The Last Governor: Chris Patten and the Handover of Hong Kong

Auden

INTRODUCTION

Hong Kong brags shamelessly. In all Asia it lays claim to the boldest tycoons, the best-educated and most industrious workers, the most important financial centre, the most innovative trading houses, the highest living standards, the most billionaires, the most spendthrift gamblers, the largest gold market, the largest diamond market, the busiest port, the most crowded skies, the most exciting skyscrapers, the widest range of luxury shops, the most expensive apartments, the lowest taxes, the most efficient civil service and the least corrupt police force. Hong Kong spews out statistics about itself which show that – on one level – it is indeed a jewel in Asia; at another, deeper, level it reveals the fragility of the identity about which its apologists boast with such abandon. If this city state has any culture, it is that of the marketplace – a free-for-all world where the pursuit of profit is unashamed and the possession of wealth is admired, not envied. If Hong Kong has a commitment, it is to today and tomorrow. The day after tomorrow will take care of itself – or so many of its denizens have wished to believe.

On 1 July 1997, Hong Kong was to be released from British colonial status to be incorporated as a special administrative region (SAR) of the last major communist power in the world, the People’s Republic of China. With a population of 1.3 billion people, which accounts for about a quarter of the world’s population, China is still in the throes of a social and economic upheaval caused by an attempt to graft the practice of capitalism on to the precepts of totalitarianism. It is an awesome venture fraught with uncertainty.

This book is about the last five years of British rule in Hong Kong and its principal focus is the remarkable political drama which began to unfold once it became clear, within a few months of his arrival, that the new governor, Chris Patten, and the rulers of China were on a collision course. From July 1992 to the end of June 1997, Patten had to make judgements of a nature and on a scale unimaginable to most men and women. Uniquely in the history of British colonialism, he had the responsibility of accomplishing the peaceful transfer of sovereign power from one state to another, rather than into independence.

The book’s main vantage point is the perch I was allowed to occupy inside Government House, where I had easy access to the governor and his team. With the proviso that what he said would be embargoed until after the handover, Patten agreed in advance to discuss – for the future record – his strategy and his tactics at every stage of what was to become a serious and sustained diplomatic crisis, the consequences of which are still uncertain. He not only did so with extraordinary candour but, self-evidently, without benefit of hindsight. As a result, his own testimony will surely be of unusual historical interest.

Patten’s task was to meet three overlapping but not necessarily compatible challenges. First, he was to negotiate the final stages of the transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong from Britain to China. Secondly, he had to prepare the people of the colony to face the uncertainties enshrined in that prospect. Thirdly, he had to convince public opinion in the United Kingdom and internationally that Britain’s withdrawal from Hong Kong had been accomplished with at least a modicum of dignity and honour. Patten did not himself enumerate his objectives in precisely these terms, but, from the standpoint of history, they serve as useful yardsticks by which to evaluate his governorship in the sunset years of British colonialism.

Inheriting a basket of unfinished business which affected the basic rights and freedoms of more than 6 million people, Patten was charged with assessing how best to prepare Hong Kong to face the unpredictable imperatives of the gerontocracy which formed the ruling politburo in Beijing. Sino–British relations had long been marked by suspicion, which, in the case of China, verged on paranoia. Disposed to regard the outgoing colonial power as an agent of ‘Western imperialism’, the old men in Beijing were swift to conclude that any failure by Britain to yield to the ‘principles’ of sovereignty to which they adhered was evidence of a Western plot to subvert the People’s Republic.

The prospects for a smooth transfer had been dramatically and immeasurably undermined by the gathering storm of protest in China during the early months of 1989 which culminated in the killings in Tiananmen Square – and in other major cities beyond Beijing – on 4 June 1989. This atrocity shattered the illusions harboured about the nature of the regime by those who had chosen to interpret the economic reforms introduced by Deng Xiaoping, China’s ‘paramount leader’, a decade earlier as an irreversible process leading inevitably to fundamental social and political reform. Hong Kong’s horror at the shedding of so much innocent blood was matched by China’s fear that Hong Kong would become a base for internal subversion against their regime. The fact that the constitution of the People’s Republic pledges to uphold democracy and to protect human rights throughout China, including the SAR of Tibet, did little to reassure the people of Hong Kong that the principle of ‘one country, two systems’ – the term used by Deng Xiaoping to express the ideal relationship between the mainland and the new SAR of Hong Kong – would survive for long.

Even under conditions of mutual amity, negotiations between Britain and China were bound to be fraught with difficulty and misunderstandings. As it was, the distrust which had bedevilled their relationship before Patten’s arrival was compounded by the intense suspicions harboured by the people of Hong Kong about both present and future sovereign powers.

Although I have sought to preserve an observer’s detachment throughout, my proximity to Government House is bound to have shaped, if not distorted, my authorial perspective. In an attempt to remedy this, my narrative is also driven by the experiences and opinions of many other individuals in Hong Kong and, to a lesser extent, in Britain, whose competing aspirations formed part of the backdrop against which Patten defined his own priorities. On the understanding that nothing they said would be published until 1 July 1997, several of these people freely confided their thoughts and feelings about the drama in which they were all central characters. I have variously attributed motives, opinions, and beliefs to all these individuals, and especially to Chris Patten. Although my judgements are based on close observation, they remain mine alone unless they are duly attributed. This book may have the authority of first-hand experience, but it is my own account of events and not ‘authorised’ by anyone.

As an outsider, I cannot claim to ‘understand’ Hong Kong, and this book makes little attempt therefore to penetrate what remain to me the cultural and social opacities of its 6 million inhabitants. However, in charting the crucial milestones along the 150-year history of Britain’s last significant colony, I have drawn extensively on the scholarship of others to chronicle the most pertinent episodes in the long march from the Opium Wars to Patten’s appointment as Hong Kong’s last governor. Since it is impossible to understand the predicament inherited by Patten without some appreciation of the colony’s recent political history, I have explored in some detail, with the help of those most closely involved (including the former prime minister, Baroness Thatcher, her former political adviser Sir Percy Cradock and two former foreign secretaries, Lord Howe and Douglas Hurd), Britain’s diplomatic objectives in the years between 1979 and 1992.

