In short
Podcast Episode Summary: The Rest Is Politics - Episode 110: Chris Patten: Conservatism, China, and the Future of Democracy
Overview In this episode of *The Rest Is Politics*, hosts Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart interview Lord Chris Patten, the last Governor of Hong Kong. The discussion revolves around Patten's reflections on the trajectory of Hong Kong since its handover to China in 1997, the West's relationship with China, and the role of religion in fostering a compassionate society.
Key Themes & Discussions
Early Life and Background of Chris Patten
- Family Heritage: Chris Patten shares insights into his background, including his father's Irish immigrant roots and his family's focus on education.
- Career Introduction: He entered politics in 1979 as an MP and became a significant figure within the Conservative Party, serving under prominent leaders like Margaret Thatcher and John Major.
The Poll Tax and Political Challenges
- Poll Tax Implementation: Chris Patten discusses his role in the implementation of the poll tax, describing it as one of the biggest political mistakes in British history.
- Unpopularity: He acknowledges the deep unpopularity and unfairness of the tax, which led to significant public backlash and riots.
- Political Survival: He reflects on the political pressures he faced, revealing his internal conflict about promoting policies he did not believe in.
Governance of Hong Kong
- Emotional Handover: Patten recounts the emotional moment of handing over Hong Kong to China, highlighting his fears for the future of the city.
- One Country, Two Systems: He discusses the concept of "One Country, Two Systems" and how it was perceived by both the British and Chinese governments.
- Human Rights: Patten emphasizes the importance of human rights and democratic principles during the transition.
Reflections on China and Global Relations
- Xi Jinping's Influence: The interview touches on the shift in Chinese politics under Xi Jinping, describing how his administration's approach has changed the dynamics in Hong Kong.
- Western Relations with China: Patten argues for a more nuanced approach to Western relations with China, advocating for the importance of maintaining human rights as a core focus of foreign policy.
- Economic Interdependence: He notes the complexities of trade and investment with China, suggesting that moral values should still guide diplomatic relations.
Religion and Society
- Role of Faith: The conversation shifts to the role of religion in fostering compassion within society, with Patten reflecting on his Catholic upbringing and its influence on his worldview.
- Political Discourse: He discusses how politicians are increasingly open about their faith, contrasting past norms of political discourse in the UK.
Future of Democracy and Political Parties
- Political Landscape: The discussion concludes by addressing the broader implications for democracy in the UK and the challenges facing political parties in a changing political environment.
- Calls for Unity: Patten suggests that some political issues, like social care, require bipartisan collaboration despite the current toxic atmosphere in British politics.
Key Quotes
- “If I'd managed to cut taxes and increase spending in British politics, I'd have still been prime minister.”
- "The best societies are those which combine free economics and free politics."
Conclusion The episode provides deep insights into Chris Patten's experiences and reflections as a politician, particularly regarding the challenges of governance, the intricacies of Sino-Western relations, and the vital role of democratic values. Patten’s perspective underscores the ongoing significance of human rights in global politics and the need for compassionate leadership in addressing societal challenges.
Additional Notes
- Hosts: Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart
- Guest: Lord Chris Patten
- Release Date: Episode 110 of *The Rest Is Politics*
For listeners interested in more nuanced discussions about politics and global affairs, consider subscribing to *The Rest Is Politics Plus* for exclusive content and early access to episodes.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:28Thanks for listening to The Rest is Politics. Sign up to The Rest is Politics. is made to fit your life and your windows. Because at Blinds.com, the only thing we treat better than windows is you. Visit Blinds.com now for up to 40 % off select styles, plus a professional measure at no cost. Rules and restrictions apply.
0:49Welcome to The Restless Politics Leading with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. And today's guest, he was an MP from 1979, when Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister. He became a cabinet minister under Mrs Thatcher. He became chairman of the Tory party under John Major and won a general election that many expected them to lose. But he lost his own seat in the process. He then became the last governor of Hong Kong. And I vividly remember his emotion and his anger as the colony was handed over to the Chinese in 97. Since then, architect of new policing arrangements in Northern Ireland as part of the Good Friday Agreement, European commissioner, chairman of the BBC, chancellor of Oxford University until quite recently for 21 years, and also once an advisor to the Vatican on dealing with the media.
1:42So all of this is not bad for the Lancashire-born son of a jazz musician turned music publisher. So welcome, Chris Patton. Chris, thank you. Tell us a little bit about growing up. What was your father like? What was your mother like? Did you have siblings? What was your home like? My dad was the grandson of a potato famine Irish immigrant. My great-grandfather was born in Roscommon, 1829, and left during the famine for Lancashire. He had five children, four girls, and a son. And the son, my grandfather, became a schoolteacher. And he married a schoolteacher. And they both became heads of primary schools.
2:26And they're very good examples of how immigrants very often become so good at using education to climb up the ladder. Against that background, my father, who had two older sisters, both of whom were music teachers, my father, to I imagine the horror of his parents, was passionate about percussion. And he left Manchester University in order to play the drums in a dance band called the Phil Richardson Band. Just before the war? Yeah, just before the war, he met my mum, who was very beautiful. She did a lot of amateur acting. She was offered a place with the Malvern players, but her parents were terribly opposed to it because they thought that going off to be an actress was the second only to going off to be a streetwalker.
3:13Anyway, my mum met my dad at this gig in Routenland Hotel, fell in love with him, to the horror of her parents, because their beautiful and well-regarded daughter was getting married not just to a drummer in a band, but a Catholic Irish drummer in a band. So it wasn't easy for them. My mum, those were the days, became a Catholic in order to marry my dad. I don't think, without being disrespectful to her, that religion ever paid a huge part in her life. My father went off to the Middle East during the war, where he learned every night to make the sign on his forehead when he was in the convoys, I-N-R-I, May Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, preserve me from unprepared death.
4:02And he used to do that to us when we were kids growing up. He was in charge, amazingly, of gas warfare in the Middle East. He was a flight lieutenant, came back from the Middle East, got a job not as a jazz drummer, but as a music publisher. And I was brought up by my parents in a new development in Greenford, which had been built, I think, mostly for people who were constructing Heathrow Airport. And later on, they moved to what my mother regarded as a more salubrious street in Greenford. my mum who was uh beautiful kind loving was not without some views on class and would have would have liked to have been i think slightly higher up the scale my dad who was a very good a very good man he was um used to spend every sunday afternoon at the local mental hospital with the st vincent's de paul society my dad was the funniest person i've ever known he was incredibly funny.
5:03He was very decent, kind, unfortunately useless at business, and also smoked like a chimney and died before he was 60. You mentioned his faith and your mother's conversion to his faith. I can remember, I was saying to Rory earlier, I remember when I was a journalist, and you were often talked about as a future leader of the Conservative Party, and I can remember talking to Tories, well, this can't possibly happen because he's a Catholic. You couldn't possibly have a Catholic prime minister. They wouldn't be able to appoint the bishops. I don't know if you remember that. So how important has your faith been?
5:35Oh, it's been important to me, partly not for intellectual, but for tribal reasons. I am not without doubts, and I'm not without being argumentative about some things, particularly these days about the Catholic Church's rather spotty record on human rights issues. I'm quite a fan of this Pope, though I think some of his views are a bit too Argentinian nationalist, and he's obviously says some rather not very wise things about China. But it was important to me and I don't think ever impeded my political advancement. There was perhaps one occasion when I was chosen, heaven help me, to be the candidate in Bath and the previous MP had been a very active Freemason.
