Lord Patten of Barnes: Lord Speaker's Corner

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In this episode

‘You engage them, first of all, without the sort of mushy feeling that you can't do business with them unless you accept their political narrative… we should talk to the Chinese, but we should do so in a pretty clear-sighted way.’

In a wide-ranging discussion, outgoing Chancellor of the University of Oxford and former Governor of Hong Kong Lord Patten of Barnes speaks to the Lord Speaker about China’s approach to the former British dependent territory. He also discusses his time dealing with China while a European Commissioner and his view on engagement with Beijing today. He reflects on his experience in government and in particular in Northern Ireland, sharing his perspective on the importance of ‘recognising that identity politics can't be allowed to destroy the ordinary civility of life.’

Following the end of his Chancellorship of the University of Oxford, he also shares what he has learnt during his time there, including the importance of a range of educational opportunities. He explains ‘a university which is doing apprenticeship courses alongside degrees… a higher education establishment that is helping people to become plumbers or electricians, is just as important as universities. They are all part of making us more successful and a more congenial society.’

Finally, Lord Patten shares the importance of giving people the chance to make a difference, saying ‘whether we're Labour or Conservative, ultimately we want the government to work.’

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Transcript

Lord Speaker:

Lord Patten, Chris, welcome to Lord Speaker's Corner. Delighted to have you along. Maybe we could start with your early life in Manchester, Irish background, and then going to London - educated at St. Benedict's and then Oxford. But your early life is important because I think that's-

Lord Patten:

My great-grandfather was born in Roscommon in 1829 and left Ireland in the 1840s during the famine and went to Lancashire where his first job was repairing cane bottoms of chairs and then got into the textile business or industry in a factory. He lived in Ardoyne in the Centre of Manchester, and by and large, all the priests were Italian and the people who built the place were Irish. And he had four children, one of whom my grandfather, went to a teacher training college, Catholic teacher training college, and became the headmaster of a primary school in the Centre of Manchester, and married another teacher who became the headmistress of another primary school. And that was my father's background. He had two older sisters who were both music teachers. My dad, to the horror of his parents, became passionate about Duke Ellington and big band jazz, and learnt to play the drums and had a place at Manchester University but chose not to go. But instead he went off to join a dance band called the Phil Richardson Band and playing in a gig in the Isle of Man.

Then the war came along. He was in the RAF and responsible for gas warfare in the Middle East. And after the war came down to London, he'd married my mother when he was still playing in a band. They met at a gig in Exeter at the Rougemont Hotel, which I once stayed at a few years ago. And they came down to London, they bought one of those slightly gimcrack houses built along the arterial roads out of London. And I was brought up there in Greenford, which is the less salubrious part of Ealing. I don't mean that in a critical way, but it's just not quite as posh. And I went to the local Catholic primary school, Our Lady of Visitation, where we were fiercely taught for the 11 plus.

Lord Speaker:

So a lot of experience.

Lord Patten:

I did the 11 plus and then got a scholarship to the local Catholic Independent School, which was run by the Benedictines in Ealing with lots of Polish boys. Lots of Polish boys because the Polish forces during the war had very often lived in West London, there's a war memorial in Northolt where the airport is. And I had two or three friends, Polish friends whose fathers were killed about the time they were born, in the Battle of Monte Cassino. And they used to sing a dirge-like Polish hymn called Red Poppies on Monte Cassino. And the fact that I'm of that generation reminds me of how lucky we were. I think being born in 1944 or '45 is a bit like being born after the Congress of Vienna in 1840 and 1815. You then had a period of peace in Europe and things were getting better every year.

And it was certainly true for my generation. My wife's father was killed a month before she was born in Normandy. Lots of my friends were orphans of people who'd been killed at the end of the war. And my birthday on the 12th of May 1944, I now discover having just read an excellent book by Jonathan Dimbleby on 1944, my birthday was on the day that the German forces were driven out of Crimea. So there's a sort of awful symmetry, the way the things come round and round and round. So I was born at a lucky time and grew up hugely happy at school, at home, a Catholic family, not over the top religious, but my dad was a-

Lord Speaker:

A cradle Catholic.