It was originally my hope to balance this portrait of Hong Kong’s last years by including the ‘Beijing perspective’. At first, in the person of the Chinese ambassador to London, the authorities of the People’s Republic showed keen interest in this idea. However, they soon retreated into vague promises about what they might be able to deliver once the ‘misunderstandings between our two countries’ had been resolved. I gave up. As the text shows, I have been obliged as a result to rely on the authority of press conferences, official statements and other much-quoted ‘sources’. However, I suspect that these have yielded as much of the truth as I would have discovered for myself if I had been able to penetrate the carapace of secrecy in China to forge a more productive relationship with one or more of its luminaries.

Inevitably, The Last Governor has been written on the run. For that reason alone, it is essentially a work of extended journalism of the sort that its proponents like to describe as ‘contemporary history’. That it contains material which has historical significance I have no doubt, but even though I have been privileged to witness at close quarters ‘history in the making’, my perspective lacks the enchantment of distance. At the time of writing, the future of Hong Kong is uncertain and precarious. I have to declare a twofold bias: first in favour of the last governor of Hong Kong, and secondly in favour of democracy. As a friend, I am disposed to judge Chris Patten sympathetically; more pertinently, as a democrat, I am inclined to look askance at those who use their own freedom to argue that others can do very well, thank you, without democracy.

Of great matters in contention, it is sometimes said that ‘history will judge’. History, of course, does no such thing. People judge and, as of now, we can only guess at what, in the case of Chris Patten, that judgement will be. I like to believe that he will be shown to have been on the ‘right’ side of history; that his faith in individual freedom is well founded, and that, for this reason, future generations in Hong Kong, and even in China, will look back on his struggle on their behalf with gratitude.

1

‘A TERRIBLE FEELING OF FALLING’

The New Governor Arrives in Hong Kong

Western writers have been by turns entranced and appalled by their experience of Hong Kong. Ian Fleming, writing in the early sixties, described the city as ‘the last stronghold of feudal luxury in the world . . . a gay and splendid colony humming with vitality and progress, and pure joy to the senses and spirits’. A decade later, John le Carré set a memorable episode of The Honourable Schoolboy in Hong Kong. Describing a taxi ride in bad weather up the winding road from the city centre to the top of the Peak, he wrote that the car ‘sobbed slowly up the concrete cliffs’, which were engulfed by ‘a fog thick enough to choke on’. Outside the taxi, ‘it was even worse. A hot, unbudgeable curtain had spread itself across the summit, reeking of petrol and crammed with the din of the valley. The moisture floated in hot, fine swarms.’ On a clear day it would have been possible to see far out over the harbour across Kowloon towards the New Territories, and beyond a vagueness of mountains that marked the border with the People’s Republic of China.

The Peak has long been de rigueur for tourists, who usually prefer to travel to the top in the Peak Tram which clanks up the sheer side of the mountain. Jan Morris, Hong Kong’s finest apologist, took this route in the seventies, accompanied by a ‘foreign devil’ who showed her the ‘kingdoms of the world’ which lay below them: ‘The skyscrapers of Victoria, jam-packed at the foot of the hill, seemed to vibrate with pride, greed, energy and success, and all among them the traffic swirled, and the crowds milled, and the shops glittered, and the money rang.’ By no means starry-eyed, however, she also saw this throbbing megalopolis as a ‘permanent parasite’ upon the skin of China, wherein the British and the Chinese, springing from ‘two utterly alien cultures, from opposite ends of the world’ are ‘fused in the furnace of Hong Kong, and made colleagues by the hope of profit’.

The last governor of Britain’s last colony landed at Kai Tak Airport on 9 July 1992, on schedule at two o’clock in the afternoon. Accompanied by his wife, Lavender, and two of his three daughters, Laura and Alice, Chris Patten stepped off the aircraft to face a battery of television cameras and journalists corralled on the tarmac by officials of the Government Information Services. The weather was routinely sweltering and the humidity nudged towards 100 per cent. Hong Kong’s new first family, the source of much excited chatter in the local media since the announcement of Patten’s appointment, smiled self-consciously and disappeared into the merciful cool of the VIP lounge.

After a pause for refreshments, the Patten motorcade left the airport to drive through the heart of Kowloon to the public pier, where the family boarded the Lady Maurine, the elderly and elegant motor yacht provided by the Hong Kong government for the personal use of the governor and which, along with an equally ancient Rolls-Royce, was one of the gubernatorial perks to provoke in some a titter of envy. Led by a Royal Navy warship and surrounded by a flotilla of naval and police launches and a convoy of pleasure craft, the Patten family made stately progress across the harbour to disembark at Queen’s Pier. A couple of fireboats sprayed a welcoming spume of water as she passed. RAF jets and army helicopters flew low overhead. Foghorns blasted and the sound of a seventeen-gun salute from the naval landbase HMS Tamar ricocheted around the waiting crowd. There was a guard of honour and a Gurkha band played the national anthem. Patten took the salute with his wife and children beside him, their dresses swishing slowly in a sultry breeze. For aficionados it was colonialism encapsulated in a single image – even if their new overlord, surrounded by so much gold braid, did cut an underwhelming figure in a plain grey suit and without the gubernatorial plumed hat favoured by his predecessors.

In the dog days of colonialism it had become customary for the media in London to caricature the motley selection of superannuated politicians dispatched to govern Britain’s dwindling possessions as faintly ridiculous refugees from a Gilbert and Sullivan opera strutting their way into the imperial sunset. Patten had no intention of either joining that twilight galaxy or dressing the part, which was one of the reasons why he had decided to forgo both the plumed hat and the ceremonial uniform. There was also an aesthetic consideration: ‘If you are built like one of those sketches for a Daks suit from Simpson’s, you can get away with wearing a hat – as someone said to me rather indelicately – with a chicken on top and that wonderful white tropical kit. If you are built like me, medium-sized and lumpy, you do look extremely foolish.’ His friends had been disappointed. ‘The prime minister said that I had been a frightful spoilsport. Lots of people who were looking forward to a rather more cheerful breakfast when they looked at photographs of me in the paper were to be denied that pleasure.’ A more pertinent, if no less self-conscious reason for his abstinence lay in his determination to impress upon popular opinion in Hong Kong that in style and character he was cast in a quite different mould from his predecessors; that his governorship would be ‘more open and accessible and without some of the flummery’ which had been traditionally associated with the post.

