‘There was a drama involving two alleged Chinese dissidents who can’t be kept in Hong Kong but have been denied entry to the UK. This had all the makings of a nasty political incident. I hoped the Canadians might be prepared to take the two women. What was absolutely clear was that we can’t send them back to mainland China.’ This is from the diaries that Chris Patten - turning 80 today - kept for five years while Governor of Hong Kong. In his foreword to the diaries, published only recently, he talks of ‘the brutal and authoritarian communist regime which now holds a city I love in its handcuffs’.
Patten was elected as Member of Parliament for Bath in 1979, a seat he held until 1992. He rose quickly, holding many and various different offices: Parliamentary Under Secretary of State, Northern Ireland Office in 1983; Minister of State at the Department of Education and Science in 1985; Minister for Overseas Development at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office in 1986; and Secretary of State for the Environment in 1989. Having been appointed to the Privy Council in 1989, he became a Companion of Honour in 1998. Also, from 1990, under Prime Minister John Major, he was Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Chairman of the Conservative Party. He guided the Party to an unexpected electoral victory in 1992, but lost his own seat.
Patten then accepted an appointment as Governor of Hong Kong, from 1992 to 1997, overseeing the return of Hong Kong to China. Thereafter, he was Chairman of the Independent Commission on Policing for Northern Ireland set up under the Good Friday Peace Agreement, which reported in 1999. From 1999 to 2004, he served as European Commissioner for External Relations, and in January 2005 he entered the House of Lords. In 2003, he was elected Chancellor of the University of Oxford, but is due to retire this year. Other posts include: Co-Chair of the UK-India Round Table in 2006; and Chairman of the BBC Trust from 2011 to 2014. He was appointed Knight Companion of the Order of the Garter in April 2023 by King Charles III. Further information is readily available at Wikipedia, Oxford University, or the BBC.
Patten has published a few books, at irregular intervals, mostly on world affairs, but also of an autobiographical nature including, most recently, The Hong Kong Diaries (Allen Lane, 2022). In his foreword (see below), he explains how and why he decided to publish the diaries; he also mentions his wife’s ‘meticulously kept diaries’ and their plans to leave their diaries to the Bodleian Library to be made publicly available ‘warts and all’.
In the last paragraph of the foreword, Patten says: ‘I have not used any material from government archives, neither those kept at Kew nor those which reside separately with other colonial papers. Nor have I used any private correspondence. I have from time to time borrowed the description of events from the meticulously kept diary of my wife, Lavender, and occasionally have cross-checked dates and events with her accounts. We both intend to give our original diaries - in my own case principally the transcription of tape recordings and the large exercise books in which I wrote down every evening what was happening during the last part of my governorship - to the Bodleian Library in Oxford and ask that they should be made available, warts and all, to scholars who wish to read them. In some places the text has been reformulated for publication and to cope with the reduction of the total day-by-day diary by several hundred thousand words. I have not excised passages where occasionally my frustration may, with hindsight, have got the better of me, since they are a true reflection of the tensions that from time to time surfaced as we navigated an unprecedented series of events. But looking back now there is nothing material that I would have done differently. My only self-censorship has been to avoid the use of names from time to time, particularly those of people who are still in Hong Kong and might suffer because of the brutal and authoritarian communist regime which now holds a city I love in its handcuffs.’
Here are several extracts from The Hong Kong Diaries.
14 April 1992
‘News of the possibility of my going to Hong Kong has leaked, I suspect because one or two of my friends have been so noisily advocating my remaining in British politics. The story has rapidly turned into the suggestion that a short break that Lavender and I are planning to take with Alice in France over the Easter weekend is intended to be my time to reflect on whether or not to head east. Truth to tell, Lavender and I have pretty well made up our minds already.’