6:19And I think he was a bit anxious about what happened to me, the fact that I was taking over from him. It never impeded me, and I don't think that it was ever held against me that I was a Catholic. I think as well that while you and a former boss famously said we don't do God, and it's right that we're not like America in that regard, I think people have become much more comfortable with politicians talking about their faith. And I think that owes quite a bit to Tony Blair and Cherie as well as to some others. I think they're most obviously the political leaders who have had most interest in religious affairs.
7:02I'm not criticizing any of the others, but I can't think of any others having, doing a serious interview about. Theresa May. Theresa May, maybe. I'm sure she's an active Christian. Of course, I should have remembered that. Her father was a vicar. And in many of the best ways, she's a good example of a vicar's daughter. I mean, when people talk about one-nation conservatism, I've always thought that, surprisingly, perhaps the best definition was what she said on the steps of Downing Street after she'd been asked by the then queen to form a government. And she talked about the burning injustices of our society with people who were born in poverty living nine years less, with most of the professions run by people who went to independent schools, not state schools.
7:48with the fact that the kids who are least likely to go to university being white working class boys and so on. And it's amazingly, and her views on women and the extent to which they have to operate under such a low glass ceiling. And as we know already, suffer all sorts of other abuse. The fact that people who are black are discriminated against right across the board in our justice system. And I thought the way she did that was, and the clarity was, was much better than the usual sort of waffle you get on the steps of Downing Street. So that was a Ficker's daughter talking. So I should have remembered her.
8:23So Chris, you're in some ways a sort of product of the, I guess, the 60s, right? Yeah. You're coming through university, early 60s. It's the Beatles' first LP. It's the Chatterley Band. Then you're coming through into 68. We're into the Vietnam War. We're into revolution in France. And you find yourself eventually in the conservative of research department. How does that sit with this cool dad who plays the drums and my whole vision of the 60s? I have to say about my dad that I don't think I ever heard my mum and dad talking about politics. Really? It wasn't a political family? It wasn't at all political.
8:57The nearest we came to politics was that the local conservative association club was at the corner of the road. I don't think my mum and dad ever darkened its door. And they took the Daily Express, but in the days when it was actually a pretty good newspaper with René McColl and Chapman Pinscher and so on. It wasn't what it's become. They didn't talk much about religion. We were very much practicing, but certainly not practicing politics. And I cannot remember anybody except my grandmother uttering a political view. Where did your politics come from? Rory hates this question when I ask it. And why did you become a Tory?
9:30I'm not sure whether become a Tory is quite right. And I think you have to go back one step. Why did I go into politics? I wasn't remotely political at university. You were talking about being a child of the 60s. It's much better to say I was a child of the 1944 Education Act. So I was a scholarship boy. I go to Oxford. I do lots of reviews and reviews in acting. I'm about a year later than Michael Palin, and obviously it wasn't as good. But giving him an honorary degree at Oxford recently was terrific fun. So I did reviews. I edited a magazine called Mesopotamia, which had been started by the people who started Private Eye.
10:11And we were disappointed if we weren't closed down regularly by the proctors. So no politics. I went to the union once. I had friends who were political. Neil McCormick, who was a great national. And if he'd been a member of the Labour Party, he would have been another John Smith. The only other political person in my year was James Douglas Hamilton, who was a very different sort of Tory. A very, very decent man. Then I went to America on a scholarship from my college. Which I did instantly, the same scholarship. Did you? Yeah, the Coolidge scholarship. The Coolidge, yeah, which was amazing. I mean, he was extraordinarily generous.
10:45And I was only worried that a bit later, Balliol sort of democratized the thing a bit. Because when I did it, there were six or eight people who got it every year for generally being thought to be a jolly good fellows. It wasn't the days before women. You got a crossing on the liner with lots of other attractive girls. to New York. You then were flown up to Massachusetts, and he lived in the countryside outside Boston, had the most extraordinary collection of paintings and wine. And the idea of the scholarship was that you would drive around in pairs, I mean, Rory knows about all this, and stay with either old Balian men who were happy to put you up, or to his friends.
11:25And you just have to phone them up or send them a letter in advance, a week or so in advance, and you'd turn up. We had a Hertz credit card. We had$1 ,000. And if you ran out, as Peter Snow memorably did, largely thanks to the tables in Las Vegas, you'd just get more money. And I went around with somebody who became one of my best friends, Edward Mortimer. So we went around the States together. We were in Los Angeles at the time of the riots. I can remember driving through the States and hearing Lyndon Johnson talking about the first commitment of troops from the United States to Vietnam. And it all had quite an effect on me.
12:07So that really helped to change my life. I don't think of myself as necessarily being part of the Beatles generation. The first gig I ever took my wife to, I think she paid actually, was a college ball where the band was the Rolling Stones. So I didn't come from Liverpool, but came from, I think they came from Richmond. Towards the end of that scholarship, Edward went back to do the All Souls exam. And I said to Bill Coolidge, the donor, the philanthropist, should I go back too? And he said, no. He said, I'm helping fund a political campaign in New York, a Republican called John Lindsay, who most Republicans don't much care for, but is very good.
12:44And if you'd like, I can find you somewhere to stay in New York, and you could go and work in the research department for him. And I did that. And it really did change my life because I turned out to be vanity about to come over the horizon. I turned out to be rather good at it. I was responsible for covering the then conservative with a small C candidate, Bill Buckley, who was very funny, very clever, pretty outrageous. But I had to cover his remarks and he was genuinely witty. Cover as in? Fine things John Lindsay could use to shoot him down. So when you say cover, you're sort of basically a hitman on Buckley?
13:21I'm doing the grown-up hitman stuff. I mean, looking up what he's said, what he's done. He was very funny. I mean, New York was in a terrible state. When somebody said to him, so what would be the first thing you would do if you won the mayoralty of New York? And he said, demand a recount, which was wonderfully appropriate. The opposite of Trumpism. Can we come back to the question of why you became a conservative? I went into politics, which is the best way to start. Because when I came back from this American trip, I was supposed to be joining nine months later, the BBC as a graduate trainee, a celebration of my editing of Mesopotamia.
13:55I had to do something before this came up, and I asked around in the Conservative Research Department. I guess I could have gone either way, but I always regarded being a conservative as a sort of way of looking at the world rather than an ideology. And I was much more comfortable with that than with signing up to things that seemed dogmatic or ideological. And I didn't have much care for Harold Wilson, perhaps unfairly, because he did quite a good job helping to manage decline. So I wrote to the Conservative Research Department with my record in America, and they gave me a job. And I was in a very short while I was helping Ted Heath prepare for Prime Minister's questions.
14:37What was it that appealed to about the Conservatives? What part of their worldview did you like? I liked the fact that they weren't dogmatic. I liked the fact that they seemed to me to be more in touch with sort of middle opinion, middle ground opinion, consensus building in British public life than Labour. I'd read Michael Oakeshott, who I think is the best modern exponent of conservatism that I've read. When I looked at history, the people who I most admired in the 19th century tended to be conservatives. It was a collection of those things. I think I was probably a natural Tory, but a Tory with a very strong sense of, I hope, of social obligation and of the fact that just as anti-market views can be ideologically stupid, so can market views.