Lord Patten:

Yeah. Yeah. My mother had to, I mean, no disrespect to her, but I don't think religion played a hugely important part in her intellectual processes. But she became a Catholic to marry my dad who'd horrified her parents, whose daughter was going off with not just a drummer in a band, but a Catholic Irish drummer in a band. But my dad, when we were growing up, we went to church every Sunday and to rosary retreats. And my dad used every Sunday afternoon to visit, he was a member of the St. Vincent de Paul Society, to visit the local mental-

Lord Speaker:

That's for the collection for the poor.

Lord Patten:

Yeah. To visit the mental hospital in Hanwell where his favourite client, patient, friend believed very strongly that he was Napoleon. So my dad was one of the world's experts on Napoleon, went to have conversations with this poor fellow. So that was my background.

Lord Speaker:

But you excelled at school and you had a scholarship to Oxford where you read history, and I think you said you weren't involved in politics at Oxford at all. You had Christopher Hill, the renowned Marxist historian. So when you left Oxford, not been involved in politics there, was it a toss-up between the Conservative and the Labour Party?

Lord Patten:

Well, I think it's probably true to say that, and I wasn't a Conservative ideologically indeed. The reason I think why I leant in a Conservative direction was precisely because I was suspicious of ideology and systems. But I got into politics entirely accidentally. I had a scholarship to America. While I was over there, I got involved in a political campaign -a Republican candidate who subsequently became a Democrat called John Lindsay, the Mayor of New York.

Lord Speaker:

Oh, yes.

Lord Patten:

And I had the job of covering his conservative with a small c opponent, a very American conservative called Buckley, who was a sparring partner of Gore Vidal and said memorably because-

Lord Speaker:

He was editor of a paper, William Buckley, wasn't he?

Lord Patten:

Yeah, New York was in a terrible state, and when he was asked what he would do if he won the election, he said the first thing I would do is demand a recount.

Lord Patten:

But that got me interested in politics. I was supposed to be joining the BBC as a graduate trainee, but that wasn't starting until the year after I got back from America. So I had some time to fill in, and I was told that the Conservative research department, which recruited people to do the sort of thing I'd been doing in America. I wrote off to them, got a job with them and the rest, as they say on podcasts is history.

Lord Speaker:

History. And you were the youngest director at Conservative Central Office, and then you went into Parliament as an MP 1979 to 1992. Maybe at this stage you could give us an idea on your reflections in Parliament at that particular time because the composition of Parliament at the House of Commons was much different from what it is now in terms of type of individuals in it and the class mixture as well as a result. Have we lost anything in that intervening period?

Lord Patten:

Yeah, I think what's been lost I think, is an enthusiasm about Parliament and the House of Commons's main function, and that is debating and arguing. My best friends, one of whom Tristan Garel-Jones, died a couple of years ago from smoking. My best friends and I, William Walgrave, John Major and others, all taught ourselves to speak and to speak without reading it out. And if we just stood up and read things out, [Commons Speaker] George Thomas wouldn't have called us again. He was a wonderfully slightly camp, improbably, Welshman, but very, very strong supporter of you if you could hold the House.

When I now see people getting up to ask a question and saying, "Could the Prime Minister tell us when he's... It's terrible. Let alone speaking. And that's served me extremely well, in some respects too well. I was sometimes able making a speech to get away with things just because I didn't have a text or didn't have notes. Matthew Parris, for example, made the best maiden speech of my generation and that was just delivered without any notes. And I think that we used to attend the House more. George Thomas wouldn't call you if you hadn't been in debates for a bit. And I think that's pretty well gone now. And I suppose people feel that two-minute interview on the Today programme is going to get them more attention than how they perform in the House. But I've got no doubt at all that the fact that we had learnt to perform well was one of the reasons why we got promoted really reasonably quickly, despite the fact that some of us were critical of Margaret Thatcher.

