The Hong Kong Diaries

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Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer View image in fullscreen ‘The politics, in his words, were a “snake pit”.

This takes the form of a passionate polemical essay, written as a postscript to the diaries, about China’s increasingly brutal sabotage of the Hong Kong deals. This might suggest that the new volume retreads familiar ground, but it is new in two major respects.

The book concludes with an account of what has happened in Hong Kong since the handover, a powerful assessment of recent events and Patten's reflections on how to deal with China - then and now. The honest opinion of his observations over the Hong Kong populace is carefully crafted and one could be easily moved by his love towards the Pearl of the Orient after reading.

For anyone who has a special interest, ties to and direct experience of HK as I have been lucky to have, this book is a must read. There were serious ructions with China along the way, and some within Hong Kong itself, about the new airport, passport rights, civil service pensions, Vietnamese refugees and, more than anything else, Patten’s reforms.The book gives unprecedented insights into negotiating with the Chinese, about how the institutions of democracy in Hong Kong were (belatedly) strengthened and how Patten sought to ensure that a strong degree of self-government would continue after 1997. With hindsight, ex-governor Lord Chris Patten revisits his custodianship of Hong Kong in this genuine recollection of his encounters with the Communist regime.

It struck me that in hindsight we had the benefit of some effective political figures, including John Major, during that time - if only we had known it then.Sadly, many world leaders are still trying to turn a blind eye to tyranny as they naively think shaking hands with them will favour world economy.

Over the next five years he kept this diary, which describes in detail how Hong Kong was run as a British colony and what happened as the handover approached. Lord Patten spent much of his time in Hong Kong struggling against British officials and members of the local elite who believed it was not worth trying to push China to accept more democracy in pre-handover Hong Kong-much less expanding it without China's approval. In The Hong Kong Diaries Chris Patten details his struggle as the last governor of Hong Kong to energise the dying days of British rule. Patten’s goal was to ensure the 1997 handover to China went as smoothly as possible, while at the same time entrenching the rule of law and trying to extend democracy.

Percy Cradock, former ambassador to Beijing and described as “working actively to scupper what we are trying to do”, is the chief villain of the piece. the diaries themselves, kept from the time of his appointment in April 1992 to the handover just over five years later, have not been seen before and make for consistently good reading .