15:27You became an MP in 1979 and did a number of ministerial jobs and ended up in the cabinet. And of course, you were largely known as the minister for the poll tax. Now, for younger listeners, can you just tell us why Margaret Thatcher thought the poll tax was a good idea, what it was, and why, in your view, it led to such, I mean, it's probably one of the biggest riots in our history, led to such anger? It was so unpopular because it was deeply unfair. You thought that at the time? Yeah, but I can go down that miserable boulevard if you want. But I guess it's probably almost certainly the single biggest political mistake a government's ever been responsible for.
16:14It goes back to when Margaret was running for the leadership of the Conservative Party. And she was convinced that one of the things she should do was to promise to abolish the domestic rates. And she was always dogged by the fact that she hadn't done anything about it. And she appointed a group of frightfully clever people whose answer to doing something about it was the poll tax. You know, sometimes very clever people don't have particularly wise political advice. None of whom now take credit for it. All of them now think it was a bad idea. I'm yet to find a single one who doesn't now say that in retrospect.
16:45It's not very surprising because they're not entirely bereft of reason, even though they were at the time. But some of my, one of my best friends. And did they genuinely believe in it at the time, despite the fact they now say that they were just forced to do it by Churchill? because it meant that everybody would pay towards local services. And don't forget, I didn't invent it. The biggest hospital pass in my life was suddenly being moved from a job I loved, overseas development, to being responsible for the environment. So I find myself doing this job. I was aware of the fact, as an MP, of how unpopular it was.
17:18I could remember canvassing a street in Bath and knocking on the door and a chap coming to the door and saying, I said, I'm your Conservative MP and I'd love to talk to you about what's going on at the moment. He said, oh, really pleased you came. He said, just hang on a moment. I've got some people who'd like to meet you. And he came out with his wife and three adult children, all of whom were paying this bloody tax. So their views were not supportive of the notion this was a fair way of dealing with local government spending. Explain the text to the listeners. How did the text work? Well, it meant that everybody above a certain age if they were living in a household, would pay a part of the local taxation.
17:59So you get, it was memorably said, quite correctly, that a dustman and a duke paid the same. And people would say, but it's fair. Look, that's how we fund the BBC. And you'd say, well, if the poll tax was the same as the BBC licence fee, maybe there'd be a better chance of demonstrating it was fair. But it was a terrible burden on people. And there was no way you could make it acceptable unless you increased the amount of money to underpin local government taxation and unless you could cap the amount people could lose. Was there ever a point where you thought I just can't promote this I can't do this I should give up my career?
18:35Yes I suppose there was. One of the difficulties that we had was Nigel Lawson who was a very clever man I didn't always agree with him but a very very clever man and admirably Dominic Lawson defends everything he ever did or said. Nigel Lawson had opposed it vigorously in cabinet. And frankly, if you were the minister responsible for taxation, you should have been able to stop it. He opposed it, but the government went ahead with it. And he then, I think, set his mind against making it more acceptable. So he would never countenance giving any more from the Treasury, for example, to limit the number of the amount that people would pay extra.
19:15The first thing I did when I was Secretary of State for the environment was a commission, a guy who was very good on local government, knew more about local government in London than any other human being should want to know, for example. Yeah, Tony Travers. Yeah. He did some polling, which we then showed Margaret. I went in to see her. And it demonstrated that the poll tax homed in on floating voters in marginal constituencies, like an Exocet missile. It was quite extraordinary. I mean, you remember what it was like. So I said to her, we've got to do something about this. And I had a meeting with her and a very nice guy who subsequently became cabinet secretary.
19:53And we had a meeting and I said, we just need to be able to cap the losses. And Nigel Lawson heard about it and made a huge fuss. And I was all over the coals with him and Margaret and he wouldn't stand for it. And so the thing went ahead and was, as we'd all suggested, dynamite. I mean, when people say that it was Europe that finished Margaret Thatcher, it wasn't Europe at all, it was the poll tax, which was so horribly, horribly effective in turning people off being conservatives. You asked me whether I thought of my own position. I tell you what I thought. If I resigned over anything when I'd just been made sort of very young Secretary of State in the Cabinet, I was very unlikely to get anything else back in the future.
20:34But above all, I regarded it as a test of something which I've always thought is extremely important. That is my ability to speak in the House of Commons. Because several of us in my generation had taken speaking in the House of Commons very seriously. Tristan Garrell-Jones, William, David Hunt, and others. And we taught ourselves to speak without reading out the bloody speaking notes. I mean, when you watch people asking questions in the House of Commons and reading out the name of their constituency, I mean, it's all ridiculous. And George Thomas would never have called you if you made speeches like that.
21:10He was the Speaker. He would call you again and again if you could hold the House. And I think it was a delusion to think that because you could win votes in the House of Commons and win the argument in the House of Commons, you were winning the House. But why did that affect your decision as to whether to stay or go? Because I realised I was vanity, vanity again. I was good at it. So you stuck with it because you thought it was fun to make a difficult argument in the House of Commons? I stuck with it because I didn't think there was much alternative, because I didn't think I was going to stop it.
21:37And I wouldn't have stopped it. What would have happened if you'd resigned? The water would have closed over my head and I would have written a rather brief book on why I'd been a conservative. But you would have been vindicated? I would have been vindicated, yeah. But vindication in politics doesn't have a great track record for future employment. You said, and I think you're right, that it was less Europe. I think Europe became this convulsive issue for the Conservative Party. But I think you're right that the poll tax was the sort of beginning of the end. And what were those last few days and weeks like?
22:05I mean, I was covering it as a journalist, but you were very much at the heart of the Tory party. What were those last few days and weeks of the Thatcher era like? Pretty awful, because to her credit, she went on punching and punching very hard right up to the end. I mean, the no, no, no speech in the House of Commons, you may have thought was suicidal. You may not have thought that what she was saying no to made very much sense, but it was quite a performance. So she went on hitting hard, and she was unfortunately advised when her leadership was being questioned, particularly after a stalking horse.
22:43Anthony Mayer. Anthony Mayer. We loved Anthony Mayer on the Daily Mirror. Absolutely. She had some awful advice, and the management of her campaign was useless. My best friend in politics was Tristan Garrell-Jones, and Tristan, who was in the whip's office, offered to go and help her and was turned down by some real goons who were around her and telling her what she wanted to hear. It's the usual thing in politics that it's all very well having people who tell you what you want to hear when it's sensible, but when it's not sensible, it's death. And you enjoyed politics. I mean, you entered in the 60s, you worked in Conservative Research for 15 years or something before you became an MP, and then you stuck through to 92 when you lost your seat and you talk very warmly of Tristan Garel Jones and William Watergrave and Matthew Paris and all these people who were your mates.
23:31You enjoyed it, right? Yeah, I did. I enjoyed it because if you, I suppose if you become a professional sportsman, professional cricketer and can't catch, it's not a disadvantage, but I turned out to be quite good at some of the things that mattered, like speaking and writing and taking decisions. And I think I'm quite good at running things and was one of the reasons why I'll get onto this, I'm sure why I enjoyed being in Hong Kong so much. So yes, it was enjoyable. I was never, and I doubt you were, Rory, I was never sort of captivated by the smoking room and thought that anything outside the smoking room wasn't worth bothering with.