The power vested in the governor of Hong Kong under the Letters Patent, which gave him absolute executive authority over the colony as the head of government and commander-in-chief of the armed forces, was a sharp reminder to Patten that he lacked the popular legitimacy of an elected leader, and it made him vaguely queasy. With this in mind, he not only resisted the ‘flummery’ of his new office but also turned down the knighthood that traditionally went with it. ‘There were negotiations and the Palace was receptive and helpful,’ he confided. ‘I’ve got my house colours as a privy councillor, which, for a politician, is the most important honour you can have . . . I think the time for an additional honour, if there does come a time, should be when I’ve actually done something for Hong Kong, not just because I’ve taken a job.’

The welcome he was given was friendly but not effusive. Foreign tourists and expatriates, as intrigued by the Patten daughters as by the new governor himself, all but outnumbered the local population. The people of Hong Kong had seen too many British officials alight on their soil to be anything other than sceptical about the latest arrival. However, even the sceptics acknowledged that Patten was a little different. For weeks the local media had regaled their public with every recycled titbit about the new governor and his family: how Lavender had been a barrister in London; that their eldest daughter Kate was in South America before starting a degree course at Newcastle University; that Laura, a photogenic seventeen and given to stylishly short dresses, would stay for a while but might return to work in London; and that twelve-year-old Alice would be living at Government House and would become a pupil at the Island School in the Midlevels. Patten himself was a good deal younger than any of his recent predecessors, who had been rewarded with the governorship towards the close of their careers. And unlike his predecessors, he was already a public figure, even – in Britain at least – something of a star. As written up by the assiduous Hong Kong press, the Pattens had all the makings of a genuine first family: politically glamorous and pleasingly enthusiastic about the adventure ahead of them.

It was not merely that Patten exuded bonhomie; nor that he waved from the Rolls and searched for hands to shake with the manic energy of a campaigning politician; nor that his face easily creased in what seemed to be a genuinely eager smile, even if, on the first humid day, his complexion assumed an ever-deepening shade of puce. All that helped, but there was something else: from the start, he exuded a self-confidence and certainty which implied, even via the unyieldingly attentive television cameras recording his arrival, that he had a purpose and he knew what it was. Even the cynical – which included most of those of whatever viewpoint who had taken more than a spasmodic interest in the unfolding drama of the previous decade, and who knew Albion to be perfidious – could not help feeling a frisson of anticipatory excitement. For better, for worse, life with the new governor – Peng Dingkang in the official Cantonese translation, or Fat Pang, as he soon came to be called – at least promised to be far from boring.

Chris Patten had been preceded to Hong Kong by a formidable reputation as one of the Conservative government’s heavyweights. The prime minister’s close friend and most trusted confidant, he was deemed to have snatched electoral victory for his party from what the polls had predicted to be certain defeat. In the process, he became, in his own characteristic phrase, ‘the only Cabinet minister careless enough to lose his seat’ in his own west-country constituency of Bath.

In Britain, Patten had been a skilled political communicator. His way with the English language had earned him a reputation as a thoughtful and fastidious politician who avoided the coarse public dialogue in which so many of his colleagues indulged. His was by no means a high Tory background: his father worked in what was then called Tin Pan Alley (Patten would recall proudly that he published the hit song ‘She Wears Red Feathers and a Hooly-Hooly Skirt’). A scholarship boy, he was educated at Catholic schools and read history at Balliol College, Oxford, where he co-authored the annual college review in which he updated fragments by the Greek writer Aristophanes. Patten evinced no interest in politics until, having won a Coolidge Travelling Scholarship to the United States, he was given a job as a researcher with the team running John Lindsay’s 1965 campaign to become mayor of New York. Enthused by this experience of politics in the raw, he returned to London and eschewed a BBC traineeship to join the Conservative Research Department. After four years he went to the Cabinet Office, and two years later, in 1972, he became private secretary to the party chairman, Peter Carrington. On his return to the research department as director in 1974, he soon fell foul of the new party leader, Margaret Thatcher, who regarded him as deplorably hostile to her radical vision. Although he remained at the research department he was effectively ostracised by Thatcher. As one of his friends told the writer John Newhouse, ‘Chris protested and then went into outer darkness.’

In the 1979 election Patten won the marginal seat of Bath, going on to serve his ministerial apprenticeship as a PPS at Social Services and a parliamentary under-secretary at the Northern Ireland Office before rising to become minister of state, first at the Department of Education and Science and then, between 1986 and 1989, in the Foreign Office, where he was in charge of overseas development. Despite his relatively slow progress, he had already been cast by his peers in all parties in the role of ‘future leader’. Although he was averse to the style of Thatcherism, and semi-detached from much of its content, he had managed to overcome his distaste to the point of toiling annually in the arid vineyard of the prime minister’s speeches to the Conservative Party Conference, attempting to bring eloquence to her thought and life to her prose. His reward, in 1989, was a place in the Cabinet as secretary of state for the environment, charged with ‘bedding down’ Thatcher’s community charge, steered on to the statute book by Nicholas Ridley. Though Patten regarded the poll tax as a catastrophe, the last gasp of a leader who had lost touch with political reality, he did not hesitate to bludgeon the bill’s opponents in the House of Commons – to their amazement and to the dismay of his admirers beyond Westminster, who could not understand how such an apparently decent politician could be party to so manifest an injustice. In failing to appreciate the iron laws of collective responsibility, they also underestimated the careful ambition of a politician which was obscured by a beguiling persona in which high seriousness and dry humour were, in that grey age, refreshingly entwined.

