Chris Patten has been called the best Conservative prime minister the UK never had. Instead, he’s been Northern Ireland minister (he has Irish ancestors), secretary of state for the environment, Conservative Party chairman, Hong Kong governor, EU commissioner, Oxford University chancellor, BBC Trust chairman and chair of a committee to reform the Vatican’s media (Patten is a Roman Catholic, though his wife, Lavender, owes obedience to the Church of England).
These days he lies in a hammock by France’s river Tarn and muses on his childhood in Ealing, the leafy suburb in west London — Windsor-knotted ties and privet hedges, Kit Kats and Victoria plum trees. He’s also penned this excellent memoir, First Confession. It contains fascinating material on all the jobs he’s done, but readers of the Taipei Times will probably be most interested in his opinions on China, and his references to Taiwan, in the chapter on his Hong Kong governorship.
Patten first mounts a major assault on the concept of “Asian values,” an identity that brings with it a weak concern with human rights and accountability, and an emphasis instead on obedience to the family and the state. This, he maintains, is “a useful cover for authoritarianism, both soft and hard, and an excuse for Western businessmen and politicians not to allow issues like torture and the suppression of freedom of speech to get in the way of trying to do business.”
The weakness of the concept, Patten writes, is its refusal to see human rights as universal. Human beings have the same right to a fair trial, due process, free speech, and the freedom from torture and enslavement, everywhere, he insists, surely rightly.
As for Confucius, frequently cited in discussions of Asian values, Patten writes: “Are the Taiwanese democrats or the Hong Kong aspirants for democracy less Confucian than the get-rich-as-quick-as-possible capitalists in Beijing or Shanghai?”
On the Chinese Communist Party, Patten has this to say: “Its foreign policy is focused on historical issues of territorial integrity (like Taiwan), its own continuing dominance in domestic politics and securing the economic resources it needs. It has no model of good, sustainable governance to offer the rest of us … Chinese Leninism is not an identity that attracts followers.”
The models for Asia in the future, by contrast, should be democracies like Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and India (a country, incidentally, that Patten hugely admires).
He nonetheless finds some generous words to say about some of the politicians from Beijing he had contact with former Chinese president Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) he describes as “a very polite man”, while former premier Zhu Rongji (朱鎔基) was “one of the most impressive officials I have ever met.”
Of the Umbrella Revolution, the Hong Kong student-led democracy movement that began in 2014, he writes: “Most of the world — except in China where the news was blocked — watched the demonstrations with surprise and admiration … Some of the policing … and the organized use of triads and paid-by-the-day bullies to break up the demonstrations brought shame on the authorities.”
Patten appears from this book an amiable, moderate, warm-hearted politician. He’s not averse to expressing unfashionable opinions. He has a great love for the US, writing that “There is a fine, brave and kind America beyond the golf course at Mar-a-Lago and the National Rifle Association.” And he’s a particular devotee of former UK prime-minister John Major, calling him “one of the most decent people ever to lead the Conservative Party.” He was someone he “liked and inordinately respected … I was proud to work for him and to call him a friend.”
These qualities of good-natured reasonableness and independence of mind are everywhere apparent. He’s in no way intransigent about his Catholicism, is everywhere tolerant of and respectful to gays, and shows more affection for Northern Ireland that you’d have thought possible (despite saying that there in the 1980s “votes were rigged, constituencies were gerrymandered” and “public spending was skewed towards Protestants”). He believes the UK imprisons too many people, thinks that the moral case for unilateral nuclear disarmament could do with more serious consideration than it usually gets, and is a strong defender of the virtues of the EU.
He has some interesting asides on former colleagues. He considers former UK prime minister Edward Heath to have been guilty of displaying a “tiresome exhibition of unhelpful ill-manners” when he visited him annually in Hong Kong and argued against his policies as governor. He tells us that Margaret Thatcher made her own bed when she came to stay.
He writes a superb analysis of what makes the US what it is (“the reason why it’s called the American dream is that you have to be asleep to believe it”), and criticizes Owen Jones’ book The Establishment [reviewed in Taipei Times Oct. 16, 2014]. “The three people I have met,” he says, “who most exuded grace and natural authority were all African or of African heritage — former South African president Nelson Mandela, former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan and former US Secretary of State Colin Powell.” And former US president George W Bush was “a whole heap nicer in person than his administration.”
Patten’s political philosophy can be summed up in his statement that “the primary role of the state is to provide order and harmony within which individuals and their social groups can flourish in a stable environment.” Crucially, he believes that what is best is “to do the right thing in a moderate way.”
I only have one important criticism. Patten calls the Falklands campaign of 1982 Margaret Thatcher’s “finest hour.” There is no mention of the sinking of the Argentinian navy cruiser the Admiral Belgrano, with the loss of 321 lives, when the boat was steaming away from any contact with British forces.
This, however, is generally a wonderful book and, though I’m no enthusiast for political memoirs, I was sorry to finish it. Patten’s central concerns are, in his own words, British patriotism, liberal Toryism, internationalism, the knowledge that he’s a European and a lover of France, but also that he’s cautious, lucky, hard-working and besotted by his family. “Lucky” is certainly true. But this is political centrism at its best. In the final analysis, perhaps he was simply too lacking in ruthlessness, too good-natured, ever to have attained the UK premiership.
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