MOST, if not all, political careers tend to end in failure. Chris Patten’s departure from Westminster was a result of his losing his Bath seat at the General Election of 1992, which he had clung on to for 13 years. Ironically, he was then the Conservatives’ campaign chief. But in delivering victory for his party he neglected to padlock his own backyard. It was a shock, he recalls, and a humiliation, though he now says that the outcome was not unexpected, at least to him. He was 48 and the rest of his life lay blankly before him. He could have occupied a park bench in the Lords or waited until a safe seat became available in the Commons, neither of which appealed. In the event, his chum, Prime Minister John Major, offered him the opportunity to be the last governor of Hong Kong, charged with effecting a smooth transition from British to Chinese rule. It was, as Patten relates in this “sort of memoir”, the best and worst of times. He proved himself an able, astute and brave governor but what troubled him all those years ago still troubles him today. “Do Chinese Communists really keep their word even when their word is included in international treaties?”

In far right-leaning circles, where swivel-eyed Brexiteers conspire with free market fundamentalists, Patten is seen as a pariah. In the Thatcher era, when cutting was cool and endemic and the likes of the Adam Smith Institute thought thoughts better left unthought, he was an advocate of public spending. To some extent, he believes, this blotted his copybook and “caused some teeth-sucking in Downing Street”. In 1983, however, he was given his first ministerial post and dispatched to the Siberia of Northern Ireland, about which he writes well and humorously and, on occasion, lyrically. A practising Catholic married to a Protestant, he was quickly labelled a “taig”, a pejorative term for one of the Pope’s faithful. “Rome and Catholicism,” he writes, “were the kernel of Nationalist and Republican identity. So religion, shorn of any idea of Christianity, provided the kindling for the blazing struggle because it encapsulated land, power ascendancy.” At the root of the Troubles was nothing more or less than “centuries-old prejudice”.

The sense one has of Patten is of a mediator. He listens, reads – the chapter on Ireland quotes from among others Seamus Heaney, John McGahern, Bernard MacLaverty, Colm Toibin – and acts in the belief it will benefit the common good. Like a poet or a novelist, he has an imagination, which many of his fellow politicians conspicuously lack. He may hanker after happy endings but he knows they are improbable. Loose ends are better left untied. He is not without pomposity, nor does he, like most memoirists, refrain from showing himself in a positive light, but he is not driven by ideology or what he calls “the quasi-religious reverence” some have for one crackpot notion or another. It is safe to say he is not a fan of the Democratic Unionist Party.

In 1999, he became one of the UK’s two members to the European Commission – the other was Neil Kinnock. He believes in the efficacy of the EU and was dismayed by the vote to leave. Unsurprisingly, he is withering in his assessment of Boris Johnson, who “helped to lead the Leave campaign while trying unconvincingly to persuade the world that his position was not dictated but an unflagging, tumescent ambition”, and likewise of Iain Duncan Smith ("woeful"), and Paul Dacre and his gangrenous limb, the Daily Mail. While President of the EU, Romano Prodi, the former Italian Prime Minister, told Patten that he had arranged to meet Dacre, in the hope that it would lead to fairer coverage of EU. Patten thought this a terrible idea and told Prodi so. Prodi went anyway and learned from Dacre that his sole interest were bad stories about Brussels and bureaucrats. Patten’s response is to quote a line from Tom Stoppard: “I am passionately committed to free speech, it’s just some newspapers I don’t like.”

An interesting chapter is devoted to consideration of the three Tory leaders – Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher and John Major – under whom Patten served. Like him, all of them were from towards the bottom end of the middle class and attended state schools. Heath, he says, did not like people very much. On leaving No 10, he sulked for three decades. Once, Patten spent a morning working with a fellow speechwriter in his “chambers” in London. When lunchtime came, Heath’s housekeeper arrived with wine and lobster salad, none of which was for her boss’s guests. This was not a discourtesy that Margaret Thatcher was ever guilty of. On the contrary, Patten recalls, she had to be dragged back from the kitchen “where she would have been making sandwiches whether you wanted them or not”. He gives her credit for making “Britain governable again” but accuses her of coming close “not only to wrecking the Conservative Party but also, in the longer term, to corroding middle-class values whose preservation was the objective of her furious activities”. One senses Patten felt no great warmth either towards her or Heath. He preferred the leadership style of Major who actually listened to other people’s opinions and was “a rather quiet hero”.

Further pages of First Confession are devoted to Patten’s stint as Chairman of the BBC Trust when Newsnight erroneously – and disastrously – identified a former Conservative Party treasurer as part of a paedophile ring (“these were not ... my happiest days”), his roles as Chancellor of Newcastle and Oxford universities, and the chairmanship of a committee to reorganise the Vatican’s media, which seems to have been as compelling as it sounds. In all these guises, the self-styled “poobah” – multiple officeholder – with the pouchy eyes and swelling paunch “left a mark”. “Did I transform anything – leave in a blaze of glory?” he ponders, as sits in his garden in France. “Certainly not,” he concludes, and thinks of Britain under a prime minister who seems to doubt whether you can be both a British citizen and a citizen of the world. That he does not name her suggests he wasn’t sure she would still be in post when his book was published.