Last governor turns towards the guns

If it were not for the good citizens of Bath who cut short his political career as their MP in 1992, there is little doubt that Chris Patten would now be leader of the British Conservative Party rather than chairman of the Independent Commission on RUC reform.

But his election defeat put paid to any chance of the top job. The Tories' loss, however, is Ireland's gain. The five years Mr Patten spent as the last governor of Hong Kong were a very public proving ground.

He showed both the Tory high command and China's communist mandarins that he was nobody's poodle, that he had nerve as well as principles. His only criterion was to do what was best for Hong Kong and its people.

This forthright stance did not make him friends. He split with Mr Rupert Murdoch who, fearing Mr Patten's racy, take-no-prisoners account of those years would damage News International's interests in China, pulled the plug on his book deal with the Murdoch-owned HarperCollins.

Macmillan was only too happy to step into the breach, taking on both author and editor. East And West was published on Monday.

Before we meet at 11 a.m., Mr Patten has already done two radio interviews and an ITN film crew is clamouring for five minutes to hit the lunchtime news.

The reason is not any great quickening of interest in Sino-British relations. Simply that with this remarkable book, written with the wit and attack that were the hallmark of the speeches he wrote for Margaret Thatcher, the author is giving notice that the Patten gunship is leaving dry dock and going full speed ahead for the political mainstream. And we're not talking Mayor of London.

In his last chapter, provocatively entitled Back To The Future, he rattles his sabre with undisguised gusto:

"As I trudge today towards what seems to me to be the front line in the battle of political ideas, hearing the distant rumble of the guns, I find myself fighting against a stream of well-heeled refugees heading in their overcrowded limousines in the opposite direction."

So is taking on the reform of the RUC just a stepping stone to the heights of political power? To pull off success in Northern Ireland would be an impressive feather to add to the plumes already salvaged from the Last Governor's pith helmet.

He slides back in his chair and smiles. The cut of his shock-white hair still bears hallmarks of its Beatle origins. He's 54, younger than he thinks he looks.

"I think that most of political success is avoiding failure. I think that a lot of people assume that the job that my commission's been asked to do is impossible. Which is why they would argue we've been asked to do it; why nobody's been able to agree on what a new beginning for policing in Northern Ireland means.

"I don't share that view, but I don't think that the commission's work is necessarily a step on the road to doing something else. If we write a good report which carries the community and the governments, then it will be remembered a long time after East And West has been remaindered. It's important in its own right."

Mr Patten has long held the view ("I've bored people at dinner parties, at lunch parties, on radio and TV for years") that Northern Ireland was the most important issue in British domestic politics.

And he's better placed than most to know what he is talking about. From 1983 to 1985 he was a junior minister at the Northern Ireland Office, charged with conducting the internal negotiations leading to the Hillsborough Agreement.

"The attempts then to deal positively with the internal dimension I think failed for two reasons. Firstly the moderate nationalists, understandably, didn't want any less than they had had in 1973. They wanted power-sharing. The unionists for their part were content to have power-sharing provided there wasn't any power."

It was not only Patten's previous experience in Northern Ireland that made him a welcome choice on all sides of the sectarian divide. At the same time as being a committed Conservative ("an old-fashioned liberal Tory, more Gladstone than Disraeli") he's a Catholic, though he prefers not to see his religion as a factor in the appointment.

"I'm not sure that an English Catholic is quite regarded the same as the local breed. But I think we're moving to a world in which people will think it doesn't matter a jot whether somebody doing this sort of job is a Catholic or not."

In socio-historical terms at least, Patten could well qualify as being local breed. His paternal grandparents were the children of "potato-famine Irish" who settled in Lancashire.

"My grandfather and grandmother both went into teaching and they were respectively the head teachers of a Catholic boys' and Catholic girls' primary school in the Manchester slums, before the 1902 Balfour Education Act brought Catholic schools within the state system."

Their youngest son, Patten's father, chose not to follow in parental footsteps, but became instead a drummer with a dance band in the Isle of Man. This was in the late 1930s.

"My father actually met my mother at a gig at the Rougemont Hotel in Exeter. I think her parents were fairly horrified, not only at her marrying a drummer in a band, but marrying a Catholic drummer in a band."

His mother converted and when his father died (when Patten was in his early 20s) she remarried her late husband's best friend, "a doctor, an Irish bachelor from Co Mayo".

School at St Benedict's in Ealing, west London, was followed by Balliol College, Oxford, where he read history. At that time he had no interest in politics and his visits to Ireland were for rugby and golf. His interest in Irish history and culture only really began in 1983 when he found himself junior minister in the Northern Ireland Office.