Lord Speaker:

You have said that both main parties now have corroded themselves as a result of an excess of internal democracy. What do you mean by that?

Lord Patten:

Well, one of the paradoxes is that as both the main political parties have become narrower in membership and narrower in their view of the world, so they've been loaded with more ability to shape the party at the centre and to choose MPs and to play quite a big role in shaping party policy. So they've moved to the right, and the people they choose therefore are more likely to be right-wing. And the whole system I think has pushed both Labour and Conservatives. When Jeremy Corbyn was leader Labour more than Conservatives, now probably Conservatives more than Labour, away from the middle ground. And you know very well that politics is largely a matter of finding where the sort of consensus in the middle ground is. It's not literally ground, but it's ideas and approach. I don't think people are particularly ideological. I think they vote Conservative mostly because Conservativism has been a sort of attitude, a way of looking at the world. And I think that's the main reason why the Conservative party has been in power so often.

I think Sir Keir Starmer understands that and people around him certainly do. People like Wes Streeting, who I find immensely impressive. I read his memoirs and heard him speaking about his memoirs at a book festival we were both speaking at in Wells, and then spent part of the weekend with him, and I thought he was a very, very impressive guy. And not easy coming from a working-class background like that and being gay. I mean, this is not easy.

Lord Speaker:

Yeah, absolutely. You've also mentioned that the most important domestic issues, questions why so many people have fallen behind educationally, financially, the wealth gap and importantly in esteem. It was actually more of 'Butskellism' when you were in Parliament at that time that these issues were given a bit more attention.

Lord Patten:

Yeah, Rab Butler, who was one of my heroes-

Lord Speaker:

Oh, you had photographs of him in your wallet.

Lord Patten:

I do.

Lord Speaker:

Of the Minister.

Lord Patten:

He once said, we'd been helping him with a speech at his country house with a wonderful garden, wonderful Gertrude, Jekyll herbaceous borders, and before we left, he was cutting some flowers for our wives and we said to him, "What's the thing you most learned in politics? What's the most important lesson?" And he was both ambiguous, sometimes brutally so, but also ambivalent, which is of course different. And he said, probably not meaning it literally, he said, "It's simple, it's more important to be generous than efficient." I often thought I'd try to write a book about what I think that means, but the whole notion of One Nation Conservativism was put best in the last few years, I thought, by Theresa May when she was speaking on the steps of number 10, after she'd been asked by her majesty to form a government, and she talked about wanting to address the burning grievances in society.

She talked about the fact that the justice system was loaded against people who were Black. She talked about the fact that the people least likely to go to university were working-class white boys. She talked about the fact that if you looked at all the professions, there was hardly anybody at the top of any of the professions who'd been to a state school. She talked about all those things, and I thought it was a pretty good description of what One Nation Tory-rism should be. So it hasn't completely died, though you might take a different view of judging by what's happened in the last few weeks. And I think the important thing about it was that it did speak to, I think, some of the fundamental views of people in this country. I think we are a pretty moderate country. I think it's why we haven't had much in the way of revolutions.

And I think even when it comes to things like free speech, we tend not to want to take it to extremes. I think the greatest Conservative political thinker was Edmund Burke who said, "Liberty must be limited in order to be possessed." And you look at Musk today, you look at Telegram and X, and you think they're very good arguments not for getting rid of or attacking free speech, but for actually putting limits on what people can say in terms of hate speech, in terms of spreading disinformation. So I think Britain has been traditionally a moderate country, and when it wants change on the whole, it votes Labour.

Lord Speaker:

You mentioned about the system of government and you said that it needs restored completely to ensure a vitality which is missing at the moment. And also you said it's the most over-centralised here. Now coming from Scotland, I'm very much aware of that particular issue. And when you were Environment Secretary, you said, "All of the decisions you take should have been taken by local authorities."

Lord Patten:

Absolutely.

Lord Speaker:

And Downing Street itself with a Prime minister, given the range of issues he or she has to take, it would seem to be distracting from the strategic aims of the country.

