, were wrong – “out of greed” – to give Xi Jinping’s regime an easier ride than that of Vladimir Putin. He fears the results are being 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. “This gloomy communist speech.” Patten, an active Catholic, has been particularly disturbed by the recent crackdown on religion and the arrest of Cardinal Zen, the pastor of the church in Hong Kong. “I knew the cardinal when I was there,” he says. “This is exactly what the rulers do not like: lively, tough, pastoral, funny.” Zen reminds him, he says, of another “brave man of yours,” Jonathan Mirsky, the former Observer correspondent who covered the Tiananmen Square massacre. “Mirski had many Chinese friends, but he denounced the Chinese Communist Party as cunning.” Patten believes that both politicians and businessmen are too late to say that. “What the Russians are doing in Ukraine is evil. What the Chinese did in Xinjiang is evil. What are they doing in Hong …
