Chris Patten

It is not unusual for electorates to want contradictory things, and politicians often make promises accordingly.

Christopher Francis Patten, Baron Patten of Barnes, CH, PC (born 12 May 1944) is a British politician who was the 28th and last Governor of Hong Kong from 1992 to 1997 and Chairman of the Conservative Party from 1990 to 1992. He was made a life peer in 2005 and was Chancellor of the University of Oxford from 2003 to 2024.

Quotes

1990s

• Green politics at its worst amounts to a sort of Zen fascism; less extreme, it denounces growth and seeks to stop the world so that we can all get off.
  • Article in The Independent (9 April 1989). Reported in Robert Andrews (ed.) Cassell Dictionary of Contemporary Quotations (1996) p. 137

• In a democracy everybody has a right to be represented, including the jerks.
  • Reported in Derrik Mercer (ed.) Chronicle of the Year 1991 (London: Chronicle Communications, 1992) p. 107. Dated May 1991 in The Hutchinson Encyclopedia (Oxford: Helicon, 1993) p. 308; "including" changed to "even"

• There is a sort of exotic preposterousness about a lot of elections, the way arguments are made even cruder.
  • Quoted in The Observer (30 June 1991). Reported in Robert Andrews (ed.) Cassell Dictionary of Contemporary Quotations (1996) p. 140

• [M]y anxiety is not that this community's autonomy would be usurped by Beijing, but that it could be given away bit by bit by some people in Hong Kong.
  • Address to the Legislative Council of Hong Kong (2 October 1996) [1]

East and West: The Last Governor of Hong Kong on Power, Freedom and the Future (1998)

USA: Times Books, Random House

No other place has quite the same blend of East and West, ancient and modern, spectacular and humdrum.

• As governor, I experienced the vitality of life in a booming and free Asian city, saw routinely the best and worst aspects of human nature, and was made to revisit some of the principles in which I have always believed but to which I had rarely given much thought previously. In the darker hours of occasionally fretful nights I found myself face to face with the moral dimensions of political action to a greater extent than ever before.
  • p. x

• No other place has quite the same blend of East and West, ancient and modern, spectacular and humdrum.
  • p. 10, about Hong Kong

• It is not unusual for electorates to want contradictory things, and politicians often make promises accordingly.
  • p. 34

• [O]n July 1, 1997, Hong Kong became the only example of decolonization deliberately accompanied by less democracy and a weaker protection of civil liberties. This was a cause for profound regret, especially for the departing colonial power. But it was China's doing and China's decision. I am pleased that Britain narrowly avoided complicity in the dishonourable act of denying the citizens of free Hong Kong what they had been promised in 1984.
  • p. 70

• Asians...put more emphasis on order, stability, hierarchy, family and self-discipline than Westerners do.
  • p. 129

2000s

Those of us who had a perfectly happy childhood should be able to sue for deprivation of literary royalties.

• Those of us who had a perfectly happy childhood should be able to sue for deprivation of literary royalties.
  • Not Quite the Diplomat: Home Truths about World Affairs (London: Allen Lane, 2005) ch. 1, p. 4

2010s

• It's obviously an issue [democracy] which is hugely important to a new generation.
• You know perfectly well there have been attacks on the rule of law, on the independence of the judiciary; abductions around Hong Kong streets; suggestions that Hong Kong’s autonomy needs to be curtailed in the future; suggestions that the autonomy of Hong Kong’s tremendous universities is something that has to be looked at again; there is a sense that free speech is under threat.
  • Interview in London to mark the 20th anniversary of the handover of Hong Kong. Reported in Zuraidah Ibrahim and Stuart Lau, "Hong Kong ex-governors Patten and Wilson still upbeat about city’s democracy ... but say there's work to be done", South China Morning Post (24 June 2017)

2020s

• Xi Jinping and his court have regarded Hong Kong and Hong Kong's freedoms as an existential problem for them because Hong Kong represents so much of what they dislike.
• It matters to everyone [sic] of us that the press tell it as it is, not as the government wants us to hear.
  • Address to the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Hong Kong (May 2020). Rachel Wong, "Ex-Hong Kong governor Chris Patten 'condemned to everlasting infamy' for 'meddling,' says Beijing spokesperson", Hong Kong Free Press (22 May 2020)

• While we were allegedly taking part in a golden age of China, the head of the Chinese Communist Party was instructing party officials and government officials to engage in an intense struggle against all the things that we and other liberal democracies stand for: Rule of law, parliamentary democracy, universally valid human rights, historical inquiry, all those sorts of things.
  • Interview by the ABC. Roscoe Whalan, "China once declared the UK its 'best friend in the West'. But Hong Kong and the treatment of Uyghurs changed everything", ABC News, Australia (7 June 2021)

• [Nigel Farage] offers nothing for a healthy Conservative future. His saloon bar bluster, if translated into policy, would give us Liz Truss economics, Jeremy Corbyn foreign policy (which would be much loved by Putin) and an approach to our nation's identity akin to that of Tommy Robinson (albeit Tommy Robinson with a cravat).
  • "My six-point plan to drag the Tories back from the abyss", The Independent (15 July 2024)
  • Published following the 2024 general election. A working relationship with Farage's Reform UK was favoured by some leading Conservatives at that time.

About Patten

• Prostitute...tango dancer...a sinner for a thousand years.
  • Anonymous, recalled by Patten and reported in "Chris Patten recalls 'happiest years' as last governor of Hong Kong ... with egg tarts, insults and a pirated memoir", South China Morning Post (24 June 2017)