Lord Patten:

Yeah, I think all that's true, and I particularly felt it when I was Environment Secretary, which was at that stage, the biggest domestic department. I had seven junior ministers. And I would go home in the evening and I'd divide my box between the things I could do in the evening, given that I probably had a drink or two at dinner, and the things I would have to get up early in the morning to do, and every night I would probably have four or five hours work. And so much of the time I was taking the sort of decisions on planning or housing, which should have been taken by local government and would've probably been better taken. It would of course have meant there were disparities in service around the country, but if people want that, they can vote for it.

So I feel very much that we're over-centralised, and that probably affects the quality of people who come into politics now, because if you had more experience of taking decisions and running things at local government, maybe it would give you greater enthusiasm for doing it nationally. I think the great difficulty we have with young people and politics is to convince them they can make a difference. And that that doesn't necessarily mean becoming a politician. There are all sorts of ways. I had to give a speech the other day, terrified me, to the school that one of my grandsons goes to. So I was thinking I mustn't let him down. He had to introduce me, poor guy, he's 16, and he was wrestling with whether or not he should say that I was his grandfather. And eventually he had the courage to do that, but he did it really well.

And what do you say to kids about politics? And I mentioned the book that's meant the most to me in the last few years by Stefan Zweig, who was a Jewish Austrian intellectual in the early years of the 20th century. He was well known across Europe as a writer, as a translator, novelist, playwright. And he writes this book, which begins with a description of European civilization in the beginning of the 20th century, which he thinks must be the most wonderful example of civilization that we know. And then he writes, he goes on to talk about the twenties and thirties and particularly as a Jew, and the way that's being gradually undermined and shredded by fascism and class conflict, and eventually really worried about how as a Jew with a Jewish wife he's going to manage the next few years. He leaves Austria and comes to Britain and then leaves Britain for America and then leaves America for Brazil.

And he writes this book called All Our Yesterdays, which begins with this lyrical description of European civilization. And then his fears about what is happening to it - can never be the same again. And the day after he sent this book with its depressing conclusions to his publishers, he and his wife committed suicide. And that was before the Wannsee Conference. The Nazi Conference in 1942 had worked out a plan for incinerating six million Jews. And what I've always thought is if he hadn't committed suicide and kept going until 1945, 1946, 1947, 1948, he would've actually seen the sort of things he believed in restored, and not particularly because of governments, but because of people, because that was the sort of society they wanted to live in.

So it's always convinced me that people can make a difference. And it means not just as Adlai Stevenson said, not just being prepared to fight for your values, but to live up to them. And I don't think those sort of challenges are made explicitly enough to people. So I mean, quite difficult sometimes nowadays to be optimistic. But I think if one remembers how we've changed things in the past, even though we were sort of in the foothills of a European war and with the threats of a war involving China and its acolytes, I think we can make things better. We can turn things around.

Lord Speaker:

And the thing is, we've got to counter the argument, which is prevalent now that nothing in the country works. And that's a huge thing for us. So the relationship between the government and parliament, the executive relationship between the civil service and the rest of the country, the relationship between politics and politicians themselves and the devolved areas, assemblies and parliaments, these are the big issues. And some would say, look, that prescription is fine, but it's really unrealistic. What are the first steps in that?

Lord Patten:

Well, the first steps in that are to give some credit and some honour to the people who are working the system as well as possible. And when I hear or read Conservative ministers describing the civil service-

Lord Speaker:

Agreed.

Lord Patten:

... as the blob, I mean, it's outrageous. I think that of course the quality of the people who worked for me as civil servants varied, but I had some wonderful people working for me and not doing it for large amounts of money either. People the other day were criticising the amount that Sue Gray was going to be paid - if she'd worked in Morgan Stanley or Goldman and Sachs, she wouldn't have crossed the road for that. So I think attacking the people who were working for you and trying to do their best is lamentable. And it always comes back on you like a boomerang.

