First Confession Read online

  Chris Patten

  * * *

  FIRST CONFESSION

  A Sort of Memoir

  Contents

  1 Politics and Identity

  2 Mass and Privet

  3 Scholarship Boy

  4 ‘The Last Best Hope of Earth’

  5 ‘Wet’

  6 Leadership: Heath, Thatcher, Major

  7 Crazy Irish Knots

  8 Out East

  9 The Loneliness of the Long Distance European

  10 Atlantic Crossing

  11 Poobah

  12 Violence and Faith

  Illustrations

  Photographic Acknowledgements

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  To my family and my cardiologists

  1

  Politics and Identity

  From far, from eve and morning

  And yon twelve-winded sky,

  The stuff of life to knit me

  Blew hither: here am I.

  A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad

  The things that make me different are the things that make me.

  A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

  A Chinese anthem, written in 1100 BC, warned against three foolish things: first, deep sleep in an unknown house; second, setting out to sea in a borrowed junk; third, not to lag behind when the elephant approaches a new bridge. To which sound advice, over 3,000 years later, one might add a fourth foolish thing – writing a political autobiography, particularly if it is a memoir of the conventional sort. The author poses as the person she or he wanted to appear to be: a somebody, not too dreary, right about everything or, if not absolutely right, then heroically wrong. The more honest examples of the genre may concede some surprise at the public heights to which the author has been lifted by what he or she knows better than anyone else are pretty modest talents.

  There may also be the admitted discovery that as you ascend you feel much the same as you did when you started the climb. I recall a former boss when I was in my twenties, Jim Prior, a Suffolk farmer, a friend of Ted Heath and a Cabinet minister, opining wistfully on one occasion as he opened his ministerial red box with its gold-embossed coat of arms, ‘I used to think before I got into the Cabinet, that if ever I made it, I would seem a very different person. But it’s all just the same.’ So it is, at least for the normal and sane.

  At their worst, conventional political memoirs, often produced more for buying and selling than reading, seem written almost straight out of the office diary with occasional forays into Rough Guide geography lessons. ‘Afghanistan is a poor country surrounded by mountains’: thus the tone and style of Hillary Clinton’s door-stopping contribution. It is not only Hillary’s way. A regular part of these autobiographies is the tittle-tattle about backstairs dramas – who said or did what to whom? Which minister’s wife was a lousy cook? Who served bought mayonnaise out of a jar? What colour boxer shorts was the Prime Minister wearing? Maybe all this adds to sales and gives some welcome relief from the heavy-handed justifications for every controversial twist and turn over the decades of a career. But can you actually remember the parliamentary row over the Chimney Sweeps Bill of twenty years ago? Do you want to remember it? How much do people want to recall about even the most harrowing and dramatic events? Perhaps it is just as well that they usually turn the page or the channel and get on with life. Overall, what do you learn from this literary species about political motivation, about the reasons for a political career, about the onion skins of a politician’s personality, about the point of it all, about who she or he really is, staring every morning into the bathroom mirror before the shaving gel is dabbed or the powder is applied?

  The discouragements are formidable. But it occurred to me that to track down myself would enable me to discuss an issue that had begun to intrigue me, namely the relationship between politics and identity, the things that had shaped me and whether and how they had come to reflect my life and opinions. As I wrote, the question of identity moved from the wings to centre stage, and roiled politics and nations on both sides of the Atlantic. Were the changes taking place fundamental and lasting? Or were they the unhappy result of a combination of haphazard events and of a random mixture of personalities? Trump, Farage and Le Pen appeared to be joined politically and culturally at the hip. Were technology and migration producing similar effects from Vienna to Virginia? Had the hollowing out of political parties left a void to be filled by duplicitous hucksters? Was the crash of 2008 to blame, or were the causes of whatever was happening more subtle, and more a result of perceived threats to the identities of groups and individuals? Had political debate been infantilized by changes in the way people received information? Had reason been dethroned, or had it never really enjoyed pre-eminence? Occasionally I thought I could begin to detect the stink of decline on the breeze, even the reek of decadence. So I wanted to try to answer some of these questions by exploring who I am, and what made up my own identity.