Patten had comforted himself by letting it be known at Westminster that he found the ‘old girl’ faintly ridiculous. In private he was also scathing about the vainglory of lesser colleagues. Contemptuous of romantic argument, whether it emanated from the right or the left, his response to it had been to acquire the disconcerting habit of slowly rolling his eyes in exaggerated bewilderment, as if to indicate that its proponent had to be off his – or, in the case of Thatcher, her – trolley.

Patten’s ‘success’ in imposing the community charge on a resentful populace helped precipitate Thatcher’s downfall. Forced to defend her leadership in a party election, she failed to win outright in the first ballot. Believing her to be mortally wounded, Patten joined the health secretary, Kenneth Clarke, in telling her that it was time to retire gracefully. He warned that if she did not follow their advice, they, like many of their colleagues, would be unable to support her in the second round. She departed for the House of Lords, blessing John Major as her successor in the Commons. Major duly defeated the foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, and the former defence secretary, Michael Heseltine, to emerge as leader and prime minister.

Patten was appointed chairman of the party to mastermind John Major’s victory over a resurgent Labour party. The 1992 campaign was not an elevated affair. Bending himself to the task of achieving victory, Patten started to deploy terms like ‘double whammy’, ‘gobsmacked’ and ‘porkies’, as if to demonstrate to genuine street-brawlers like Lord Tebbit (a predecessor in the post) that he, too, was an upper-echelon bruiser. Many commentators were genuinely taken aback by his vulgarity, while his opponents affected dismay that such an eminently reasonable politician should stoop to such abuse. Yet those who knew him well were already accustomed to his private, if quaintly anachronistic earthiness, and were surprised only that this trait had not emerged earlier in his career. The Patten they knew was a complex individual, a man of pragmatic conviction, blessed with religious faith, who lived for politics but also had what Denis Healey had memorably called ‘a hinterland’. He had one of the best political brains of his generation among the Tory high-flyers. An ideologue who wore his commitment lightly, he was a Conservative in the mould of ‘Rab’ Butler and Sir Edward Boyle, formal photographs of whom had become part of his office furniture. Yet unlike those icons of ‘one-nation’ Toryism, he was also, in the political sense, more of a thug than his genial demeanour suggested.

Armed with a swift wit and a gift for the apposite phrase, he had long been the leading figure in a group of sympathetic contemporaries which included such luminaries as William Waldegrave, Tristan Garel-Jones, his namesake, John Patten, and John Major, before the latter’s meteoric rise at the behest of Margaret Thatcher. Perhaps not as clever as Waldegrave, nor so artful as Garel-Jones, and less volatile than John Patten, he nonetheless dominated the group with effortless aplomb. To the chagrin of political journalists, even the most ambitious of his colleagues, who were usually swift to deprecate each other in private, stayed their hands. He was the one to whom others turned for advice and reassurance, and whose judgement was trusted, even by his fiercest rivals. Some likened him to Lord Whitelaw, whose benign countenance disguised a shrewd political wisdom on which Margaret Thatcher had learned to rely. But the comparison was inapt: Whitelaw lacked ambition and the ‘killer’ instinct to go with it. Patten wanted to be prime minister, and he was not nearly so squeamish about it as his self-deprecatory manner might have implied. His asperity in argument left none of his friends in any doubt that the master of the emollient soundbite was very much tougher than his image might suggest.

In his final weeks as the Conservative MP for Bath, that political armour was tested to the limit. Patten had been resigned to the prospect of defeat from the start of the election campaign. Damaged by his association with the poll tax, he was also held responsible for the injustices of the uniform business rate – not least in his own constituency, where some traders faced consequential ruin. As party chairman he was obliged to be in London under the daily scrutiny of the media, and although he was ferried to Bath by helicopter, his campaign in what had long been a marginal seat was inevitably spasmodic. In his constituency he became a scapegoat for the government’s unpopularity and, as the canvass returns seemed to confirm, enough of his sophisticated electorate had resolved to vote ‘tactically’ against him to ensure that at least one member of the Cabinet would be driven from office.

The rejection was more painful than he had anticipated. Afterwards he tried to draw comfort from Adlai Stevenson’s reaction after his defeat in the 1952 US presidential elections. Like a small boy who had stubbed his toe, ‘It hurt too much to laugh but I was too grown up to cry.’ Patten resisted the temptation to blame the burghers of Bath, but he was to harbour lasting resentment about the raucous delight with which some of his opponents at the count greeted his defeat. His farewell speech was dignified, decent and generous, but his successor, the Liberal Democrat Don Foster, failed to offer the customary condolences, an omission or oversight which rankled. Reports that some rightwingers at an election gathering in London hosted by the party’s treasurer, Lord McAlpine, had toasted his demise even as they celebrated the victory of which he had been the principal architect did little to soothe his wounded spirits. Exhausted by an election campaign which, as usual, had been demeaned by personal abuse and vilification, Patten left Central Office in the early hours of Friday morning, sustained by the gratitude of a jubilant prime minister but conscious that, for the moment, his own career in British politics was at an end.

Knowing that Patten was unlikely to hold his seat in Bath, the prime minister had held out the promise of the Hong Kong governorship to his friend some weeks earlier. On the day after the election, Major renewed the offer, but at the same time intimated that he would dearly like Patten to reject the Hong Kong option in favour of remaining in his Cabinet. It was common knowledge that the prime minister had come to rely heavily on Patten’s acute political intelligence as well as on his skills as a communicator. Patten exuded that air of relaxed assurance that Major could never master; it would be invaluable to have such a ‘safe pair of hands’ close by to help navigate the government through the turbulent waters of domestic politics that lay ahead. As Patten recalled their conversation a few days later, Major made it clear that ‘he’d have liked me to stay around, but he recognised that Hong Kong was a big job . . . [and that] without being too vain, I sort of fitted the bill . . . I guess quite a lot of my friends, while recognising the importance of the job and flattering me into thinking I could do it, also flatteringly, hoped that I’d stay in London.’