Lord Speaker:

Yeah, I had a recent birthday, born in the same year as you, so you'll know what birthday it was, but I got a sheer delight and that the first birthday card I got was from my former private secretary in the Northern Ireland Office. So that relationship between politicians and ministers is really, really important. And I subscribe to what you say enormously on that.

Lord Patten:

I know, one of my favourite stories about the civil servants who worked for me when I was at the Department of the Environment as Secretary of State, and I was put there disastrously just at the same time as the poll tax was being introduced.

Lord Speaker:

I remember.

Lord Patten:

I was put there because I was thought to be, which was true, keen on the environment. That's when I was at overseas development, I'd made some speeches about environmental issues, and my predecessor of the department had been Nick Ridley, and he was a very clever man, but to say that he didn't have a warm shoulder would be understating it. And he was pretty brutal with people. And the Catholic bishop and the C of E Bishop of Liverpool went to see him one day, and they said-

Lord Speaker:

Is that Worlock and Sheppard?

Lord Patten:

Yes. It probably would've been. Yeah, Worlock certainly. Yes and Sheppard. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They go to see him, asked to see him and can they come into his office? And he's sitting at the end of this long office behind his desk and having a fag. And he said, "So what do you want?" They said, "Well, as you know, we're Bishops of Liverpool and we're worried about the state of Liverpool. And your predecessor made clear that one of his responsibilities was Liverpool, and we just wonder if you feel the same way and whether we can help you do something about Liverpool's challenges?" They said, "So do you regard yourself as responsible for Liverpool?" And he said, "Well," he said, "I suppose so. I'm responsible for most things." He said, "I'm responsible for sewage sludge and I'm responsible for preserving the natterjack toad. So I suppose Liverpool, yes, that fits in."

And coming away, the outraged decent Bishops, they're being shown out by a very, very nice man who subsequently became the head of communications when I was Secretary of State, who was in Ridley's private office. And as they're coming out as walking down the corridor from his private office, he seizes the attaché cases that both of them are holding and they say, "What you doing?" And he says, "I just want to carry them for you so that somebody's been well-mannered and decent to you today in this building."

Lord Speaker:

Yeah. In fact, Michael Heseltine was in the chair a number of months ago, and as you know, he was very active in Liverpool.

Lord Patten:

Yeah.

Lord Speaker:

And he said to me, he said, "Liverpool changed me." And he said, "The biggest compliment I've ever had was getting the freedom of the City of Liverpool alongside the Labour Mayor at the time, Joe Anderson."

Lord Patten:

Yeah, Hezza, we didn't agree entirely on-

Lord Speaker:

Hong Kong.

Lord Patten:

... China and Hong Kong, but he's been a friend and a very, very straight, I mean, if he loses an argument, he doesn't leak afterwards and all that. And it's not entirely the same as my approach to politics, it's more sort of slap bang wallop, but my goodness, he makes things happen. And you look across his political career and I think the way he could with big schemes, make them work and transform parts of the country or transform thinking in some respects, I think it was amazing. And he's formidable still. He's, I think 92. He's formidable in arguing the case of One Nation Conservatism or whatever. He'd have been a pretty remarkable Prime Minister, would've probably been great. Probably would've been great.

Lord Speaker:

Yeah. You've stated that the biggest question for us as a nation is immigration. And you recalled your time in hospital and intensive care, and I think the team that were caring for you about 16 in number, but only one was from the United Kingdom. So what advice do you have for people in this? For example, at the moment, some people are saying, look, the ECHR is an impediment to us. Let's abolish that. The Refugee Council, we pull up the drawbridge.

Lord Patten:

Well, if we think that there's a big issue now, it's going to be much bigger. When you look at the demographic pressures from Africa, the poverty and the numbers with populations increasing while the economically active population in Europe is going down. And the first thing is we can only actually deal with these issues if we work together, if we work with other countries. That's why the European Convention is so important. But it's also true that I think we've been too, perhaps intellectually squeamish, even I think the Labour Party about the essential importance of having a serious labour market policy.

