The Governor’s staff at Government House (GH) was run by the private secretary. Richard Hoare was private secretary when I arrived; he moved on to become the government’s Head of Administration, and then retired from the Hong Kong civil service to England before the handover. He was succeeded by Bowen Leung, who became Secretary for Planning, Environment and Lands from 1995 to 1998. He was then made the head of the Hong Kong government’s office in Beijing. Bowen was followed by John Tsang. He was appointed Secretary for Commerce, Industry and Technology in 2003 and was Financial Secretary from 2007 to 2017, a job in which he was very successful. He stood in the pseudo-election to become Chief Executive in 2017, and despite fighting an excellent campaign and having opinion poll leads of up to 40% he was defeated in the Beijing-picked election committee by Carrie Lam, and received only 365 votes out of the 1194-member election committee. He had won the support of those who wanted greater democracy, or at least a dialogue on the subject between the members of Hong Kong’s different parties, the Hong Kong government and Beijing officials. His fault was plainly to favour trying to build a consensus in Hong Kong rather than to steamroller opponents. He has subsequently set up a fund to help young entrepreneurs and taught at university. His election would have changed Hong Kong’s history, but instead Beijing got their hand-picked committee to rubberstamp the person they wanted.
My chief spokesman in GH was first Mike Hanson, a British civil servant on secondment who returned to the civil service in the UK and was succeeded by an Australian former journalist, Kerry McGlynn. They were both open with the press, politically savvy and very competent. I trusted them completely and I cannot think of a single occasion when they got anything wrong in dealing with an endless barrage of questions from the local and international press. I assumed that they were both slightly left of centre but never asked. I still see Kerry, now alas widowed, on my occasional visits to Sydney. I once introduced him at a meeting with Michael Howard as the Australian ambassador (a touch of humour on a dull morning), which rather flummoxed the Home Secretary.
I have described my political advisers at the beginning of the diary. After Hong Kong, Martin Dinham (a brilliant and thoroughly decent civil servant) went back to work in the overseas development field, and Edward Llewellyn came to work in my Cabinet in Brussels and then, after working with Paddy Ashdown in Bosnia, returned to London to become David Cameron’s chief of staff. After Cameron’s resignation as Prime Minister, Edward became British ambassador in France and then Italy, and was made a member of the House of Lords in 2016. Readers of this diary will know how much I relied on his and Martin’s advice, good humour and friendship in Hong Kong.
My main Foreign Office officials in Hong Kong were first Sir Anthony Galsworthy, who ran the British side of the Joint Liaison Group (JLG) until 1993. He became the ambassador to the People’s Republic of China from 1997 to 2002 after the retirement of Sir Len Appleyard. Sir William Ehrman, my political adviser, was ambassador to Luxembourg from 1998 to 2000 and ambassador to China from 2006 to 2010. Bob Peirce, who replaced Ehrman as political adviser in Hong Kong in 1993, went from there to a post in the British embassy in Washington after the handover, and I requested his secondment to the UK to be Secretary to the Independent Commission on Policing in Northern Ireland, which I chaired after the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. He then became British consul-general in Los Angeles, and left that post for a career in business. Witty, forceful and a superb draughtsman, he was a loss to the diplomatic service.
Hugh Davies followed Tony Galsworthy running our JLG operations. With only about a year to go before the handover, the FCO tried to persuade him to take on a big Asian embassy which suddenly fell vacant. Honourably, Davies declined on the grounds – correctly – that his job on the JLG was one of the most important diplomatic posts for Britain. He was an extraordinarily patient and courteous man with an excellent deputy, Alan Paul, and a first-class team. They did much of the heavy lifting in dealing with the PRC. Davies has privately published his diaries of his experiences dealing with the Chinese. Paul stayed in Hong Kong after the JLG was wound up at the end of 1999 and started a consultancy there.
The two deputy FCO political advisers in Hong Kong were Stephen Bradley, who later became consul-general there from 2003 to 2008, and John Ashton, who was to become the special representative for climate change at the Foreign Office.
The Hong Kong government itself was led when I arrived in Hong Kong by the Chief Secretary, Sir David Ford, who then went on to run the Hong Kong office in London. After retirement, he became a director of the campaign to protect rural England and to breed rare cattle and sheep in Devon. He died in 2017. His successor as Chief Secretary was Anson Chan, who continued in that role after the handover in 1997 until 2001. During this period, working under C. H. Tung, she became known (as I have noted) as Hong Kong’s conscience. She withdrew completely from public life in 2020 after years in which she had spoken out bravely about events in the city. The choice of Tung rather than Chan as the first Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) was one of Beijing’s biggest errors, as some of their leaders probably soon realized.