Indeed, within hours of the election some of his closest friends were counselling him to find a ‘safe’ seat (in Chelsea, for instance, former minister and fellow ‘wet’ Nicholas Scott had indicated that he would be ready to stand down in favour of such a formidable successor), or to accept John Major’s offer of a peerage and a place in the Cabinet with the prospect of succeeding Douglas Hurd as foreign secretary. Patten demurred. ‘I did have a very strong feeling,’ he said privately a few weeks later, ‘that I didn’t want to hang around on the margins of contemporary domestic politics, collecting directorships, doing a bit of writing, with the terrible danger of starting to be afflicted with a sense of what might have been. I think it’s important, since we’re only here once, to look forward, not backward.’

Patten had long stated his private aversion to political carpet-bagging, or joining the ‘chicken run’, as the demeaning search for a safe seat was later disparagingly described. Moreover, he was too astute to presume that any Conservative seat would be safe in a high-profile by-election following the return of an unloved government. If he accepted a peerage, his future in public life would depend exclusively on the prime minister’s patronage: for an ambitious individual who was not yet fifty years old, the Lords seemed a remarkably precarious pinnacle from which to establish a position of sustained influence. He had no wish to become a supplicant at the court of Westminster.

Yet party politics had been his life, and he felt bereaved. On the Saturday following the election he helped the prime minister to select the new Cabinet and, he said, felt ‘a certain wry detachment’ when three of the new appointees rang him for advice about what to do and how to do it. Yet he had no sense that he should have been in their shoes: the ‘stabs and twists of anguish’ that did assail him sprang from the inevitable loss of companionship, the feeling that he was no longer a member of an intimate club and the recognition that half a dozen of his closest friends now inhabited a world from which he was excluded. He resolved to resist the temptation to resort to envy or bitterness. ‘Some people might find this barking mad, but the first time I had dinner with them, and practically all of them had to go off to vote at ten to ten, I did feel slightly gutted,’ he confessed later. ‘What really came nearest to emotional disembowelling, though, was not just missing them, but realising they were going to miss you.’

By this time, Patten had virtually decided to accept John Major’s offer to become the last governor of Britain’s last significant colony, Hong Kong. Despite the passionate entreaties of Tristan Garel-Jones, one of the wiliest insiders at Westminster, who organised an informal lobby of sympathetic Tories to ring Patten urging him to stay, he was not to be persuaded. On the Sunday he told Douglas Hurd on the phone that he was ‘very attracted’ to the job. Lavender, his wife, was also enthusiastic. From the outset, she had said, ‘If you don’t take it, you’ll spend the rest of your life regretting it.’ Only his loyalty to the prime minister still made him hesitate. That evening the Pattens and the Hurds dined together. Although other names had been canvassed for the governorship (including that of the former foreign secretary David Owen), Hurd made it clear that Patten was, in his judgement, the best available choice. The two men and their wives rehearsed the pros and cons, but the foreign secretary was gently adamant: ‘Without pushing me into doing it, Douglas made the point that it would be much more interesting than most of the jobs I might have been doing in domestic politics,’ Patten recalled. ‘It is unique in public service. Dangerous – not in a physical sense – but difficult enough to be fascinating . . . Almost the second the prime minister knocked the ball over the net, I wanted to knock it back again.’ As Hurd put it, ‘I was very sad for Chris when he lost his seat, but when the thought was sown that he might go to Hong Kong, I jumped at it, because I could see there were going to be problems.’

It was later reported that Patten was so agonised by the decision facing him that he and Lavender had to remove themselves to France for a heart-searching weekend. ‘Pretty average bilge,’ Patten commented. The die had already been cast.

The decision to replace a diplomat, Sir David Wilson, with a politician for the final years of British rule had been mooted by Douglas Hurd some months before the election. Hurd explained later that this ‘had nothing to do with Chris Patten’, although, as he saw it, the argument in favour of a ‘political’ governor was compelling: ‘The last five years were going to be very difficult, and we needed someone in Hong Kong who was in tune with the world of Westminster and the British media; someone who could operate in Hong Kong in a more political way than had been traditional, finding allies and supporters in a way which a traditional governor had no need to do.’ It was, he insisted, no criticism of David Wilson, just ‘a clear view on my part that we needed a different kind of governor for the last five years of British rule’.

When the decision to replace Wilson became known, it was rumoured that the prime minister and the foreign secretary (both of whom had been recently bruised by a joint mission to Beijing) regarded the outgoing governor as one of the principal advocates of the ‘appeasement’ of China, an approach which they believed could no longer be sustained after the atrocity of Tiananmen Square in June 1989. Hurd has conceded that his visit with the prime minister to Beijing in 1991 – to follow up a ‘memorandum of understanding’ about the construction of a new airport for Hong Kong initialled by Major’s foreign affairs adviser, Sir Percy Cradock, earlier that year, on which Beijing was soon to renege – had been ‘extremely frustrating’. The groundwork for this doomed effort had been prepared by Wilson in co-operation with Sir Percy. As a result, both sinologists fell foul of the media, which – led notably by The Times and the Spectator – were scathing about the ‘kowtowing’ diplomats in the Foreign Office who had masterminded Britain’s relations with the ‘butchers of Beijing’. Hurd has dismissed as ‘a journalistic cliché’ the suggestion that his and the prime minister’s experiences in Beijing turned them against the Foreign Office ‘kowtowers’, but he has acknowledged that the decision to replace a diplomat with a politician did involve a shift of emphasis by the government: while ‘co-operation and consultation’, he explained, remained ‘highly desirable and necessary’, they ‘don’t mean waiting to establish what the government of the People’s Republic wants and then doing it’. The implied rebuke was self-evident.

For his part, Lord Wilson has been reticent about his departure, confirming only that he was ‘very sorry to leave’, and that had he been asked to remain, ‘I’d certainly have regarded it as my duty to do so.’ It was ‘very crude indeed’ to suggest that he had been sacked for failing to stand up to the Chinese and to make way for someone who would. However, Wilson shared the view held by many of his peers in the Foreign Office that the restoration of good relations with China following the shootings in Tiananmen Square was of paramount importance. ‘I was trying to build a house that had decent foundations,’ he has since explained. ‘Now that meant . . . Chinese support is perhaps putting it too strongly; Chinese acquiescence, yes, for sure.’