If you know you need more dentists and nurses, you do something about the cost of their training as well as about their pay. And you shouldn't think it's terrible Leninist planning to do that. It just makes sense. So you don't fetch up having at the last moment to try to hoover people into the country whether or not they have the skills you want or not. You have an idea of what skills you're going to need in order to manage. I think we also have, this is my own view, to deal with the question of identity cards. I cannot understand why there is a sort of libertarian argument against identity cards, which are the only way you can really deal with illegal immigration.

Everybody, almost without question, has a wallet full of cards. And even if you are not middle-class with a wallet, there are other cards you need to have, a bus pass or whatever. And the fact that we are prepared to do all that without being prepared to have a card which demonstrates our citizenship is I think crazy. So I think we have to recognise how vital it is for us to have immigrants in some areas. I think we have to do more for planning for that, and we have to deal with illegal immigration by working with other countries to do it. And by I think ensuring that people can't come here and get a job unless they have an identity card.

Lord Speaker:

Hong Kong. Going to take you onto Hong Kong and the relationship with China. And we mentioned Michael Heseltine, and Michael had a difference with you at the time of Hong Kong saying, we've got to trade with China. And you've pointed out in terms of exports to China in the four years that you were there, they went up, that the previous four years that they'd been down. So in your eyes there, that made no difference with the relationship. There are some people that are saying China with its human rights violations, whatever, we should have nothing to do with it. Now I know that they're a minority with that, but you had your differences with the Chinese, and I get the feeling from looking at your material that you would still engage with China and Asia, and knocking down the notion that modernity is in the west, whereas a lot of the initiatives in modernity are developed in Asia now.

Lord Patten:

Well, the great American poet Robert Frost said memorably, good fences make good neighbours. And I think that's true, but it doesn't mean you shouldn't... If I can destroy the metaphor, it doesn't mean you shouldn't lean over the fence and talk to your neighbours. I mean, I think we have to at the moment, we have to recognise that what MI5, MI6, the Parliamentary Intelligence Committee have said is true, China is a threat. It's a threat to our national security, and it's a threat to some of our economic interests. It's not me saying that, it's our security services, but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't try to engage them. I think you engage them, first of all, without the sort of mushy feeling that you can't do business with them unless you accept their political narrative. It's absolute drivel.

Lord Speaker:

You've mentioned you got on with Chinese officials very well, particularly when you were in Europe as a commissioner.

Lord Patten:

Absolutely. But also if you look at the figures steadily over 25, 30 years, we've had a huge and growing trade deficit. And we say, well, we have to be especially nice to the Chinese otherwise they wouldn't buy as many of our goods. They buy what they want at the best price they can get. And by and large, if you are making something which competes with something they're making, they cut you out of the market. They abuse the terms of the GATT outrageously, and you ought to recognise that. You shouldn't think that, well, we're not winning this contract because this or that minister has raised human rights issues. I mean, it's drivel. Secondly, I think we have to recognise that it's also pretty good mush to say that we have to get on with China because their agreement to dealing with things like climate change or epidemic disease is crucial. So we must be nice to them in order to get their signature on the paper.

Truth to tell, they break their word all the time with international agreements as they did with Hong Kong. So it may be that you want to try still to suck them into international agreements, but you shouldn't think that if you're nice to them, they'll sign the paper and stick to the agreement. And thirdly, I think our approach should distinguish between the Chinese Communist Party and China and Chinese people. The people who worked with me in Hong Kong were Chinese, and they were Chinese patriots, but they didn't define their patriotism in how much they loved the Communist Party. So I just think we should talk to the Chinese, but we should do so in a pretty clear-sighted way. And when people say your language sounds like the Cold War, the only Cold War language has come from the Chinese.

When Xi Jinping became the dictator of China, he gave instructions to the party cadres and government cadres that they should engage in an intense struggle against, and he listed all the things that you and I would regard as important things in a free society. Freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, elections, and these are all the things they have to fight against. And one of the reasons why they've trashed their agreements on Hong Kong and started to turn Hong Kong into the offshoot of a totalitarian state. And one of the reasons why they've done that is because Hong Kong reflects all those things or reflected, and they regard that as an existential threat. So I think that the Chinese people are incredibly hardworking and clever. China is a great culture. The Chinese Communist Party, which is incapable of reforming itself, is a pretty brutal way of running a country.