  One of the most fundamental questions about political life – or political science, as some like to call it, as if it were one – is ‘Who are we?’ With what pattern of loyalties do we identify? Which narratives, memories and experiences shape our behaviour? Do we always find ourselves caught in the same threads of that spider’s web? Can we move about from one strip of the silky trap to another? All of which raises a preliminary question. ‘We’ is simply the collection of ‘I’s. So who am I? What makes up my identity? Genetics, nature, nurture play a major role. But in addition, as with everyone else, my identity in part reflects choices I make. It is also in part the result of influences over which I have little or no control. ‘Know thyself’ was Socrates’ challenge, a challenge both to personal memory and to honesty. Here, perhaps, is the beginning of a justification for writing in this rather different way about my life.

  How much does any of us remember? Some train their memories like a classical rhetorician. That was the advice given to Charlemagne by Alcuin, an English scholar and poet at his court: do what Cicero did, learning the skills of public oratory, for which a good memory is invaluable. However, Alcuin noted that to have a good memory it is important to avoid drunkenness. When I first entered Parliament, where alcohol is occasionally consumed, I trained myself to speak for long periods without a text. When the time came, I was able as a minister to speak from the Despatch Box in the House of Commons in a big debate with just a few sketchy notes, often enabling me to get away with defending a bad cause simply because of presentation. I recall, in one debate about the wretched poll tax, an Opposition speaker on the other side of the Despatch Box muttering in a rather worried voice to a colleague, ‘He hasn’t got any notes.’ Over the years, my ability to pull this sort of trick has deteriorated, though I do not think drink is the villain, and I can still master a brief pretty quickly. Tony Judt, the fine and brave historian and essayist, created what he called a ‘memory chalet’ to trigger his recollections, as motor neuron disease closed inexorably in on him, switching off one light after another until all was dark. The chalet provided a storage cupboard for his well-stocked mind. It was presumably modelled on the ‘memory palace’ of images which Matteo Ricci, the sixteenth-century Jesuit missionary to China, used to teach his pupils through mnemonics, and which has been brilliantly recorded by Jonathan Spence in his book on Ricci.

  How much, though, do we choose what we remember? Do we simply remember what we wish, good or bad? It does not necessarily help to have kept a diary. Some diaries are admittedly so comprehensive that they acquire an additional authenticity. How can this not be the whole person? Pepys takes us from the navy’s accounts, to the Stuart court, to his table, to the lavatory and notably to bed with such attention to detail that we think we must know the real Samuel. But do we? A
nd what of a diarist of our own times like Alan Clark? Clark constructed a tale in which he was not only of course the central character – a mendacious philanderer – but a major figure in the politics of his times. Read Clark and you are led to believe that one of the dominant issues in British politics in the 1980s was when and how he would ascend to Margaret Thatcher’s Cabinet. But this Mr Toad’s journey – ‘Poop poop!’ goes Alan’s flashy limousine – was never headed to Downing Street except in his own entertaining fictions. Was his night-time sex life perhaps as riddled with fiction as his daytime politics? Demonstrating how the silliness of a doubtless very clever judge could cause maximum distress to two honourable politicians and their families, a Lord Justice of Appeal spent years in the later years of the Major government trying to decide during an inquiry into arms sales to Iraq whether he should believe Alan Clark’s word or that of Nicholas Lyell and William Waldegrave. Most of their colleagues in the House of Commons would have taken about five minutes to conclude that Clark was being as honest as usual, but Sir Richard Scott took a great deal longer to come to this blindingly obvious conclusion.

  I have kept a diary at one or two periods of my life, in Hong Kong, for example, and reading it now enables me to see a little more clearly what was happening twenty years ago without condensation on the rear window. But I emerge from it too well. I am who I want to seem: affable and relaxed under pressure, even gay in the old-fashioned sense. Was it really like that? Did I just shrug off the mandarins’ and businessmen’s stilettos as they were aimed at the back of my smart (made by Sam of Kowloon) suits? I rather doubt it. But I had to pretend that I did not care a jot, go on whistling and crack a few deadpan jokes.

