A few minutes after the result of the vote of confidence in the Prime Minister was announced on Monday, I spoke to Chris Patton on the phone. The former Conservative chairman and current disobedient Tory peer was afraid to see “Johnson’s cult still hanging.” He described the government as “shameful and skinny”. “The most depressing thing is that I watched interviews with ministers tonight,” he said, “and the headlines themselves are so depressing. Jacob Rees-Mogg, Minister of Brexit Opportunities. If there is ever a contradiction in terms, it is. And no one should ever see the words “Nadine Doris” and “Secretary of Culture” in the same sentence.
I suggest that the fractures go back to the 1990s. John Major’s bastards have long since taken power.
“It was a very long nervous breakdown. And I don’t see what the party is gathering again. In politics, a distinction must be made between people who do things that are wrong and people who try to do things that are right. And I just think Johnson is terribly wrong. It is difficult to beat Dominic Greave’s description of him as a moral vacuum.
A few minutes later he called me. “What I have to say,” he said, “is that we do not have a conservative government at all, but an English nationalist party that is populist but – fatally – unpopular.
Patton has become something of a living reminder of this change on the right. He was the architect of Major’s 1992 election victory, built on the belief that after Thatcher, the party must be “tolerant, efficient and generous.” These are three values for vocabulary. If he did not lose his seat in Bath in this election, in part because it was linked to the per capita tax, at 48 he would become chancellor of the treasury. His next career was a tour of endangered institutions and imperial relics, the older version of Portillo on the train. He was, of course, the last British governor of Hong Kong to be ridiculed in the Private Eye as the great pub before the surrender to China in 1997. He followed suit with the work he was most proud of – creating a new, non-sectarian police force. in Northern Ireland as part of the Good Friday Agreement. He was then EU Commissioner, partly responsible for the Union’s foreign policy. Then chairman of the BBC Trust, fighting the rearguard against redundancies. He has been rector of Oxford University for the past 19 years. In each of these roles, he is opposed not against the left, but mostly against the Daily Mail and the ideologues and crazy positions in his own party.
Patton lives in a large villa in Barnes in south-west London, next to the wooded community. There is a rural atmosphere from the 1930s, inhabited today by bankers and lawyers paying £ 5 million. Visiting it is like entering a lost conservative hinterland. At the door I am met by his wife Lavender and their terrier Bobby. The elegant, book-lined living room opens onto a generous garden. Beneath a painted portrait of Patton and his 51-year-old wife are photos of their eight grandchildren. He turned off the muted symphony when he arrived. On the table is the book he just left, Julia Boyd’s Village in the Third Reich: How Ordinary Lives Have Been Transformed by the Rise of Fascism, and a copy of his own new book, The Hong Kong Diaries, which is the occasion for our meeting.
The book was a blocking project. He kept a daily diary of his historical years in Hong Kong, partly on tape. The plan was to hand over the lot to the Bodleian Library in Oxford, but he thought he had to put it in order. “This involved turning 850,000 words into 250,000. And cross-checking with my wife’s diary to make sure I had the right days.
With Margaret Thatcher (and Michael Portillo, far right) while he was Secretary of the Environment in 1989. Photo: Tony Harris / PA
It is strange to repopulate the years of Patton’s book, the last traps of the British Empire, which are falling apart in a series of difficult negotiations with the Beijing government. Great promises made for “one country, two systems” mixed with anecdotes about Patton’s three daughters and two dogs. As you read it, you can’t help but think of a significant loss of rigor in Britain’s relations with the world; contrasts with Douglas Hurd and Malcolm Rifkind as foreign secretaries with incumbent President Liz Truss.
“It’s too depressing to think about,” Patton said. “Many good people were expelled from the Brexit Conservative Party. There are still a few. I look at people like Jeremy Hunt – although I’m afraid that will ruin his chances of leadership to say that he is completely good and decent. “
Patton seems perfectly calm 78. Does he ever get angry watching his life’s work, at home and abroad, unravel?
“I used to hear Sheila Hancock talk about how one of the things about aging is getting angrier. And yes, I’m angry about things. And it’s probably just because so many of the things that I think my generation took for granted are now messing up. “
Patton was not a Tory with a silver spoon. He was born into an Irish Catholic family in his father’s country. His father was a drummer in a jazz band who became a music publisher before running a precarious business making jingles for television. “We’ve never talked about politics or religion at home,” Patton said. “It was an extremely apolitical household; my parents would vote for a conservative. They bought the Daily Express in the days when it was a decent newspaper.
His vocation is shaped more than the time of his birth, which comes with tragedy and built-in hope. Patton was born in 1944, the day the German army was expelled from Crimea. His wife’s father competed in the 1936 Olympics, “part of this generation of chariots of fire,” and was assassinated in 1944. “For people my age, it was a bit like being born right after the Congress of Vienna. [of 1814]to then experience a period of stability and growing prosperity, longevity, better health, in which there were a number of realities: Europe or a democracy of prosperity or something that Peter Hennessy writes about, leaders who, in the absence of a written constitution, can to have confidence that he will do the right thing. “
Patton received the union’s flag after it was last hoisted at 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 despairs of seeing our own democratic norms threatened – the suspension of parliament, the undermining of the independence of the judiciary and the neutrality of the civil service, the threat of ignoring the treaties in Northern Ireland – is that he knows that makes it harder to criticize other regimes.
After leaving Hong Kong, Patton was part of the EU team that negotiated China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2002. Tony Blair suggested he had paved “the path to democracy.” [in China] unstoppable “.
Does this belief seem ridiculously naive now?
“When Chinese leaders said that Hong Kong could be left alone for 50 years after 1997,” he said, “rather it raised the question of whether they knew what it was in the first place. I talk in the diaries about how I am trying to explain to my reverse number in Beijing what the rule of law is, that it is not a rule of law. And he looks at me puzzled. Such notions were mysterious to them. I think they thought Hong Kong was just allowing people to get rich.
Do you think it was also their belief that the British government was mistaken about its own goal? I mean, it was a colonial project. Do you think they have always seen this?
With his wife Lavender and daughters (left) Kate, Laura and Alice, after receiving the Order of Honorary Companions at Buckingham Palace in 1989. Photo: Fiona Hanson / PA
“Well, there are two elements to that. I think people talk about American exclusivity in the first place, try Chinese exclusivity. They had the mandate in heaven, and I didn’t even have the mandate of Bath’s voters. But there was one bigger question that I think shaped the whole problem. It was difficult for them and for us politically and morally. It was not a colony like any other. We did not prepare him for independence. It would become part of China. The black clock [the last British military unit to leave] they would not hold Hong Kong against the People’s Liberation Army. I kept saying that the only bunkers in Hong Kong are 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 refuted. Western governments, Patton said, were wrong – “out of greed” – to give the regime to Xi Jinping easier than that of Vladimir Putin. He fears the results are being played out in Hong Kong. “You can see it in the language used by [former Hong Kong chief executive] Carrie Lam and now this horrible cop who is her successor, John Lee. This grim communist speech. “
Patton, a practicing Catholic, is particularly concerned about the recent crackdown on religion and the arrest of Cardinal Zen, the primate of the church in Hong Kong.
“I knew the cardinal when I was there,” he said. “He’s exactly what authoritarians don’t like: angry, hard, pastoral, funny.” Zen reminds him, he says, of another “brave, tall man,” Jonathan Mirski, a former Observer correspondent who covered the massacre. Tiananmen Square. “Mirski had many Chinese friends, but he denounced the Chinese Communist Party as evil. Patton believes that both politicians and businessmen are too slow 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 …
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