24:10My old friend Tristan thought I was, loved it, absolutely loved it. And I used to get rather bored with the halitosis and the drunks and so on. That was never my ideal and nothing but political gossip. Who's up, who's down, you know, that sort of which dominates. Tristan Geryl Jones loved all. He did. When he was in a wheelchair, he was going into the House of Lords every day. We'll come on to Hong Kong in part two, but can we just close off by maybe going to John Major, who I think is fair to say became a friend as well as a boss. Is that fair? Yes, he's, I was very lucky with the people I worked with, but he's as nice as anybody I've ever worked with.
24:51A thoroughly decent man and much cleverer than people ever supposed. And in my generation, there were some outstandingly clever people like William Wargrove, who was a fellow of all souls, and Matthew, who wrote so well and so wittily. John always knew more about the job you were doing than you were yourself. When he was Chief Secretary of the Treasury and you were going in as a departmental minister to negotiate your budget for the next year or more, John used to say to you, do we need officials or should we just do this on our own? I'd be sitting there with responsible for everything from capital grants from local authorities to housing benefit and all the details of it.
25:32And John would know all the detail as well as or better than me. And on one occasion I was doing this and my officials were sitting outside hoping I didn't screw everything up and give the department away. And one of my officials said to his senior guy on the budget about spending, looking at a row of pictures of chief secretaries and chancellors, said to this guy, all your chief secretaries, he said, who's the best of them? And he said, pointing at the door, this one, John Major. He was colossally well respected because he he worked so bloody hard he never stopped never went to bed his main failing in politics which he would concede was he cared too much about the news what the newspapers yeah absolutely and then you became Tory chairman for him as I said in the introduction in 1992 now I actually was never convinced you were going to lose that campaign but most of your colleagues seemed to think that you were so what was that like to feel like you're losing, but then to win.
26:30And then alongside it, probably to know that you're losing your own constituency. Yeah. Well, it was interesting because, I mean, I'm generally thought to be rather a gloomster, rather pessimistic about things. So when I told John Major that he was going to win the election, but I was going to lose my seat. And I told him that at the beginning of the campaign, I told him it three or four nights before. He didn't believe me. On both counts? No, he didn't believe on the second count. In the end, I think he really thought he was likely to win the election. Because, to be frank, rather unfairly, people simply made a choice between him and Neil Kinnick.
Read the full transcript
27:07I've always believed, because I work with Neil Kinnick in Brussels, I've always believed he's a thoroughly decent man. I would have worshipped his wife, Glynis, who's sadly died not very long ago. As a European MP dealing with the sort of things I was dealing with, she was almost without parallel. I mean, she was just terrific. So I think people run fair to Neil, but nevertheless, things like I think the Sheffield rally actually mattered. This is when Labour had this massive rally in Sheffield, and the line that was running against Neil was that he was behaving as though they'd already won. Yeah.
27:40And I always think he's been overstated. You're saying people were unfair to Neil, but you were running the Tory campaign, which was immensely unfair to Neil. Yeah, well, we were unfair, particularly to the Labour Party's economic policies. Certain familiar themes about taxation and public spending and what was going to happen to him. When you say you're unfair, you actually mean that you were pushing it, that they weren't really as bad as you were making out. Yeah, but I mean, it's not unreasonable to see the bad side of what oppositions are trying to do. It's unreasonable when you lie about them.
28:18And I do think that the Labour Party had got into a rather difficult position over taxes and the double whammy stuff about tax and public spending. So they were trying to do something which the terrible lesson that Keir Starmer seems to have drawn from your successful 92 campaign is to go into an election so scrupulously refusing to make any promises on taxation that he now finds himself elected with public services and bits and his hands tied behind his back because he feels that if you ever give the Tories an inch on taxation, you lose an election. I think he draws the wrong conclusion, but I can understand it.
28:57I thought the conclusion he'd drawn was, for heaven's sake, here we are. We've got a huge lead in the polls. And it's like having a tray with full glasses of champagne on. You've got to walk across a cocktail party without being nudged or dropping anything. And I sympathize with that. I think there is, perhaps we can talk about this sometime. I think there is a really big and difficult issue for democratic politics. if you find yourself in a position where you're saying things which you really know you're not going to be able to do after an election. And I think one of the arguments, one of the calling cards for democratic politics is that it may be a bit scruffy and scratchy, but by and large, it's the best way of getting people to accept decisions which are in the country's interest, but not necessarily in their own interest.
29:45And I think when you raise doubts about that, I think it can be quite damaging for the whole political system. And it's particularly so at the moment when the two major parties have such a small share of the vote, and there are these others, loons in the Reform Party and so on. Well, I think that's a good moment to finish our first half and launch ourselves into the second half. So thank you very much. The spirit of innovation is deeply ingrained in America, and Google is helping Americans innovate in ways both big and small, From improving emergency response times to protecting against cyber attacks, local, state, and federal governments are innovating with Google AI.
30:24This is a new era of American innovation. Find out more at g.co slash American Innovation.
30:35Welcome back to Restless Politics Leading with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell, with Chris Patton, who would be very, very keen to talk about his years as governor of Hong Kong. I said in part one, Chris, that I was there with Tony Blair because this happened early in Tony's premiership, right at the beginning at the handover. And you were very, very emotional. I can remember you, I think I can remember you in tears at one point. And I can remember you talking a lot about, you call them the Dewhursts. And I said, what do you mean the Dewhursts? It's the butchers. you had very very strong views about what you feared for the future of hong kong give us a feel for how you actually were feeling at that time and how you feel now about what's happened to hong kong in the interim well you should put my emotions in context i can't watch a guitarist and pipe band playing going home without getting sort of rather emotional about it so you're an emotional guy so i can be very i can be very and you know doesn't take many renditions of nimrod or Elgar's Cello Concerto to have me reaching for the handkerchief.
31:40Hong Kong was particularly emotional for two reasons. First of all, I'd been happier there and my family had been happier than at any other time, I think, in our lives. And it hadn't been easy for them because my wife had to give up a career as a barrister and my kids were between school and university or actually at university. And you'd had the pain of defeat? And we'd had the pain. Yeah, it went off. I mean, And Adley Stevenson once said after, I think after he'd been beaten by Eisenhower, what it felt like. And he said he felt like the little boy who'd bumped his toe on the end of the bed.
32:14It hurt too much to laugh, but he was too old to cry. And I think that puts it extremely well, as did Stevenson's put so many things so well in context. So we had been incredibly happy in Hong Kong. And I'd made some of my greatest friends. The people who worked for me in Hong Kong were the best people I've ever had working for me. They were absolutely terrific, both the Hong Kong Chinese and some of the civil servants in the foreign office, people like Peter Ricketts. So we'd been happy there. It was a wonderful job because being, as it were, mayor of a great Asian city, which had been growing for 26 years, where I was able every year to cut taxes, to increase public spending so that the Communist Party called me a socialist.
33:04They called you a lot of things. They called me a lot of things. You were a serpent. You were a whore. I was a… Fatty Pang. Yeah, yeah. That was your nickname. name. And I was able to build the airport out of revenue, not out of borrowing, which would have been more sensible. The Chinese wouldn't let us do it. So it was a hugely enjoyable job. If I'd managed to cut taxes and increase spending in British politics, I'd have still been prime minister. But it was a great job, thoroughly enjoyable. And I made friends for life. But you knew it was going to end. Yes. And another reason for being emotional was that you couldn't be at all sure how it was going to go.