10 September 1992
‘There was a drama involving two alleged Chinese dissidents who can’t be kept in Hong Kong but have been denied entry to the UK. This had all the makings of a nasty political incident. I hoped the Canadians might be prepared to take the two women. What was absolutely clear was that we can’t send them back to mainland China. But we seemed to be making progress on the issue of the new terminal, thanks to some very neat footwork by the senior civil servant involved, Anson Chan. She found an ingenious formula which met some of my requirements about openness and competition while guarding against any lack of competitiveness in the running of the terminal and port as a whole. She has many of the things that I like about civil servants - she’s decisive, smart, talks straight to me and is prepared to take on tough assignments. My team think she is terrific, together with Michael Sze, that she’s the best of the local civil servants - and since most of them are very good that is high praise.’
‘Day after day we go round and round the wretched airport with the Chinese side buggering us about in increasingly imaginative ways. We put forward some new proposals reducing the amount of borrowing that is required and increasing the equity injection by using the money made from the sale of land along the new rail route to invest in the whole project. It’s a perfectly reasonable approach - it builds on China’s own proposals; it cuts the overall cost of the airport; it means that we will not have to channel resources from other public-spending programmes. But it didn’t get a very good public reception, partly because some of the British press suggested that it is a kowtow and the pro-Beijing papers attacked us because it isn’t exactly what the Chinese side have pressed for, whatever they may have been saying this morning. So much for the understanding which Li Peng signed with John Major.’
19 February 1997
‘Rumours again that Deng is dead. Bob has phoned our embassy in Beijing, who report that there are no signs of an imminent Deng-Mao celestial meeting - no extra police on the streets, no solemn music on the radio. One of our senior officials, whom I invested with the CBE a few months ago, has suggested that, since a message for the disabled in our lifts is not yet available in Cantonese, we should stop the English message. We also had a good district visit to Sham Shui Po in Kowloon. It’s an old working-class area with a host of economic, housing and environmental problems. I’d been here last on an unpublicized visit to look at some black spots and I returned to the same block of really bad private housing that I looked at before. It’s been tidied up a bit and the tenants are disarmingly grateful. But the conditions are still pretty awful. I climb up onto the roof and look across rooftops of similar buildings, covered in illegal shacks as though a raggle-taggle army had camped out on Kowloon’s skyline. This is a long way from the marbled halls in mid-levels. Hardly surprisingly this district is a hotbed of political activism. The social problems find their safety valve in politics, petitioning, demonstrating, arguing - all pretty peacefully. When I see the problems in a place like this, it makes me realize how much Hong Kong needs another blast of social progress. I’d like to be building on what I started in 1992, which in some areas has only touched the surface of peoples’ lives. I ran into a good-natured demo on the way into a shopping mall and I disarmed them by handing out the traditional New Year lai see packets. There is a mad scramble to get one of the little red envelopes, banners dropping as hands reach out for the packets. Edward heard a photographer on his mobile phone talking to his newsdesk. ‘Did you get good photos of the demo?’ he was asked. ‘No - he started handing out bloody presents.’
23 June 1997
‘It’s a ‘lasts of everything’ week. And planning and organization for the farewell, the departure and the launching of the SAR government are becoming ever more demanding and even more frenetic. Chinese secretiveness and bureaucratic incompetence risk throwing everything into chaos. The Chinese are still producing lists of guests whom they want invited to events. Their plans for the arrival of senior leaders change by the day, but they seem to have given up on the idea of the vast yacht. What a mess. Our team of officials is working literally around the clock and are all dog-tired. The weather is awful, leaden skies, rolls of thunder and swampy heat. At Exco, the main issue was about de-registering a company called Rex, which is involved in weapons proliferation, especially chemical weapons. It’s plainly a front for the main Chinese arms dealer and manufacture, Noninco. The papers have all come through for this decision to be taken this week, and I’m also being pressed to close down an Iranian bank which has been funding the proliferation exercise along with the Bank of China. I’m prepared to act against the company even though it is so late in the day. But to hit the bank, which has local creditors, risks provoking an nth-hour bank run that would look to the Chinese like a final British ‘petty trick’. We can fire a shot across their bows, setting the government on course to close them down later if they don’t give satisfactory answers to our questions. It will be an interesting test of the new SAR government’s resolve to protect Hong Kong’s reputation as a reliable partner in the strategic trade field.’
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