The Financial Secretary, Sir Hamish McLeod, held this post from 1991 to 1995, when he retired to Scotland and a private sector career. He was succeeded by Sir Donald Tsang, who himself followed C. H. Tung as the second Chief Executive of the SAR from 2005 to 2012. He was followed in the job by C. Y. Leung, a long-time United Front supporter who had a probably deserved reputation for being mildly sinister. He was hugely unpopular: another triumph for Beijing’s political judgement.
The main FCO officials who worked for us on Hong Kong matters in London were first of all Peter Ricketts, who later became ambassador to NATO and France, head of the Foreign Office and the UK’s National Security Adviser from 2006 to 2012. Ricketts, who is now a cross-bench member of the House of Lords, is a real class act. He was succeeded as head of the Hong Kong department by Sherard Cowper-Coles who later became private secretary to Labour’s Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, and then ambassador to Israel, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, a post which ended with his reported clashes with NATO and US officials. Sir Sherard, as he of course became, always had strong personal opinions. He worked in the FCO for Sir Christopher Hum, who was the ambassador to the PRC between Galsworthy and Ehrman. On retirement from the diplomatic service he became Master of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.
The list of those with political responsibilities on Hong Kong is much shorter. Douglas Hurd was Foreign Secretary from 1989 to 1995, followed by Malcolm Rifkind from then to the handover. The Minister of State was first Alastair Goodlad, who later became Conservative Chief Whip, High Commissioner in Australia and a member of the House of Lords, and then Sir Jeremy Hanley, who was – lucky man – MP for Richmond and Barnes for 14 years until 1997, before pursuing a career in business.
The main players on the Chinese side were first the Chinese Foreign Minister, Qian Qichen (1988 to 1998), who was also a member of the Communist Party politburo. A good linguist – Russian, English and French – he probably had more influence in the party than any other diplomat since then. No ‘wolf warrior’, he was nevertheless tough without being rude or abrasive, as readers of the diary will have seen. He did seem to believe that diplomacy sometimes involved give as well as take. He died in 2017.
In Hong Kong itself the PRC’s day-to-day interests were the responsibility of the New China News Agency, in practice more a cover for and a co-ordinator of United Front activities than a media organization. Its director was Zhou Nan. He was a Foreign Ministry official who had spent a short time in 1980–81 as ambassador to the UN, after which he became a vice minister of the PRC. He spent the rest of his political career involved in negotiations with the UK over Hong Kong. He spoke fluent English, apparently improved by his time interrogating prisoners of war in Korea. Admired by Sir Percy Cradock but not by anyone else whom I’ve ever met, he retired shortly after the handover and was succeeded by Jiang Enzhou.
The head of the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office of the PRC State Council was Lu Ping, a major figure in the diary. He had joined the office in 1978 and left as its head shortly after the handover. It was interesting that both Lu and Zhou left their jobs not long after I sailed away from Hong Kong. I would have liked to know Lu better and could never ascertain how much control he was able to exercise over the main policy issues regarding Hong Kong, or even over some of the smaller ones. I once promised to send him some CDs of English composers – mainly Elgar and Vaughan Williams. I did send them but I was told that he later complained that he had never received them. I guess it was the same story as the interception of the ties which Margaret Thatcher used to send as a gift to Zhao Ziyang every time she was in Hong Kong. Lu Ping died in 2015.
Finally, three post-diary stories about the author which are relevant to the events recounted there.
After leaving Hong Kong I wrote a book called East and West about my experiences there and more generally about the relationship between Asia and the rest of the world. It was commissioned by HarperCollins, which was owned by Rupert Murdoch. When he heard the news that his firm was publishing a book by me, partly about China, at a time when he was trying to curry favour with Beijing in order to develop his media interests there, he intervened to prevent its publication. The spurious grounds for doing this led to a generous financial settlement and the publication of the book by Macmillan with a sticker on the front in the United States saying ‘the book that Rupert Murdoch tried to stop’. Perhaps partly as a result of this, it sold extremely well. The book’s editor, who played a brave role in this affair, has worked for many years since then for Penguin Allen Lane. His behaviour defined publishing integrity.
I like the story told by one of Mr Murdoch’s principal associates in his business empire of his trip to Beijing to try to persuade the Premier, Zhu Rongji, that he should be allowed to run satellite TV channels in China. Zhu apparently asked him, ‘Is it true, Mr Murdoch, that you were born an Australian citizen?’ Mr Murdoch said it was indeed true. ‘And is it also true, Mr Murdoch, that you became an American citizen in order to buy an American newspaper and American TV channels?’ Murdoch replied in the affirmative. ‘So is it the case, Mr Murdoch,’ Zhu continued, ‘that in order to run TV channels in our country you would like to become a Chinese citizen?’ Zhu’s officials could hardly contain their amusement.