33:44You had to have a sort of leap of blind faith in the Communist Party being as good as their word. And something that used to buoy me up for a bit, I used to think to myself, if they've made so much of a bloody fuss over the smallest detail, why are they going to walk away from it afterwards? And to be fair, for some time after we left, it went pretty well and they didn't interfere too much. But then I think the arrival of Xi Jinping, which we can probably talk about, made a huge difference. It was a very interesting political calculation you made. I mean, I was born in Hong Kong. I grew up in Hong Kong.
34:20I lived in Hong Kong. And the difference it felt like between you and your predecessor, David Wilson, is you had gone further in pushing for democratization and the protection of rights as you handed over to the Chinese government. And I guess the crusty old China watchers, which my father would have been one, would have said that this was in the end wasn't going to work out, that the Chinese wouldn't put up with it. How do you look back at this now? First of all, I think the only defense of the Chinese Communist Party is that when they enunciated the formula one country, two systems, and we jumped on it, it was terrifically successful in a way of putting things together morally and politically on both sides.
35:04Because in our empire, we hadn't been used to preparing a society not for independence, but for handing over to a completely different political regime. So, one country, two systems had a huge appeal. I'm not sure they ever really understood what our system was. And I don't think we went out of our way to explain it. And I think we got away with putting into the joint declaration exactly what the Hong Kong system was. And it wasn't principally the democracy stuff they objected to. It was the two things they most objected to were things we did about human rights and the rule of law and the fact that we involved the people of Hong Kong in the decision.
35:44They were really cross with me when we went up to Beijing for the first time with the fact that I'd told people in Hong Kong before going what we wanted to do and what I wanted them to decide. And I was much affected by the fact that my predecessor had been trying to get an agreement on the Court of Final Appeal, which he hadn't been able to get through because the legislature and the legal profession and so on weren't having any of it because it hadn't been explained to them first. And it looked as though it was being imposed by Beijing. So I think that they were cross with me because I made it clear that I wasn't going to be Beijing's man in Hong Kong, but Hong Kong's man in London and representing Hong Kong's position in Beijing.
36:26My argument has never been with China or Chinese people, the people who worked with me in Hong Kong. In example, these issues of the rule of law and democracy and so on. They were Chinese. They were Chinese patriots, but they didn't define their patriotism in terms of how much they loved the Communist Party. If I mention their names now, it won't be good for them. But they were incredibly brave, having their families being attacked in the Chinese Communist press. They were very brave, and they were brave because they believed that what we were doing was the decent thing to try to do. And I believed for some years after 1997 that it was probably working.
37:06because under Jiang Zemin, they interfered from time to time and they went back on some of the things that they promised to do. None of which surprised you, presumably? Not really. I mean, I think the hope was perhaps a smaller question than the pessimism. But I didn't think that it would be quite as bad as it's been under Xi Jinping. And why is it so bad under Xi Jinping? Well, you can see it from the very beginning. Xi Jinping, when he was becoming party leader, gave instructions to the cadres in government and the party to engage in an intense struggle against, and then he lists, or they list in these instructions, all the things we would describe as liberal values, whether rule of law, free elections, freedom of the press.
37:56These are all things the party was instructed to struggle against. Why? Because I think Hong Kong representing those things and those things themselves were seen as an existential threat to Chinese communism. Because Xi Jinping had been convinced that any change in China was going to risk the Chinese Communist Party's position. Now, I have one view about this, which some people think is eccentric, but I believe it to be true. Very close to Xi Jinping was a man called Wang Qishan. He was made head of the Commission Against Corruption when Xi Jinping was on the rise. And Wang Qishan, who was completely trusted, partly because he didn't have any children, and he was married to a princeling's daughter.
38:42He came to Oxford a few years after I'd become chancellor. He'd been the mayor of Beijing, and he was vice economics minister at the time. And he was coming through to Britain with a group of officials to a conference in the Caribbean. And the Foreign Office thought, you know, would you have a good idea if he came to Oxford, first of all to London, and they took him to the Olympic Park. And I think he'd seen more bloody Olympic stadiums than he ever wanted to see, so it wasn't very imaginative. He then came to Oxford, and he went to the new chemistry labs and the science park and so on. What then changed his mood completely was being taken to the Ashmolean.
39:19and it was only later that we realized he'd been a quite a serious historian and had once been a museum trustee and he kept going on going back to one of our my favorite pieces in the ashmolean which is thought to be the most perfect renaissance example of perspective it's called a hunting scene and he went on going back to it and looking at and he was more interested in the in the european things in the ashmolean than the than the others so plainly an interesting and slightly different fellow. He was very fed up, I was going to say something ruder, that the embassy stopped him going to look at an exhibition that was on in the Ashmolean at the time of posters of the cultural revolution, which when we told him afterwards that he hadn't been allowed to see it by the by the ambassador, he was really cross.
40:02The Chinese embassy? The Chinese embassy. So after this, he goes to Rhodes House for a lunch with a group of Chinese students and Chinese academics. and he's enjoying it, having a good conversation. Then the ambassador comes over to the table, the Chinese ambassador, and says, Minister, I'm afraid we must go back to London now. And Wang Qishan said, I can't go back to London. I haven't been to the Bodleian. So we summoned the librarian who was walking her dog on Port Meadow to show him Chinese artifacts in the Bodleian. And he was interested, but he was plainly disturbed that he wasn't seeing the thing he wanted to see.
40:41And it was only later that we discovered that Alexis de Tocqueville had somebody he used to write to in Oxford about the lessons to be gained from the Ancien Régime and the French Revolution for authoritarian governments. And we discovered that this correspondence was actually in All Souls, not in the Bodleian. Why was he interested in this? Why did copies of de Tocqueville's Ancien Régime, which I had to do and I'm sure you did, Rory, why? Because he thought that de Tocqueville, and we're not talking about democracy in America, where de Tocqueville was very wise too, but de Tocqueville in Ancien Régime made the point that governments in authoritarian countries didn't have an easier time just because people were getting better off.
41:26and more than that that authoritarian regimes are almost at their most vulnerable and weakest when they tried to change and this copies of de Tocqueville to the publisher's amazement spiked in sales in China everybody in the central party school had to read it and it was read across the central committee and that is what Wang Qishan this extraordinarily wise and well interesting fellow, had clearly felt and was saying to Xi Jinping. So the Chinese Communist Party, thinking that it was starting to lose control, took the view that they had to tighten their grip on everything, whether it was the press, which was becoming, they were newspapers which would attack public officials for corruption.
42:09There were attempts at democratic elections for party positions. And I think Xi Jinping was convinced that that way was the sort of Gorbachev route that would do to the Chinese Communist Party what Gorbachev had done to communism in Russia. And that had a certain resonance with me because I was in Beijing in 1989 at the time of the Tiananmen or until a week before the Tiananmen Square because I was, as overseas development minister, I was at the time the vice president of the Asia Development Bank. You got that gig as well. So I was, until just before the murders, till the tanks went in, Mr. Tank Man and so on, I was seeing this sort of astonishing explosion of belief in freedom and democracy.
42:55And it's sort of, the whole thing and my experience in Hong Kong underpinned something which I'd always believed in intellectually, but had never seen quite so vividly. The best societies are those which combine free economics and free politics. And that's what people were trying to establish, to some extent, in Tiananmen Square, and were shot as a result. Quite a few of them got out, and to David Wilson's credit, he made space for them in Hong Kong. But one of the things which told against him, I think with John Major, is that he and Sir Percy Craddock, I genuflect, he and Percy Craddock convinced John Major that in order to get Beijing's agreement to Hong Kong building a new airport, and John Major should go and sign an agreement with Li Peng, the butcher of Tiananmen Square, as he was sometimes known.