Lord Speaker:

If I remember correctly, after you were Governor of Hong Kong, you were invited to Peking to give a lecture to the Communist Party about communism in the 21st century. I found that quite amusing. Particularly when they said about you that you think like a Buddha... Sorry, you speak like a Buddha, but think like a serpent. So you're an enemy in some sense, but you're still engaged in the communication.

Lord Patten:

It was quite funny, when I was a European commissioner and immediately after I'd been in Hong Kong, and when they'd been vilifying me as a sinner condemned for a thousand years, all that, and the then Chinese foreign minister came to see me in Brussels, and he came into my office and we were making sort of polite chat. And then he looked at the walls and there were photographs of all my daughters on the walls. And he said, "Your daughters?" He said. So I said, "Yes." He said, "How come such beautiful daughters have such an ugly father?" And the Chinese ambassador I thought was going to go through the floor and was saying, "The minister is making a joke. The minister is making a joke."

So just before he left, he very solemnly read out a piece of paper and he said, "You should know that the Chinese leaders have considered your situation and they've decided that you're a cause of concord not discord." After the meeting, the Chinese ambassador phoned up my chief of staff, my chef de cabinet, to say, "Did you get that down? Did you take that down correctly?" But they quite respect you if you say what you think, and I'm not downright rude, but I think it's awful to think we can only do business with China if we accept that they have a sort of mandate of heaven.

Their view of international world order is one which is in their own interest. And we've got to actually deal with China and Russia and the so-called CRINKlies. China, Russia Iran, North Korea. We've got to find a way of dealing with them, which doesn't permanently divide the world and one way in which we have to do that is by being as good as our word when we talk about international order, when we talk about an international rule of law. We should actually show that we mean that, and I don't think that's happening at the moment.

Lord Speaker:

Could I take you on to Northern Ireland? And you mentioned that when Reggie Maudling was a home secretary in the 1970s, he went across for his first visit to Northern Ireland, and when he got on the plane, he asked for a stiff drink and said, "What a bloody awful place this is." And I quote. Now, since then, with yourself and others there, there's been an empathetic engagement. So did the Tory party change in its attitude and did your Catholicism assist you in your duties as a minister and then looking at the police force?

Lord Patten:

I think it probably did. It led to me being called by the Paisleyites 'minister of treachery.' But yeah, I think it made me more sympathetic to what was becoming the majority community, which was completely shut out of the governance or loyalty apparatus of Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland was a disastrous series of errors by the British political establishment. We tried to ignore that it existed. And you remember when you and I were younger that here and elsewhere, there were endless criticisms of the Americans for gerrymandering boundaries in the south, in the southern states, and to ignoring the race issue. We were doing that in Northern Ireland. While we were scolding them, what was happening to the constituency boundaries and so on in Northern Ireland?

And we looked the other way while half the community was being shut out of decent housing and jobs and so on, quite deliberately. And I think we started with after the beginning of the so-called Troubles, we began to address that. And I think there were some very good ministers sent over to Northern Ireland like Willie Whiteclaw, like Leathes Prior.

Lord Speaker:

Richard Needham, a friend of yours.

Lord Patten:

Richard Needham was a friend of mine. Did a fantastic job in Belfast and in Derry/Londonderry.

Lord Speaker:

Yeah, that was your genius Derry/Londonderry, City of Derry.

Lord Patten:

Yes, exactly. Exactly. I was scolded in a Times leader for that, for allowing the city council when it became SDLP to do what the law had said it could do, which was to just determine what its name was. But it seemed to me that the fundamental point about the Good Friday Agreement, which was hugely wise and a great tribute to all the politicians involved, including Bertie Ahern in the Republic, was a recognition that to have a peaceful future, you could allow the Catholic Republican community not to feel obliged to honour what appeared to be the marks of a Protestant unionist state. And in return, they would give an assurance that they wouldn't try to change the state violently, but only through the ballot box. And that was the deal, I think.

