The Last Governor: Chris Patten and the Handover of Hong Kong by Jonathan Dimbleby Little, Brown 461pp, £22.50 in UK
The frostiness between the British and the Chinese at the handover ceremonies in Hong Kong on June 30th was as nothing compared to the icy animosities on the British side. The Last Governor, a collaboration between the author and Chris Patten, a personal friend, is pay-back time for all those who dared to criticise Britain's final viceroy as he tried but failed to force the Chinese to swallow a more democratic Hong Kong. The villains range from Geoffrey Howe, Edward Heath, Michael Heseltine, James Prior and James Callaghan to a brace of former governors and a swarm of Foreign Office sinologists, in particular Sir Percy Cradock, former British ambassador to Beijing.
The British rift had its beginnings in the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984, which Cradock helped craft, whereby the UK agreed that Hong Kong would be handed back to China more or less intact at midnight on June 30th 1997. The Foreign Office promised that in the final decade of colonial rule, Britain would not radically change the system by which the territory had been governed for 150 years. Thus after the handover, a local Chief Executive would take over the executive power which 28 British governors had always exercised, and the council, elected or not, would remain powerless to introduce bills or debate motions which the regional administrator didn't like.
However, an element of democracy, a dirty word to the imperial rulers for 150 years, was introduced, with Chinese consent. In further, secret, negotiations in 1990, Cradock obtained agreement from Beijing for the creation of eighteen directly-elected seats in the sixty-member council for 1991 elections, which would be increased to twenty before the handover, and to thirty by 2003. This was known as the through train, which would carry the legislature "into China", ensuring a degree of continuity. Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, in private correspondence with his opposite number in Beijing, Qian Qichen, expressed the hope that "by agreement with you" faster progress towards democracy might be made in subsequent elections in 1995.
This was the situation which Patten inherited when he arrived in 1992, complicated by the fact that after the Tiananmen crackdown three years earlier, the Democrats were demanding a wider franchise. Incredibly, the new governor was not told of Hurd's apparent promise that Chinese agreement would be sought for further electoral reforms.
After a brief period during which he tactically cultivated public opinion to make Hong Kong people "think I'm a decent bloke", Patten introduced reforms without consultation with the Beijing government, which he viewed as "vindictive, irrational and incompetent". The new council would have twenty directly-elected seats as agreed, but under a revised franchise for twenty-one "functional" constituencies, the number of potential voters would be increased by a factor of five to 2.7 million people.
The Chinese were furious. They sensed a conspiracy to create a political entity they could not control. They told the Governor that if he pressed ahead with the extended franchise in 1995, the new council would be abolished when they took charge and a provisional legislature would be put in its place. Which is what happened.
The sinologists were apoplectic with fury. Percy Cradock publicly accused Patten of wrecking the through train, thereby depriving the very people he championed - like Martin Lee, whose Democrats won seventeen of the eighteen directly-elected seats in 1991 - of a role in post-1977 Hong Kong. Patten retorted that the Chinese would have found a way of excluding the Democratic Party leader as a subversive, and reflected that in imperial history, the British themselves "went round the world locking up the Martin Lees". Cradock's views he dismisses as venomous and naive.
While the governor fumed privately at his predecessors for creating the "rotten boroughs" he was reforming, his officials failed "to suppress their mirth" when watching on television the voting by a Beijing-approved committee as it selected Tung Chee-hwa as Hong Kong's first post-colonial ruler, forgetting perhaps that all British Governors, Patten included, had been foisted on Hong Kong without even the pretence of process.
Such incidents reveal the atmosphere in the political bunker that was Government House as the last viceroy came under attack from China for "loosening the screws" and from British critics who believed he was screwing it up.
After Deputy Prime Minister Michael Heseltine led a trade mission to China, for example, Patten fulminates: "I find myself living between those who think that Hong Kong is being sold out for British trade (with China) and those who think Hong Kong should be sold out for British trade."
He is taken aback by the "brazen treachery" of a former diplomat who allegedly tipped off the Chinese to his negotiating tactics. A named Foreign Office Official is thought by Patten to have been "over-promoted". The ty coon Henry Keswick is written off as "faintly ridiculous". Edward Heath is depicted as "churlish and rude", falling asleep at dinners in his honour. British ambassador to China Len Appleyard, referred to as "Applecart", is characterised as an appeaser.
Geoffrey Howe, the author comments, had his appreciation for Beijing's concerns enhanced by his appointment to the board of GEC. This is a mistake - Howe never served on it. The former Foreign Secretary has since furiously attacked Patten's "Iagolike accomplice" for his "grotesque" charges of treachery against himself and others in a "lamentable book". Even the charming Lavender Patten, described by Dimbleby as the very model of a model governor's wife, was infected by the climate of treason. When a respected legislator changed his mind in a vital vote, she spat "bloody traitor", before quickly recovering her poise. Much more serious is the allegation that Howe, Cradock and former governor Lord Wilson were implicated in the manipulation of a 1987 opinion survey to show the Hong Kong public was not in favour of direct elections. Foreign Office sources allege Dimbleby had access to relevant papers which Patten only got from Whitehall during his last year after guaranteeing he would not reveal their contents and would destroy them after reading them.
This episode portrays Patten's opponents as a slippery lot - the servants of Perfidious Albion making policy in the manner of Yes Minister - especially when compared with the robust, passionate last Governor of Hong Kong, Dimbleby's account is naturally sympathetic to his subject but is nevertheless well-written, never boring, and a significant contribution to the history of Hong Kong.