43:47And John went. It made no difference at all with the airport. They went on making trouble for years. But John Major was embarrassed because he was made to inspect a guard of honor in Tiananmen Square. And understandably, he hated that and hated being made a fool of in that way by the Chinese and by his advisors. And you might have been there. When journalists were going away from meetings in the coach, asking one or two people who'd been with John Major, whether he'd raised human rights, the answer from people like Percy Craddock was, well, yes, but he doesn't really mean it. I mean, just something we have to go through.
44:26On that, you mentioned Lee Pang on the very same subject of human rights. When at the handover, Tony Blair was summoned to go and see the Chinese on the other side. We've got a boat journey in this terrible weather. And Li Pang was there. And when Tony Blair very timidly raised the issue of human rights, just as the H was forming on human, Li Pang took out his handkerchief and spat very loudly into it. So, very quickly on that. It's something that's now becoming clear went wrong with Cameron and Osborne, which is they were very excited from 2010 onwards that there'd be a lot of Chinese investment and we'd have this wonderful golden age with China.
45:02And then they invited the Dalai Lama in to see them and the Chinese turned off all investment. So, actually, having fallen over backwards to please the Chinese Communist Party, they then found themselves with the Chinese really not putting any money in or investing in the way that they hoped. How on earth are governments? What is the lesson from Cameron Osborne being friendly and then seeing the Dalai Lama? Well, the lesson is, first of all, look at the figures. And there is very little relationship between having a sort of kowtowing relationship with China and getting lots of investment. And is that how you saw it?
45:34Yeah. And if you look at the figures, for example, while I was being called a sinner condemned for a thousand generations, which they went back on later on, I'll have you know. Well, a million generations. No, no, no. I'll tell you the story in a minute. Apart from saying that and having all these arguments, if you look at the export figures from the UK to China while I was governor, they went up steadily. And by the end, we were, I think, had the best ratio of exports to GDP in the G7. I mean, the figures changed. So, and it's been like that with Australia recently when they tried to raise the issue of an investigation for reasons, which I could explain, into the coronaviruses in Wuhan.
46:15And the Chinese got very cross and said they weren't going to buy anything from Australia anymore. The figures of, when you look at it, have been extraordinary because the Chinese needed things like iron ore. Maybe it affected Western Australia wines, but otherwise they had to buy the things they were getting from Australia at good prices. What I've always been cross about is the way that delusion affects people's views on China, that you have to accept that the mandate of heaven rests in Beijing and that you can't do business with China unless you recognize that. It's simply not true. The other delusion is that you need to have agreements with China because, you know, they always keep their word.
46:56It's complete balls. I mean, they don't keep it completely, indeed, rather than reverse. Do you think we in Britain, we the people and also we the politicians do you think we care enough about hong kong well i am very pleased that the last government whatever the delusions of the golden era introduced the bno passport scheme twice in the last few months i've talked to bno past meetings of bno passport holders i hadn't spoken to as many people from hong kong ever since i left and the other one And the other day, they gave me a birthday party. Got the OBE over bloody 80. And on both occasions, you're talking to people who are overwhelmingly graduates.
47:41They are paramedics, they're nurses, they're doctors, they're teachers. Last summer, I'd been back to my old school, and the new chemistry teacher had just arrived from Hong Kong. The following day, I was in Oxford and bumped into a Hong Kong family with their, I suppose, 25-year-old son, who said to me he was there for an interview to become a doctor in the local health authority. So they're exactly the sort of people that we need and that Hong Kong shouldn't be. The people who've come here, but what I meant was more whether you think that we've just given up on political pressure to try to keep some of the elements of Hong Kong that you fought for.
48:19I hope not. And for example, Lord Sumption's remarks the other day about Hong Kong drifting into being a totalitarian state like China, his views on the rule of law. There are some cases which I think we are insufficiently concerned about. Can I just mention one? The Jimmy Lai case. Jimmy Lai is a British citizen. He has been in prison now for over a thousand days without being tried, except early on about something, a civil case actually. He is 23 hours and 10 minutes a day in solitary confinement. He's a Catholic. He's not allowed to take Holy Communion. He's being treated outrageously. He's got a very good legal team here at Doughty Street Chambers, where Keir Starmer used to be a barrister.
49:05The best human rights chambers, I suppose, there is. Very, very good team. They make a terrific case for him and his son, Sebastian Lai, and the other son who've both been at school here. And the government, I think, go through the motions of raising his case. But this is a British citizen who's been treated outrageously. He's one of 10 journalists who are in prison in Hong Kong at the moment for the crime of being journalists. Chris, one of the problems, of course, is what sort of influence Britain has. So when you were the environment minister, the British economy was more than twice the size of the Chinese economy.
49:41By 2004, 2005, we were still larger than the Chinese economy. I mean, the Chinese economy is now seven times larger than us. It's a very, very different universe, isn't it, from the universe we were in in 97. And it happened very quickly. I mean, 2004 to 2014, China's relative relationship to the world in economic power in terms transformed completely. How much do you think you're still living in a world where you believe, because this was your world of the late 80s, early 90s, that Britain's a really big deal that can go around telling other people how to behave? And how much do you think the world's moved against you?
50:12I don't think that just because some other countries, not least because they've got 1.4 billion people, although their population is now being outpaced by India's, I don't think that just because some other people's economies have got stronger or bigger, it should dilute our concerns about human rights. I don't think Dalit has influence on what you're talking about. Well, it's soft power. Since we don't have soft power in terms of having a vastly strong economy or vastly strong armed forces, it would be a pity, I think, to give up the sort of authority that we have from standing up for human rights.
50:49And I'm not sure what else we should put at the heart of our foreign policy. It's in our national interest to do that. When Joe Nye talked about soft power, that is one of the sort of things he meant. And he might have thought that Britain coming out of the European Union would not exactly enhance our soft power. He would have thought it was completely barking, as I do myself. And why are people so, on the whole, so mute about the consequences? I think one of the reasons is similar to how you feel if you've been scammed. I was scammed once and thought I was a real idiot to have sent somebody some money on the grounds that they were the daughter of a friend, you know, all that stuff.
51:33And I felt a real idiot. And I didn't want to go around telling people that I'd been a real idiot. And I think that there is a sense among sensible people in this country that they were scammed by politicians. And it's difficult to face up to it. But sooner or later, we're going to have to, if only to, restore some sanity to political debate. I don't think we're going to go back into the European... I'm 80. Are we going to go back into the European Union when I'm alive? No. Can we have a better relationship with the European Union? Certainly, yes. Will an improvement in our relationship with the European Union improve our standing in the world?
52:11Certainly. Particularly since now, the European Union economy is, I think, in some difficulty and trouble. And there are some areas, for example, research and higher education, where we can help. You can see why the scammers don't want to talk about it. And even Farage barely talks about Brexit now. And Johnson's just off sort of doing whatever Johnson's going to do. And he's making speeches for large amounts of money. Making speeches for large amounts of money and writing shit books, which he's done before. But why do the ones who warned that it was going to be a scam not want to talk about it?