  Why do I find myself thinking so much about identity? The primary reason is that now I look back I realize how much of my public and private life has been spent dealing with the politics of identity, whose wild and carnivorous beasts have torn so many societies to pieces and unleashed so much havoc. Today they threaten to do even more damage on two fronts. The world is safer than it was when the West and the Soviet Union snarled at each other from behind their silos of nuclear weapons, and when wars on most continents played surrogate for Washington and Moscow (only ‘small’ wars, unless they visited your town or village), but today’s random violence with alleged religious roots and a malevolent hostility to anything which seems alien and particularly Western causes mounting worry. While he is probably thinking partly about every sort of conflict, civil and economic as well as violent, Pope Francis exaggerates a little when he sees a world in flames. Yet, in many regions, the fires really are raging. Unsurprisingly many share the Pope’s view of our civilization’s proximity to apocalypse as jihadists bomb lawyers in a hospital at Quetta, as they continue their bloody campaign in Lebanon, Yemen, Turkey, Bangladesh and Saudi Arabia, as an elderly priest is slaughtered on the steps of his altar, as innocent European citizens are mown down from Nice to Westminster. Identity politics, not ideological, strips our world of its certainties and even some of the quite comforting old uncertainties of great power politics, such as the insane balance of mutually assured destruction. On top of this, the growth of identity nationalism – ‘America First’, ‘pure-blooded Frenchmen’, ‘take back control’ – threatens the survival of the institutions of global governance and economic order which have given the world a hugely beneficial infrastructure of rules and co-operation for more than half a century. We appear to be prepared in the West to forget the habits of working together which we once took for granted.

  Let me demonstrate how my own career has often brought me into contact with the present or the past horrors of identity politics. It is a public life which has taken me hither and yon. One evening the chairman who was introducing me as an after-dinner speaker began: ‘Lord Patten has had a chequered career.’ Just how ‘chequered’ has it been?

  My great-grandfather was an economic migrant from Ireland in the first half of the nineteenth century. I was brought up as a Catholic in 1950s England, when Catholics were regarded as a little bit odd, a tad foreign. I went as a student to America in the 1960s, when race riots, anti-Vietnam protests and the Civil Rights Movement dominated political life there. I worked by chance in a New York political campaign that trampolined me away from an intended career in the BBC and into politics and eventually an uncomfortably marginal parliamentary seat at Westminster. Later came my first ministerial job, which took me to Northern Ireland. I remember the first time I saw a blown-up body, one foot rather deftly blasted to the top of a laurel bush. I had seen dead bodies before – my father, mother and stepfather, all groomed for the coffin and worms by a funeral parlour – but they had all been in one piece. I returned to the Province thirteen years later to try to take the police out of the cauldron of political acrimony. I worked closely for Margaret Thatcher and John Major. Indeed, I recall once being asked in Siena by a group of ladies from Yorkshire if I would agree to be photographed with them collectively and one at a time. It took for ever. As they moved on to their next Duomo, I heard one say to the others, ‘He’s so nice, that Mr Major.’ I used to be confused with John fairly regularly. It cannot be my shape.

  After losing my parliamentary seat in Bath, I went as Governor to Hong Kong. Some suggested when I was there that my arguments about civil liberties, the rule of law and democracy showed how little I understood, and how ignorant I was in denying the proposition that there is a civilizational clash between the Christian West and the Confucian East. After that I was sent as a Commissioner to Brussels in 1999. My departure for the EU was regarded by some as an unpatriotic act. I found myself for much of the time there dealing with the problems of Palestine and Israel, and the residue of violent conflict in the Balkans. Was there something about being an Orthodox Serb Christian or a Croat or a Bosnian Muslim which made it inevitable that you would want to kill the others?

  How much of my own identity is the result of confronting the extremes of identity politics? Have I simply used my experiences to buttress a set of prejudices that were already in place and are mostly the progeny of a belief that, once you turn your back on moderation, all is soon lost? You cannot be moderately moderate in safety. Indeed, you need paradoxically to be immoderate when you are standing up for moderation. But is all this the result of accumulated objective experiences and judgements? Is it genuine? Am I fooling others and lying to myself and to them because I believe this is what they will like? Most of us hide parts of ourselves in dark burrows like John le Carré characters, manipulating others by showing them what we think they want or expect to see. Above all, most of us want to seem to be someone whom others will like or admire.

