Abstract
Chris Patten1 was born in 1944, the son of a jazz musician and publisher. He was successful at his Catholic school, St Benedict’s, Ealing, and won a scholarship to Oxford, where, according to one commentator, he was more interested in the theatre than politics, being quite effective in comedy roles. On graduating from Oxford he won a travelling fellowship to the United States, where he gained his first experience in politics as a political researcher for John Lindsay, who was campaigning to be Mayor of New York.
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Notes
The title for this chapter is borrowed from a section heading of an article by Brian Hook, ‘Political Change in Hong Kong’ in David Shambaugh, (ed.) Greater China: The Next Superpower? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) pp. 188–211
Alan Clark, in his notorious Diaries (Phoenix, 1994), reports Thatcher as claiming that, ‘Patten had plotted the whole thing.’ (London: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1st ed., 1993) p. 384
Alan Watkins, A Conservative Coup: The Fall of Margaret Thatcher (London: Duckworth, 1991)
Bruce Anderson, John Major: The Making of the Prime Minister (London: Fourth Estate, 1991).
Lawrence James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (London: Little, Brown and Company, 1994) p. 614.
S. K. Tsang, ‘Income distribution’ in P. K. Choi and L. S. Ho (eds.) The Other Hong Kong Report 1993 (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1994) pp. 361–8.
As noted in Chapter 3, during the negotiations leading up to the Joint Declaration this tri-partite relationship was referred to by Lord Belstead, the British Minister of State with Responsibility for Hong Kong, as a ‘three-legged stool’. Britain always emphasised that the views of Hong Kong should be paramount in any negotiations over Hong Kong’s future and that each of the three parties should be represented. China, however, always rejected the ‘three-legged stool’ formulation, on the grounds that Hong Kong is a part of its territory and so could not be put on the same level as the two sovereign powers. See James T. H. Tang and Frank Ching, ‘The MacLehose—Youde Years: Balancing the “Three-legged Stool”’, 1971–86’ in Ming K. Chan (ed.) Precarious Balance: Hong Kong Between China and Britain 1842–1992 (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1994) pp. 149–71.
Most notably Max Atkinson, in Our Masters’ Voices, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984).
The ‘I have a dream’ speech of Martin Luther King is a very good example of the use of parallelism. See Deborah Tannen Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)
Robert Cockroft and Susan Cockroft, Persuading People: An Introduction to Rhetoric (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992).
Regular polls, conducted weekly by the Social Sciences Research Center (SSRC) of the University of Hong Kong, show that Patten’s popularity consistently increased from the day of the announcement of his appointment right up to the day of his policy speech. His popularity fluctuated at that level for five weeks, before plunging to a record low in mid-December, following severe attacks by China. Robert Chung, the research officer of the SSRC, attributes Patten’s early popularity to ‘the tremendous effort he [Patten] spent in meeting the media and the public’. See Robert T. Y. Chung ‘Public Opinion’ in L. W. Poon (ed.), The Other Hong Kong Report: 1993 (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1993) pp. 401–232
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© 1998 John Flowerdew
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Flowerdew, J. (1998). Enter Christopher Patten. In: The Final Years of British Hong Kong. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26135-2_6
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