52:45And I guess what I'm doing here is asking you to give a bit of advice to the current Labour government as to how, because deep down they know Brexit's a disaster, but they don't want to confront it. So how would you confront it if you were there? Two things. First of all, I would, as David Lammy and others have been doing, make it clear that we want in all sorts of ways to have a better relationship with Europe. And secondly, to make it plain that we can't make up for the fact that Brexit has probably cost our economy five or six percent of GDP, but it's going to make us, makes it even more important for us to do lots of things which will help us to grow faster.
53:22Why are you not talking about rejoining the customs union or accepting the EU mobility scheme? You're giving the government a lot of credit. You can talk about mobility schemes, I think, but we're not going to be able to rejoin the customs union with the same sort of terms that we had before. You've got to understand that there are people on the other side of the table who think we behaved very badly, as we did. I mean, Brexit means Brexit was taken to mean, as it turned out, that Brexit could mean the harder sort of Brexit in town. And it's damaged our economy. It's also, I think, and this is a matter of opinion, not provable, more or less provable to some of the economic stuff.
54:00I think it's introduced into our politics a toxicity, which is really, really bad. And I think it's partly the reason for the two major political parties getting such a small proportion of the vote at the last election. But, you know, would we have had the glorious premiership of Liz Truss without Brexit? Would we have had Boris Johnson a moral vacuum in number 10 without Brexit? I don't think we would have done at all. I think it had a really appalling effect on British politics and on the two main parties. And still is. And still is. And still is. And there's obviously now going to be a tussle with smaller parties, and given our curious electoral system, for what's left of the vote.
54:45How about what Labour can do about public services? So the NHS is clearly in the most horrible trouble. In almost every indicator, it's falling to pieces. And yet we've got a government coming in saying they're not going to raise taxes. How are they supposed to deal with this stuff? I just wish Paul Johnson was running the country because I think the IFS have been, the Institute of Fiscal Studies have been right about this throughout. I gave my sons-in-law in 2023, I suppose, a copy of his book, Follow the Money, which is the best analysis of what's happening to the British economy and to our public finances I've seen.
55:18I don't believe for one moment that Wes Streeting, for whom I have a very high regard, as a person as well as, I mean, I spent part of a weekend with him and heard him make a speech on a platform. and I thought he was just terrific and very nice. I don't think he believes that you can deal with the NHS's problems without spending more money. So for Keir to stay, I understand why he does it, there'll be no more money for the NHS without reform. Of course there will be, because they need more equipment. I think an example of what's gone wrong with the Conservative Party in opposition, the leadership contest in which they're all saying they want a smaller state and lower taxes.
55:56I mean, it's for the birds. With the Labour Party saying, well, we can deal with all these problems without putting up taxes. They can't at all. And the best example is the one which we don't talk about. And there was a big fuss about the Christmas, the winter fuel allowance, 200 quid, which has stayed the same since it was introduced in 2000. So while it's been losing value, nobody's been making a fuss about it. Now it's being taken away. And understandably, there's a fuss being made. What is being done? what should be done about the fact that the Dilnot Report has once again been trashed. The thing we should be doing for helping the vulnerable elderly is curbing the costs of social care.
56:36And Wes Streeting said that the government weren't going to resile on that from that just before the election campaign. Rachel Reeves is clearly resiling on that. And that is going to have a real damaging effect on the lives of decent people who are having to give up their savings, sell their houses in order to pay for their old age. It is intolerable that we haven't dealt with this issue. It's been used as a political football by the two major parties for years. And I think that there are, and it's an old man talking and may sound like old men all the time. I think there are some issues in politics where the major parties have to work together.
57:13And I think social care for the elderly is one of them. I actually think that funding universities is another because of the importance to our economy. We shouldn't turn them into political footballs. And I hope that Rachel Reeves will look again. I'm sure she's under pressure to look again at winter fuel allowance, but the most important one is Dilnot. How you get decent and clever people to produce sensible reports for government anymore when the reports are simply buried is quite a good question. You would accept that the very sensible report you did on policing in Northern Ireland was accepted and broadly implemented?
57:46Yes, except that... Oh, Lord. Except for this, while it was going through the House of Parliament, the then Secretary of State thought that he could do a better job of abating unionist anger by trimming some of the things we'd proposed. We're talking about the then Secretary of State who followed Mo Mowlam, who was Peter Mandelson. And he thought that he could satisfy the unionists by fudging things. And I was in the extraordinary position of having people like Gerry Adams, part of an organization which had spent some years trying to shoot me, saying we want Patton and nothing but Patton. And eventually, to the credit of the government or their whips, maybe the Secretary of State as well, they put back into the proposals what they'd been taken out.
58:35But it's the one thing I've done in my life of which I'm most proud. I think you should be. You raised Peter Mandelson, not me. who are you backing as your successor at Oxford? What's that remark in Michael Dobbs' novel? I couldn't possibly comment. Okay. Well, if I said it would be, who do you think it would be, Rory? And then at least he can say, you might think that I couldn't possibly comment. You've got to vote, haven't you? I've got to vote. That's true. I've got to vote. You've got to vote, Alistair. No, I'm Cambridge. He's got to vote. I thought I got you wrong. No. That accounts for a lot.
59:08Chris, I think as we come towards the end, Tell us about getting older. If your 50-year-old self or even your 20-year-old self was being mean about your 80-year-olds, what would the 20-year-old self be disappointed by? What would they look at and think, that's not quite what I wanted? I think that I'm not as fit as I should be. I don't think I take as much exercise as I should. And your 20-year-old self would have cared about that? Not enough. My 20-year-old self would have been happy that I'd given up smoking. Was your 20-year-old self primarily concerned about your health rather than your mind?
59:38No, about my mind. All right, about my mind. I tell you what inevitably happens when you get older. There's a certain resonance to the phrase, the last time I did this or the last time I did that. Because you realize when you're 80, I don't want to sound morbid, that it may well be the last time. Because I've almost stopped planting trees because I'm not going to see much of them. I'm a very keen gardener and most of my gardening is done in France with other people doing most of the heavy lifting but I do start to think going back to France for a couple of weeks in my garden shortly and the weather forecast is awful but I'm going back shortly and I will think to myself as I'm looking at a new flower bed how many more times will I see that and it's not morbid it's what happens Michael Palin was saying something rather similarly one thing we all have in common is we die and maybe don't think enough of it.
1:00:34It shouldn't necessarily make you gloomy. As you die, it might be nice to think that that flower that you've just planted is going to be here long after you've gone. Absolutely, or that something which you're thought to have stood for is likely to win the day. One-nation conservatism comes back. Yeah, Hong Kong. When I talk to people from Hong Kong, the ones who were here as refugees, as exiles, I say to people, it must have been an awful wrench leaving Hong Kong. And they say, yes, we had to, you know, leaving a job and a home and friends and maybe parents and so on. And I say to them, why did you come?
1:01:11Again and again, I'm not making this up, again and again, they say, because we want to bring up our children in freedom. And when I'm gloomy about Hong Kong, I think that's the reason why Hong Kong will be free again one day. That's a very, very good point on which to end. Chris Patton, thank you very much.
1:01:32So, Rory, you're former chairman of your former party. Yeah, Chris Patton. So, Chris Patton is a sort of, it's difficult maybe for international listeners to pick up on this. He is this very odd British phenomenon called a national treasure now. As you've pointed out, he's been chancellor of Oxford, chairman of the BBC. It's like a sort of political version of David Attenborough. And he's even managed the most remarkable thing, which is having been part of the core of the Conservative Party from the 1960s through the 1970s, real professional politician, came in with Margaret Thatcher, cabinet minister under Major.
