Chris Patten

Chris Patten was the last governor of Hong Kong and spent his five years there in an argument with Beijing about how much democracy could be added to a territory already promised away. He was a Conservative cabinet minister who ran John Major's winning 1992 campaign and lost his own seat doing it, and was given Hong Kong as a consolation - the first governor in a century who was a politician rather than a diplomat or civil servant, which turned out to be the point. He arrived without the plumed hat, walked about, took questions, and then proposed electoral reforms that broadened the franchise for the 1995 Legislative Council within the letter of the Basic Law. China called him a serpent, a whore and the sinner of a thousand years, and dissolved the elected council on the night of the handover in 1997, replacing it with an appointed one. Whether his reforms were a principled late correction or a gesture that achieved nothing and hardened Beijing has been argued ever since, in Hong Kong as much as in London. He went on to be a European commissioner, chairman of the BBC Trust and chancellor of Oxford, and has kept commenting on Hong Kong since the national security law of 2020. His diaries of the period, East and West, sold well and annoyed Beijing again. The handover ceremony in the rain, with the royal yacht leaving the harbour, is the image most people have of the end of the British empire, which is odd for a territory that was never a settler colony and always a lease running out. He was refused entry to Hong Kong to launch a book in 2020. He had been the last chairman of the Conservative party to win a general election before 1997 and never sat in the Commons again.

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