Chris Patten First Confession: A Sort of Memoir
The best we can do is try to be better and kinder ourselves; to remember how much it is sheer courage that usually gets people through disappointment and heartbreak; and to recognise how the greatest disruption to our well-ordered plans is often love, occasionally regretted but usually embraced and invariably transformative. These modest words about basic ambition typify the autobiography of Chris Patten, former Chairman of the Conservative Party, last Governor of Hong Kong, European Commissioner for External Affairs, Chancellor of Oxford University, Chairman of the BBC, advisor to the Pope - as he self-deprecatingly puts it a Grand Poo-bah, the Lord High Everything Else. The autobiography of a conservative liberal challenges a political culture in which a thick skin of prejudice, reinforced by reading the tabloids, is proof against the dilemmas of the real world. Patten writes: I am a Conservative who has never believed that everything my party does or stands for is right. I a