In December 1998, as a BBC reporter, I watched Chris Patten chair a hostile public meeting in the port of Larne as part of the public inquiry into policing in Northern Ireland. Larne is a Loyalist town: no place for a Catholic bigwig. I came away, that cold night, impressed by Patten. Here was a man steady under fire, with a sharp intelligence, courteous but tough. An impression confirmed by this biography, subtitled “A Sort of Memoir”.
In 1998, Patten had accepted the inquiry’s chair at the invitation of Mo Mowlam, the New Labour secretary of state for the province. He came to it fresh from his stint as the last British governor of Hong Kong – where he had incurred the displeasure of the Chinese through his efforts to leave at least some kind of democratic legacy when Britain withdrew. It tells you much about Patten that he became a “go to” man for both Tory and Labour governments when they needed someone with political nous, diplomatic skills and a thick skin.
This book has been criticised in some quarters for its lack of spicy political gossip but, as Patten explains in his introduction, tittle-tattle is not his purpose. Rather, he has posed the question “Who am I? What makes up my identity?” And the answer is rather fascinating.
Patten, now Lord Patten of Barnes, is a liberal Tory and a lifelong Catholic, and what he tries to do in this book is explain himself to us.
His story is that of a very clever boy, reared in a happy, loving, but not overly prosperous middle-class home in west London. Schooled by the Benedictines of Ealing Abbey, he won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford. A trip to America, funded by a generous alumni, stimulated an unsuspected passion for politics.
Forgoing the offer of becoming a general trainee at the BBC, he went instead to work for the Tory Party, rising, by the age of 30, to be director of its research department.
There is much warmth in his description of his early life and family. Writing about his father provokes one heartfelt mea culpa: Patten berates himself for not properly expressing his love and pride in his Dad, who died young, and regrets never having the opportunity to establish a loving, adult relationship with “this dear man”. Instead, he says, he was a “supercilious, patronising young smart-arse”.
As Patten details the ups and downs of his political career, he delivers judgments drawn from (sometimes bitter) experience. He is surely right to say that it is not the class system itself but the failures of the education system which have held so many working class children back. And surely right too when he says that the Hong Kong administration should have done much more, much earlier, to establish democracy.
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But the cause to which he is most devoted is the European Union. The result of the EU referendum is the great regret of his life. He believes that Brexit, coupled with the election of Donald Trump, threatens to destroy the foundations of the world order. He reserves his greatest contempt for those, like Nigel Farage, who, he believes, fanned low prejudice to achieve their aim. And here, it seems to me, is his blind spot.
There is, by my reckoning, no person in contemporary British public life who has grabbed as many of the glittering prizes as Patten: governor of Hong Kong, an EU commissioner, chairman of the BBC, chancellor of Oxford University – any other man might feel ambition fulfilled by just one of these. But life at the top has an insulating quality making it difficult to empathise with the common man. Perhaps Brexit won the day because a majority felt that national identity was imperilled. Lord Patten, living among the global elite, was never going to share that view.
He has harsh words for the Eurosceptic tabloid press. Conversely he has a great regard for the BBC’s balance and fairness. But I know, because I was there, that for decades the BBC was biased in favour of the EU, just as the Daily Mail was biased against it.
He is right to argue that Britain gained much from EU membership – but there’s a downside too. And while he deplores the fact that the EU referendum was called at all, it seems to me (as someone who also voted Remain) that in a democracy nothing is irrevocable and sometimes it is necessary, and proper, to give people a say in how they are governed. After all, it was by referendum that our place in the EU was confirmed way back in 1975.
Lord Patten has written a book about identity – his own and his country’s. For anyone who has followed British politics for the past half century, there is much to savour.
He declares “with no intellectual shame” his Christian beliefs and is proud of his Catholic faith. British Catholics can also be proud that one of their own rose so high, served so well, and remained a decent, humane and faithful public servant.
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