To this end, he confided to at least one senior colleague in Government House that he was quite ready to be pilloried by the media in Britain and Hong Kong as one of the ‘arch-appeasers’ of China. Appointed in 1987, Wilson had been expected to retire before the handover, but he was bitterly disappointed by the prime minister’s decision to remove him at a moment when, he claimed, ‘We had recovered in a quite remarkable way from all the problems of 1989.’ According to his friends, he felt especially betrayed by the failure of government ministers to quash publicly the rumours that he had been sacked to make way for a figure of greater resolution and substance.

The prospective governor had been to Hong Kong as overseas development minister and before that, in 1979, as one of a group of backbenchers, led by the Labour MP Ted Rowlands, who took it upon themselves, in the words of one official who was present, to ‘harangue’ the governor of the time, Sir Murray MacLehose, about democracy. Why, Patten and his colleagues wanted to know, had the colonial authorities been so dilatory about the introduction of democracy? Were not the Hong Kong people mature enough to accept a parliamentary system? And would not democratic reform reinforce Hong Kong’s precious ‘way of life’? By the prevailing standards in Government House, such questions must have seemed irredeemably jejune. Nevertheless, this encounter between the young Turks and the colonial old guard did, in fact, help to nudge the colonial administration towards the establishment, in embryonic form, of the hydra-headed quasi-democracy which the new governor was to inherit over a decade later.

Aside from these brief encounters, Patten’s knowledge of Hong Kong was rudimentary, while his acquaintance with the delicate latticework of diplomacy between Britain and China in the intervening years was negligible. He was tangentially familiar with the Joint Declaration (the 1984 treaty, lodged at the United Nations, defining the terms under which the sovereignty of Hong Kong would revert from Britain to China in 1997), and the Basic Law (China’s codification of the Joint Declaration into a constitutional and legal framework for the governance of Hong Kong as a special administrative region of the People’s Republic of China). However, he had had no cause to pay close attention to the recent history of Hong Kong and he was thus not au fait with the carefully contrived ambiguities of either document, or with the tortuous diplomacy through which, under relentless pressure from China, Britain had negotiated its retreat from sovereignty.

Throughout May and June of 1992, therefore, Patten immersed himself in the detail of Hong Kong’s recent history. Briefed by Foreign Office officials and former diplomats, he was also lobbied by industrialists, financiers and several of Hong Kong’s most prominent public figures, who flew to London to deliver their competing recipes for triumph and disaster. He worked his way through a daunting collection of files – memoranda, briefing notes, telegrams and correspondence – reading between the lines to piece together not only the order of events but the aspirations and assumptions which underlay the process of diplomacy. As he noted at the end of those two months, ‘It’s dragged me up the learning curve and in the process I’ve acquired some prejudices. But I’m absolutely convinced that when I actually get to Hong Kong and see things for myself, and allow my nostrils to twitch in the breeze – if there is any in July – it’ll feel different.’

Sir Percy Cradock – who had been the principal architect of Sino–British relations in the 1980s and who, as foreign affairs adviser to Margaret Thatcher and, latterly, to John Major, was still the most influential sinologist in Whitehall – had opposed the appointment of a ‘political’ governor. His aversion, which predated Patten’s availability for the post, sprang from his fierce belief that the accommodations he had engineered with Beijing would be jeopardised by the more aggressive approach that a politician, driven by other imperatives, would almost certainly adopt. In particular he was convinced that a politician as governor would be overly swayed by the media in Hong Kong and London, a large sector of which, to Cradock’s chagrin, had already decided that his own approach had been pusillanimous. Cradock thought that ‘there were great springs of emotion bubbling away below the surface about this’ in the hothouse of Westminster, and that these threatened to undermine the prospect of a smooth transition which, he believed, his ‘realism’ had managed to secure. He feared that a politician would too easily yield to unrealistic but vociferous demands to extend the bounds of democracy in Hong Kong before 1997, and that any project of this kind would be doomed to fail amid acrimony and conflict with China. By his own account, Cradock told Major, as he had previously told Thatcher, ‘It’s no good shuffling the cards; you are not going to change the situation.’

He made no headway with the prime minister; Douglas Hurd, meanwhile, privately believed that Cradock and his fellow sinologists had ‘missed the change in Hong Kong’ following the killings in Tiananmen Square and the new strength of the demand in Hong Kong for political advance. This internal conflict was concealed until some months after Patten’s appointment, but it went to the heart of the bitter divisions, within Whitehall and between the Foreign Office and Government House, which were soon to provoke an undeclared war of attrition between them. This was only resolved in Patten’s favour precisely because he was the kind of heavyweight politician to which Cradock had taken such exception.

Patten had foreseen that there would be tensions. ‘I’m sure that, from time to time, there will be differences of view. I’m sure there will be people who say, It just shows what happens when you appoint a politician, ’ he commented on the eve of his departure for Hong Kong. ‘I guess there’ll be people who’d say, It just shows that with a job like that at the crossroads of Asia, you really needed to have an old Asia hand stroking their nose. Needed a sinologist. Good lad – but didn’t speak Mandarin. ’ However, he had no premonition of how prolonged, how vituperative and – in the case of Cradock and a motley array of superannuated diplomats and politicians – how public this fundamental dispute would become.

The new governor’s insouciance was underpinned by his confidence that Major and Hurd would, in his own phrase, give him ‘a great deal of authority and a great deal of elbow room to manufacture policy with them’. Indeed, according to Patten, the three of them never even discussed the issue because: ‘They both know I’m not a turf warrior . . . it didn’t need to be said that I would have the authority I needed.’ The mutual trust that existed between Major, Hurd and Patten would, they all three recognised, be critical in sustaining that authority as Patten sought to navigate Hong Kong through the political and diplomatic rapids ahead. At the Rio Summit soon after the announcement of Patten’s appointment, John Major duly described the elevated status of the new governor to the Chinese premier, Li Peng. As reported to Patten, the prime minister in effect said, ‘This is one of my closest personal and political friends in Britain. He’s one of the leading politicians in my party and the country, and there is no point in thinking you can slip bits of tissue paper between him and Number Ten. If you are talking to him, you are talking to me.’ This blunt statement served only to intensify Beijing’s growing suspicion – paranoia is perhaps a better term – about Britain’s purpose in Hong Kong in the run-up to the handover. It also confirmed Cradock and his allies in the Foreign Office in their belief that Britain was about to embark on a hazardous course of confrontation rather than conciliation.