The second tale followed hard on the heels of our departure from Hong Kong. It has been told in detail in a book by Peter Oborne, The Rise of Political Lying. At about the time that I left Hong Kong, Jonathan Dimbleby wrote a very carefully researched book about the handover and the last years of British sovereignty. It drew on extensive interviews with most of those in and out of both the Hong Kong and the British governments and was critical of some Foreign Office officials and attitudes. It was also very positive about others. I had of course myself been interviewed on camera by Dimbleby for a TV documentary that he produced alongside the book. It was not hagiographical about me; indeed, it was particularly critical of the position I took on the Court of Final Appeal. The book and the documentary clearly annoyed some UK diplomats, present and retired, who blamed me for the criticisms.
A few weeks after the handover, the News of the World found out that Robin Cook, Labour’s Foreign Secretary, had a mistress. To distract attention from the story, and from Robin Cook’s rapid decision to divorce his wife (all of which looked like the first example of sleaze under New and clean-as-a-whistle Labour), the government launched a number of eye-catching stories to divert attention over the weekend of 2 and 3 August. The first was that the government was intending to save the Royal Yacht Britannia from being mothballed, and the second was a carefully leaked story that I was about to be investigated by the security services for breaches of the Official Secrets Act because of the Dimbleby book. Jon Sopel, the senior BBC journalist, described at the time how the story was sedulously given credibility without anyone from No. 10 or the Foreign Office actually confirming it. The Labour government’s spin-meister Peter Mandelson was thought to have more than a hand in this piece of black propaganda. I was on holiday at the time with my family when the story broke and they and my friends learnt that I was apparently about to be investigated by Special Branch and – who knows? – perhaps committed to the Tower of London, or at least Wormwood Scrubs. They were understandably upset by what Oborne describes as ‘reckless and irresponsible’ behaviour. I was in fact never interviewed by the security services, Special Branch or any other law enforcers, and nor was Dimbleby.
In the autumn of that year, the government’s Attorney General answered a written question in the House of Lords about the affair saying that in the public interest no further action was being taken. I suppose this was an unpleasant early example of the way that the often sanctimonious Blair administration was prepared to do business. As I pointed out to Oborne, the irony was that in the following year, after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement about Northern Ireland, I was asked by the Prime Minister (presumably with no worries about breaches of the Official Secrets Act) to chair the Independent Commission on Policing in Northern Ireland. We had of course to cover a number of sensitive security issues during the course of this work. I’m glad that I was asked – it was one of the most difficult assignments that I have had. But I had not forgotten the attempt to tarnish my reputation in order to take attention away from an embarrassing weekend media story.
Finally, in 1999 I became European Commissioner for External Relations. China was of course part of my beat. The first time that I met the Foreign Minister who had succeeded Qian Qichen, at the UN General Assembly in 1999, he said to me, ‘This time, Governor Patten, we must cooperate.’ I replied, ‘But that is what I wanted to do last time.’ The minister, Tang Jiaxuan, whom I rather liked, gave me a little smile. He visited me in Brussels on one occasion, and as he came into my office he noticed pictures of my daughters on the wall. Sitting down he asked, ‘How come that such beautiful daughters have such an ugly father?’ His ambassador to the EU, greatly embarrassed, said very quickly, ‘My minister is telling a joke.’ Towards the end of the meeting, he very solemnly read out a sentence from his brief, which announced that senior leaders had concluded that ‘I was an element of concord not of discord.’ So, once a sinner condemned for a thousand years, I had earned remission. Indeed, throughout my negotiations with Chinese officials over the next five years we had perfectly amicable discussions, albeit we were often in disagreement. This was particularly the case since the member states of the European Union usually turned to the Commission to deal with the most sensitive issues over which it actually had no responsibility, such as the EU’s refusal to sell arms to the PRC or the treatment of human rights. I particularly enjoyed my encounters with Zhu Rongji during discussions about China’s access to the WTO. I thought he was one of the most impressive public servants I had ever met.
I was invited by President Jiang Zemin to go on a semi-official visit with my family to China. My wife and I went and at the end had a long meeting with the President himself. As we left the room, his interpreter sidled up to me carrying a copy of East and West – plainly a pirated edition – and asked if I could sign it for him. The President quoted a lot of Shakespeare and was enthusiastic about British films from the 1940s and ’50s. I gave him a collection of Shakespeare’s plays and said that I thought he would particularly enjoy the history plays. Our only disagreement was that he wanted me to spend more time in China.
All this happened without me ever changing my views on Chinese communism or the way I behaved. I am interested in China and admire much about its culture. The same is not true of my vision of the Communist Party. But, once pardoned, I suspect that I may now again be regarded as a recidivist sinner speaking out against China’s bullying behaviour around the world, and in particular its systematic destruction under Xi Jinping of the freedom and promised autonomy of Hong Kong. What the Chinese communist regime has done there is wrong and wicked. We should say that clearly.