The Hong Kong Diaries
Allen Lane 560pp £30
The Week Bookshop £24 (incl. p&p)
Chris Patten was “one of the big beasts of British politics” when the voters of Bath rejected him as their MP at the 1992 general election, said Stephen Vines in Literary Review. It led him to take up a post which “he had never expected to occupy”: that of the “last governor” of Hong Kong. In 1984, Britain had struck a deal with China to hand back its “last remaining major colony” on the stroke of midnight on 30 June 1997. As governor during the build-up to the handover, Patten’s task was to ensure that Hong Kong’s “basic freedoms” were robust enough to “survive the transfer of sovereignty”. Patten has now published his diaries from this period, to coincide with the 25th anniversary. General readers may find the sheer level of detail off-putting, but the diaries are well worth reading – “wonderfully waspish, fascinating and rude in spades about all the people who deserve nothing less”.
As governor, Patten lived in a sumptuous house with “white-clad staff”, and had a large, tax-free salary, said Michael Sheridan in The Times. Yet he found the role deeply frustrating. He planned to democratise Hong Kong by extending the vote, but found his reforms opposed at every turn – not only by the Chinese government, but also by self-interested business magnates, and even British officials, who “shuddered” at his proposals. Few have their “reputations enhanced by the governor’s pen”, but he is particularly scornful of John Major’s foreign policy advisor, Sir Percy Cradock, whom he labels “spectacularly vain”.
Patten ends the book with a “passionate polemical essay” denouncing Xi Jinping’s brutal crackdown on the territory, said Martin Kettle in The Guardian. His diaries provide a “foundation for understanding why the circumspect optimism of 1997” has, in recent times, been so “tragically confounded”.