Patten was clear about the competing pressures that would be placed on him by China, Britain and a volatile community in Hong Kong. He also knew that if he was to impose himself on the drift of events – not to turn the tide but to direct the flow – he would have to act swiftly, and to be seen to do so. As he focused more precisely on his objectives, he was sharply conscious that the eyes of the world would be on Hong Kong, and on him. ‘This is the last big job in our colonial history. I don’t mean to give the impression that I want a place in history – I think politicians who talk like that are pretty dangerous – but it is a literal description . . . Britain’s colonial history is going to be judged, to a considerable extent, through the prism of the next five years in Hong Kong.’ He was also aware that the decolonisation of Hong Kong was quite different from any other. Hong Kong was not to acquire independence, but to be transferred from one sovereign power to another; from a liberal democracy to a communist dictatorship. In 1980 the Chinese leader, Deng Xiaoping, had used the phrase ‘one country, two systems’ to characterise the prospective relationship between the 1.3 billion people on the mainland and the 6 million of Hong Kong. This slogan had acquired an almost mystical significance, becoming a mantra for optimists and pessimists alike, to be chanted with ritual fervour in the knowledge that, like all phrases devoid of intrinsic meaning, it was reassuring precisely because it was opaque.

To define his own objective as governor, Patten had taken to using – or, by his account, abusing – an intergalactic metaphor. The traditional process of decolonisation, he noted, involved ‘designing’ a constitution, complete with an independent judiciary, an honest civil service and the Westminster model of democracy. The next step was to ‘put this on the launchpad, light the blue touchpaper and hope the satellite will go into orbit. Sometimes it is successful and sometimes it isn’t – which is when you fetch up with judges being murdered, the public service corrupt and Sandhurst having rather more influence on government than Westminster.’ In the case of Hong Kong, however, there had to be ‘a docking of shuttles in outer space’. If this intricate manoeuvre were to succeed, the applause would be muted and, in the case of ‘a lot of Americans and others who take sometimes a rather dangerously moralistic view of global issues’, absent altogether. However, failure to dock would be calamitous. One of his mentors commented: ‘Of course, if it goes smoothly it’ll be frightfully boring. If it doesn’t, you’ll have people rioting on the streets and you’ll have civil disorder. You’ll have a collapsing Hang Seng Index. You’ll have half the people wanting to run you out of town for causing instability and the other half for not standing up to China with sufficient vigour.’

The prospect of severing his ties with the intimacies of the political club to which he had belonged for most of his adult life for the uncertainties of Hong Kong was bittersweet. By the time of Patten’s departure, the shock of his election defeat had given way to a lingering sense that this new appointment had brought his career in domestic politics to an end. ‘It is difficult,’ he noted wistfully, ‘to think of anybody who has taken off for a flight round the airfield and has managed to touch down again. Christopher Soames [the last governor of Rhodesia] didn’t manage. I don’t know whether Sir Leon Brittan [a European commissioner] will manage . . . Our system slightly distrusts those who show from time to time that Westminster isn’t the only place in the world.

‘I have woken up once or twice early in the morning with a terrible feeling of falling. It’s an adventure.’

2

‘RECKLESS AND UNSCRUPULOUS ADVENTURES’

Britain Acquires a Colony

The new governor lacked the reverential approach to China’s past with which so many British sinologists were afflicted. A few days after his arrival at Government House, he stood in his study examining a map of China as he reflected breezily on Beijing’s attitude to the handover of sovereignty in 1997. ‘I think for most Chinese, but certainly for the immortals, the Long March generation – pretty fatal, literally, once you start calling yourself an immortal – for that generation, it is about the national humiliation of the Opium Wars. It is about reasserting Chinese sovereignty and, in the process, closing a humiliating episode in Chinese history.’ His own knowledge of that history was, as he readily acknowledged, decidedly sparse.

The British flag was planted on Hong Kong for the first time in January 1841. The foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston, was dismayed when he heard the news, and reprimanded Captain Elliot, who had taken this ‘barren island’, pronouncing that Hong Kong would never be ‘a mart of trade’. The Chinese emperor, Daoguang, was no less baffled, but concluded of the invaders: ‘These barbarians always look on trade as their chief occupation . . . It is plain they are not worth attending to.’

The seizure of Hong Kong was a classic if accidental triumph of gunboat diplomacy. The island was one of a hundred or more scattered around the estuary of the Pearl River, seventy miles downstream from the capital of southern China, Canton. By the early eighteenth century, Canton was already an elegant city whose grandest quarters, graced by fine squares and magnificent triumphal arches, reminded one contemporary correspondent of St Germain in Paris. By the end of the century it had become an established entrepot where the great trading nations of the world had taken up residence to exploit the huge but virtually untapped market of an ancient but ramshackle empire which already had a population of 300 million subjects. In Britain, liberal ideology was in the ascendant, most aggressively in the form of a commitment to free trade, which had acquired the status of a quasi-moral imperative. It was underpinned by a genuine belief that international peace and prosperity could not otherwise be secured: the alternative to free trade, it was argued, was war. British merchant venturers, with the Royal Navy in support, criss-crossed the trading routes of the globe in pursuit of the rapidly growing opportunities for trade and investment. In Canton, these buccaneers operated under the protective authority of the East India Company, which was formally entrusted with quasi-governmental responsibilities on behalf of the British empire. Like their European rivals, the scions of the great trading houses, such as Messrs Jardine and Matheson, regarded themselves, in the words of the latter, as the ‘princes of the earth’, the advance guard of a new world order.