"I was very lucky that I had in one of the departments that I ran in Belfast two permanent secretaries in a row who were extraordinarily widely and well read, scholarly public servants. The first was Norman Dugdale who, I think, is an underrated but very fine poet. He writes marvellously witty, urbane and at the same time passionate poetry.

"And I think Norman is a reminder that, while a lot of blood and tragedy has come out of Northern Ireland in the last three decades, it's also true that an astonishing quantity of fine poetry has come out. One of the paradoxes perhaps.

"He was followed by Maurice Hayes who is now a senator in Dublin and actually a member of my police commission. And Maurice is a great Gaelic polymath and also a very fine writer. I think his books on his childhood in Co Down are just marvellous writing."

The wheels of the RUC Reform Commission have already begun to roll, albeit quietly. There have been five plenary meetings so far. "The next stage of our work will be much more public, when we talk to the political parties and to the community. But we've done the necessary initial groundwork, setting research projects in train and taking evidence from quite a large range of people."

But what new ideas can Patten bring to pull the sectarian sting of the RUC while at the same time bolstering its policing capability?

"I think the ideas that have to take root are actually rather old ideas. Every liberal democracy depends to a great degree on restraint. A liberal democracy is different from majoritarianism. And I hope that both the nationalists and the loyalist community in Northern Ireland are learning that and learning it fast.

"Nobody outside, not even somebody half outside like me, should underestimate the quantity of generosity of spirit that is going to be required in order to ensure that the gains that have been made in the last few months are not thrown away.

"I think everybody has got to reach out beyond their politically narrow traditional positions. If they can do that, then I'm sure that Northern Ireland will once again be a place where disagreement is dealt with through discussion, debate and democracy rather than Semtex."

Does the thought that there are still men out there capable of terrible violence frighten him?

"I am concerned by people whose bigotry is so intense and all-embracing that they can be cauterised from the normal feelings of humanity. I find a mentality which connives at, or condones, blowing children's limbs off, impossible to comprehend.

"Now I don't know whether that means I'm frightened of that sentiment. I think I'm just as astonished, as outraged by it."

The mixing of politics and religion he finds totally abhorrent.

"I think that if you believe in the Resurrection, it goes so far above and beyond politics as to render unnecessary the distinction of how one accommodates one's politics to one's religion.

"Of course, if you're a practising Christian your religious beliefs infuse your politics just as they infuse other aspects of your life, but I don't think claiming a monopoly of wisdom for this or that set of political opinions, because of some alleged connection between them and religious beliefs or spiritual practice, is anything but a charlatan's trick."

His experience in Northern Ireland in the 1980s proved helpful in Hong Kong.

"It helped me to take pressure. It was in Northern Ireland that I first had to take some quite controversial decisions." One was allowing the renaming of Derry County Council. He remembers it did not go down well with the DUP.

"Under the law they could. And there were no grounds on which I could turn the decision down. And for me it was an early case of the imperative of following the rule of law. Life becomes complicated when you try to pick and choose which laws, as a minister, or a private citizen, you obey and which you keep."

It's now the turn of his Hong Kong experience to inform the task in hand back here, including the pitfalls of "fudge" diplomacy, which were a major source of frustration and friction in his dealings with the Chinese Communist Party.

"I think that sometimes in order to make progress and to get round obstacles, you have to allow for a bit of grey, for a bit of fudge, for a bit of imprecision. But you can't do it for too long. And you can't allow it to be a long-term answer to really fundamental questions.

"I think that's particularly true in diplomacy, but in all politics, I guess. Because if two parties go away from the table with contradictory views of what's actually been agreed, sooner or later things will fall apart.

"I also think it's been a besetting sin of British diplomacy over the years to try to draft our way around problems, to find formulae, rather than to face up to difficulties. I suspect that fudge is one of the reasons why membership of the EU has always been such a contentious issue in British politics.

"The extent to which at the outset we kidded people that there weren't political implications. And there clearly are political implications. So sooner or later, trying to avoid inconvenient reality inevitably leads to traffic jams and crashes further down the road."

It was back in April that Tony Blair first offered Mr Patten the chairmanship of the commission, subject to ratification of the Belfast Agreement. Six months on and Patten says he is more optimistic now than he was then.

"We all know that Northern Ireland politically has been in the past like the Grand National without a finishing line. Every time you get over one fence people say, `Ah, think that was clever, do you?' And you've got a bigger one just coming up. And one day what is going to happen, people in Northern Ireland are going to wake up and realise there hasn't been a fence for some time."