  There are some contributors to my identity which do not appear in the introductions favoured by the chairman at meetings. I am white, very happily married, and have three daughters – Kate, Laura and Alice – and eight grandchildren. I have been in love with the same person, Lavender, for over forty-six years. I subscribe to the view that one is only as happy as one’s least happy child. My grandchildren provide the principal reason for such optimism as I have about the future, partly because I assume that there must be lots of other grandparents with similar views about the grace of their own grandchildren. As our older generation falls by the wayside, they carry on, our genetic stake in the future of humanity. I believe in God and an afterlife. I am a Christian, a Catholic. I have a British passport and think that I have been lucky to live in Britain during what must have been (at least until now) the happiest, healthiest and most peaceful period in British history. I am a patriot in an English sort of way, not Podsnappian, though inconveniently I do get a lump in my throat when singing ‘I vow to thee, my country’. I believe that Britain has been diminished in economic and geo-strategic ways during my lifetime. On the other hand, I had no doubt until recently that it was a nicer, more tolerant country than it used to be. I hope this is still true, although doubts accumulate. I was a scholarship boy from the deep middle (certainly no higher) of the London, suburban middle class. I
am an Atlanticist and a pro-European. I was shocked by the result of the EU referendum which will make us poorer (especially those who are already poor) and less influential for good in the world. Above all, I am appalled by what it says about the state of our democratic politics and saddened that it took the unparliamentary device of a referendum to demonstrate this. I am liberal on economics and social issues. On questions like gender equity, sexual preference, gay marriage and capital punishment, I tick most of the boxes on a tabloid newspaper’s hate list. But as my wife noted, ‘No day is entirely wasted if you have been attacked by a tabloid.’ I am a Conservative of a rather old-fashioned sort: while there is not much noblesse about me, I strongly believe in ‘noblesse oblige’.

  My favourite painting is The Surrender at Breda by Velázquez; it shows grace and magnanimity in action. My favourite story is the parable of the prodigal son in St Luke’s Gospel, though I have more than a sneaking sympathy for the dutiful son who stayed at home, too. My favourite films are The Producers (the original version) and Some Like It Hot, which of course has the greatest last line in any movie – ‘Well, nobody’s perfect.’ My favourite piece of music is the canonical quartet from Beethoven’s Fidelio, ‘Mir ist so wunderbar’, and my favourite passage in English literature is the last paragraph of George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The second half of the very last sentence of Middlemarch pulls together the principal theme of this, perhaps the greatest, English novel: ‘the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs’. Exactly. All that is me. I’m not making any of it up; at least, I don’t think I am.

  These are my compass points, my comfort blankets. Here is what makes me feel at ease, happy and secure. But a sense of identity does not always do that, or do that for everyone. While it can push and pull strongly in constructive directions (consider the peaceful nationalism of a Catalan or Scot) elsewhere it can and does also cross a line into territory that denies civic humanism and common decency. This is especially true when it exaggerates its own uniqueness. It can goad you into belligerence. It can trap you in history’s cage, and bad history at that. It can increasingly define you not by what you are for, but by what you are against. It can turn victimhood into a way of life, or more likely of death. It can make you into a fanatic – Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, nationalist or vegetarian. It can squeeze all the wonderful complexity out of life, paint all the greys black, white and blood red, eviscerate all the ‘not quites’ and ‘yes buts’. It can turn young Irish Republicans into bombers and hunger strikers, and their Unionist fellow citizens into assassins. It can recruit apparently normal young men from plural societies to become torturers and murderers, making the trip from East London or Yorkshire to Syria to cut off other men’s heads and rape their wives and daughters. It can open concentration camps in what was once Yugoslavia. It can arouse a young man from forested Artigat in rural south-west France to travel to Toulouse and kill Jewish children, or excite other young French men and women from the Paris banlieues to gun down journalists and to butcher their contemporaries in that city of light. It can drive people from their own country, whether in Asia, the Middle East, Europe or the United States, to embrace death themselves in order to kill others. The list goes on and on, and every time the catalyst is above all a corruption and hardening of the idea of identity.