Unhappily for these self-appointed ‘princes’, this obeisance before the altar of commerce clashed fundamentally with some of the basic tenets of Confucianism. In the celestial empire, the deference owed to traditional hierarchies was rigidly enforced. The merchant class was to be found almost at the bottom of the social scale, above beggars and prostitutes but beneath peasants and craftsmen. In Canton, the self-esteem of the ‘princes of the earth’ was thus put severely to the test. As fan-kwais, or ‘barbarians’, foreign merchants were required to segregate themselves from contact with the indigenous population, which regarded them with suspicion and even hostility. Forbidden to live inside the city walls, they were restricted to their own compounds while their womenfolk were banned altogether from landing on Cantonese soil. Even more frustratingly, their terms of trade were severely restricted and they were only permitted to do business with China during the summer months, after which they decamped, reluctantly, to the island of Macau at the mouth of the Pearl River delta.

These constraints were not only irksome but, far more importantly, they violated the new Western orthodoxy according to which all nations not only had the right but the obligation to open their borders in the cause of free trade. This imperative, it was widely agreed, was a cause which could legitimately be pressed to the point of war. In 1793, following pressure from the East India Company, the British government sent Lord Macartney on the first ‘embassy’ to Peking to urge His Celestial Majesty to liberalise Chinese trading regulations and, more broadly, to put Britain’s diplomatic relations with China on a more substantial footing by allowing His Britannic Majesty’s government to establish a presence at the Imperial Court. He failed. In a courteous but firm rebuff, the old emperor, Qianlong, sent Macartney back with a missive for George III informing the British monarch that the changes he sought were ‘not in harmony with the state system of our dynasty and will definitely not be tolerated’.

By the end of the eighteenth century, opium, cultivated in India and shipped to Canton, had become the most valuable commodity traded with China. An imperial edict banning the import of this addictive substance had been widely ignored by local merchants, who smuggled the contraband ashore under the eyes of well-bribed officials. Everyone – with the possible exception of opium addicts – benefited. As Frank Welsh has observed in his masterly History of Hong Kong, ‘It was in everyone’s interest that the Canton trade continued uninterrupted: the prosperity of Canton, the comforts of Peking, the livelihood of thousands of officials, and, through the duties levied on tea [the celestial empire’s principal export], a substantial part of the revenue of the British government, all depended on it.’ As a result, efforts by the Chinese authorities to stamp out the illegal trade were at best desultory. On one occasion, after a ritual engagement with a departing convoy of opium traders, the Chinese naval authorities issued a proclamation stating: ‘His Celestial Majesty’s Imperial fleet, after a desperate conflict, has made the Fan-kwais run before it.’ This sound and fury concealed the fact that, as always, the Chinese gunboats had followed the British merchant ships, as Welsh puts it, ‘at a respectful distance and at a deliberate pace, but with the minimum discharge of ordnance’. Great care was taken to ensure that no one was hurt and no ships suffered more than superficial damage.

In Britain opium was still highly regarded as both a painkiller and a soporific. Its addictive properties were well known, but caused concern only to a minority. In China, the use of the narcotic was as commonplace as that of tobacco in Britain. So opium itself was not a casus belli between the two countries. As Welsh has argued persuasively, the underlying cause of the Opium Wars between Britain and China was principally the dispute over free trade which sprang from mutually incompatible attitudes. It is conceivable that if the emperor had been willing to open negotiations with the first British envoy to visit Peking, the ‘embassy’ led by Lord Macartney in 1793, armed conflict between Britain and China, and more than two centuries of resentment and distrust, might have been avoided. It is clear from the available evidence that the British authorities would have been quite willing to suppress the opium trade in return for the liberalisation of legitimate trade, which had far greater potential. That happy outcome, however, would have required the statesmen of both sides to bridge the cultural chasm that separated their two empires – an improbable vision to contemplate, even with the benefit of hindsight.

Throughout this period, the British government came under growing domestic pressure from the merchant classes, who demanded the right to trade as directly and freely with China as with the other parts of the world over which Britannia held sway. Towards the end of the eighteenth century British exporters were facing intense competition from rival European nations and from the United States of America. They were anxious for new outlets in which to market the products of the industrial revolution. For them, China was an untapped source of unimaginable wealth: if only they could trade freely through Canton and move unhindered about China, then, as Welsh has noted, ‘the Chinese masses would rejoice at being able to buy Staffordshire mugs, Birmingham trays and Lancashire frocks, all brought to them cheaply by British-built railways’. A petition to Parliament in 1820 demanded action; the government of Lord Liverpool, its collective mind elsewhere, for the moment demurred.

In Canton, the British merchants became ever more fretful. In 1831, they petitioned London again, complaining that the Cantonese authorities were ‘a venal and corrupt class of persons, who, having purchased their appointments, study only the means of amassing wealth by extortion and injustice’. Worse, they subjected the foreign community to ‘privations and treatment to which it would be difficult to find parallel in any part of the world’. The petitioners proposed that if the Cantonese authorities could not be persuaded to mend their ways, the British government should ‘by the acquisition of an insular possession near the coast of China place British Commerce in this remote quarter of the globe beyond the reach of further despotism and oppression’.

The imperial arrogance of this demand did not find immediate favour in London, where the government faced conflict rather closer to home: an agrarian uprising, riots in major cities, a financial crisis, and, in the form of the Great Reform Bill, a constitutional drama of the first magnitude. Indeed, in 1833, even with the bellicose Lord Palmerston as foreign secretary, a British government mission to Canton was enjoined to ‘cautiously abstain from all unnecessary use of menacing language . . . to ensure that all British subjects understood their duty to obey the laws and usages of the Chinese empire . . . to avoid any conduct, language, or demeanour, which should excite jealousy or distrust among the Chinese people or government . . .’ Evidently the British empire’s policy towards China had yet to live up to the bloodcurdling reputation that later mythology was to bestow on that period. However, this injunction failed to impress the man chosen by Palmerston to lead the mission, Lord Napier, a former naval officer without experience of diplomacy or trade, who, in the words of the Tory Morning Post, knew as much