1:02:06He's also achieved the sort of wonderful thing of really being seen, I think, by most of the sort of intelligentsia of Britain as not really being a conservative at all. Well, he's the conservative that it's okay to like. Which is the role you like to claim for yourself, of course. That's right, exactly. It's pure envy that I'm giving this particular account of Chris Patton. Tell me when you first encountered him and how you feel he's changed over time and what his strengths and weaknesses were when you knew him first. I would first be aware of him when I was a journalist and the whole poll tax thing was going on.
1:02:38I did have a sense that he didn't really believe in it. I don't think that's him just sort of, you know, going into national treasure mode. When he was the Secretary of State implementing it, he gave you the impression he didn't believe in it. that must have been very helpful for the whole management and leadership process. For the Daily Mirror. I can't say that he was sort of, you know, he wasn't conspiring against his own policies, it were, but you always felt that Nicholas Ridley, who was his predecessor, was an absolute true believer, partly because that was the sort of politics he believed in, but also because it was coming from the Holy Margaret and therefore had to be right.
1:03:09Whereas I always felt there was a kind of, you know, lack of certainty about it. But he kind of gave an explanation as to why he went along with it. He thought that if he hadn't, he'd be sort of finished in politics, as it were. I'm not sure that's right, by the way, but that's his view. Well, wait, let's stop on that, because that was a sort of big moment in the interview, where he basically said he didn't believe in the policy, but he did it because why? Because he thought the waters would close over him if he didn't, was how he put it. So that is a very kind of personal ambition sort of thing.
1:03:40When I got to know him better was when he became chairman of the Conservative Party under John Major. And you're right, by the way, he does now come across as this really affable sort of centrist dad type, centrist granddad in a way. But he was a pretty brutal campaigner. And enjoyed it, didn't he? I mean, he said he cut his teeth in American Senate campaigns in 1960s. And he loved the business of campaigning and sticking it to the opposition. He enjoyed that stuff. A couple of days before the interview, I was at dinner with Neil Kinnock, and I said to him, we're doing Chris Patton on the podcast.
1:04:15And Neil said, oh, yeah, he's a good man. He's a good man. Because they became colleagues at the European Commission. And it's interesting how that Neil's experience, if Chris Patton had left Neil Kinnock's life in 1992, he would only really have known him as the sort of architect of this brutal campaign against Neil Kinnock. But then, of course, they both go off to the European Commission and become good colleagues. And how did he get to the European Commission? You guys presumably appointed him to the European Commission. You must have decided to send this ex-conservative minister as European Commissioner in 1999.
1:04:49Is that when he went? Yeah, 1999. So it must have been a decision by you and the Blair government. So it shows that you weren't that tribal. Yeah, but I wonder whether that was a response to the fact, one of the things Neil reminded us of at this event I was at with him is that Fiona and I and our kids were with Neil. We were actually playing football in his garden in Ealing when John Major phoned and asked him to go to Brussels, which Neil was absolutely thrilled to do. So I wonder if that was a sort of, it was always interesting with those European Commission appointments, sadly, no longer happening, that you did have to kind of think about the politics of it.
1:05:23The expectation was that you'd send one Labour, one Tory, roughly. So yeah, maybe I wonder whether that was partly as a response to the fact that John Major had sent Neil, that Tony decided to send Chris Patton. Fascinated, I think, actually, is a sort of, Chris Patton really is a kind of amazing, he's also a knight of the garter, like your friend and former boss, Tony Blair. So he really has become the sort of cornerstone, I guess, of the sort of modern British establishment. Oh, he's got so many letters after his name now, it's utterly ridiculous. I liked his Hong Kong, I enjoyed talking to him about Hong Kong.
1:05:54Yeah. I think you'd have to say he's kind of been proven right. Well, he sort of has and hasn't, hasn't he? I mean, I was sort of getting at this, The view at the time from people like my father who were against him is that in the end, he could push those reforms through and they would be high-minded, but they wouldn't last. And the alternative strategy, so he decided to push for a framework of human rights and democratic protection, which has now been dismantled. The question is whether there was an alternative political strategy where you could have negotiated something with the Chinese government, which was more to their liking and more likely to last.
1:06:28In other words, a middle way. And that by pushing for a more idealistic vision, we haven't ended up back in a place that's even worse for people in Hong Kong. I guess what I meant by him being right was that he was always worried that the thing would end up in, not just within the Hong Kong context, but that China would end up as a form of dictatorship. Yeah. Well, the only thing I guess where I thought he was a little too slick, and it sounds great, but I don't think it's entirely right, is this idea that there's no consequences for people who challenge China in terms of trade and investment.
1:06:59It's true that China will continue to buy things that they need. I mean, you get a good example of iron ore from Australia. But I think it's also true that China can make a lot of choices on where it puts its investment. And Cameron's decision to meet the Dalai Lama meant that a lot of the hopes that Cameron Osborne had of Chinese investment coming into the United Kingdom were not realized. And sometimes, you know, that was a little slick. That was kind of an idealistic. You can stand up to them and there's no cost to it because in the end, they'll always follow their commercial interests. I think China really does use its investment as a tool of diplomacy.
1:07:30And that's one of the reasons one should be concerned. If only the world was so straightforward that you could just push your ideals and not worry about it having any consequence on trade with China. I wonder if there's another job in him. So, cabinet minister, knight of the garter and all that stuff, chairman of the BBC, Oxford University. He's only 80. Your friend George Mitchell is still going strong. Yeah. What other great establishment job could he do? Chairman of the MCC? We didn't really get into cricket or not. There's not much left, I think. he sort of ticked it all off. St. Andrew's Golf Club.
1:08:00Maybe we've run out of things. I don't know. A dukedom, that's the way to go. Keir Starmer gave him a dukedom. Now, I'm being a bit unfair. So, I mean, I think a remarkable person. And I think one of the things that maybe we didn't come across with best and that I should pay tribute to as we come to the end is just how much admiration his contemporaries had for him. Consistently, if I'm talking to Jonathan Demmelby or Matthew Paris or Tristan Gara-Jones, they really rated him. They rated him as a minister. They rated him as an intellect, which was one of the reasons why, even though his political career on the surface, he didn't have any of the great officers of state.
1:08:32He was talked about as a future prime minister. And one of the reasons why his post-political career has been so astonishingly successful is that people detected real quality and talent, which I think has carried him through since 1997. Yeah. Good. See you soon. Bye bye.
1:09:05Thank you.
1:09:24Save yourself money today. Increase your wealth. Customize and save we say. That may have been too much feeling. Only pay for what you need at LibertyMutual.com. Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty. Savings vary underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.
From the publisher
As the last Governor of Hong Kong, what are Chris Patten's reflections on the city’s trajectory since the handover in 1997? How can the West improve it's relationship to China? What role does religion play in fostering a more compassionate society today?
Rory and Alastair are joined by Lord Chris Patten to discuss all this and much more.
TRIP Plus:
Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes.
Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics.
Instagram:
@restispolitics
Twitter:
@RestIsPolitics
Email:
restispolitics@gmail.com
Assistant Producer: India Dunkley and Aaliyah Akude
Video Editor: Teo Ayodeji-Ansell
Social Producer: Jess Kidson
Producer: Nicole Maslen
Senior Producer: Dom Johnson
Head of Content: Tom Whiter
Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