Lord Speaker:

And dual identity. Republic of Ireland citizenship and UK citizenship.

Lord Patten:

So you could be a citizen of Northern Ireland and want to have an Irish passport. And that was, for me, a fundamental point when I was asked to look at the question of policing and the security services in Northern Ireland. And to create a police service which the whole community could trust, to take policemen out of the firing line, and to encourage more Catholics to join the police service. And we were really successful with that. It wasn't-

Lord Speaker:

It was universally acclaimed the work you did there. I was going to say, because of the empathetic approach that you had and you subjected yourself to go around the whole country, talking to little four-hour meetings. And I was touched by one of your comments because your experience was similar to mine because I was on duty the weekend of the Omagh bomb, but you describe it as an old woman, and I quote, "Standing up the back and saying, Mr. Patten, everything you said is okay." But then pointing the finger at the person in the next seat and saying, "That young man killed my son."

Lord Patten:

Yeah. No, I think that a little of the same thing is true in Israel today, that people who don't know Northern Ireland don't realise the intimacy of the violence. It's a small country. And you're standing in the queue in Morrisons, and you look across to the next queue and you can see somebody whose uncle killed your aunt or whose son killed your dad, and that happens all the time. And I think recognising that and recognising that identity politics can't be allowed to destroy the ordinary civility of life.

The first decision I had to take when I was a Northern Ireland minister, I was presented with a paper which said, and a very well-finished Parker-Morris standards and all that, new housing estate had been completed. And they were trying to move Catholics and Protestants in, and they wouldn't move them in. They wouldn't go in unless there was a wall down the middle between Catholics and Protestants. Not only that, but they'd agreed they would put a wall, but now people were insisting that it should be higher. And I said, "You're actually asking for a higher wall than the Berlin Wall." And they said, "Well, that may be true, but unless you do it, nobody will move in." And very reluctantly, it was all against my liberal values, but I agreed to it.

Then I went to a hospital and I said, rather nervously to the charge nurse, I said, "Have you had any casualties in recently as a result of the Troubles?" And she said, "Yes, actually, we had some Catholic knee-cappings in last week." And I said, I heard my officials sucking through their teeth, I said, "But you can't possibly tell the difference between a Catholic and a Protestant knee-capping." And she said, "Of course we can." She said, "The Catholics use a shotgun and the Protestants use a Black and Decker drill." And I felt my stomach disappearing. But it was true, and it was quite, I mean, one of the most important experiences of my life, I think being brought face to face with the horrors of ordinary life for a lot of people in Northern Ireland. And I think that one thing that Richard Needham did and others, and I tried to do the same, was to treat these issues as generously as possible, but be determined never to actually fudge the issue of whether it was okay to deny the identity of other people.

Lord Speaker:

Can I take you on to your faith, because you're very clear on your faith and you say that, "My Catholicism is a fundamental part of who I am." And I think you're aware of, as you said, "Your voluminous evidence of the imminence of mortality." So that's bound up obviously with your Catholicism. But your view of the church, and particularly Pope John XXIII and latterly Pope Francis. I listened quite a number of years ago to your interview with Matthew Parris on Great Lives, and you mentioned John XXIII, a roly-poly Cardinal, exiled to Bulgaria, his boss in the Vatican saying, "This guy has learned nothing. And then he goes on to establish Vatican II without telling the Cardinals." Pretty smart politician.

Lord Patten:

Yes, he was. And he was like I think the present Pope, he didn't regard the Catholic Church as being a police station and telling people what to do and ticking them off on -

Lord Speaker:

Which it was in the early days.

Lord Patten:

Yeah, yeah, yeah it was. And I mean, I think it was this Pope who described the Catholic Church as being, or should be, run like a field station of a field hospital. Helping people deal with the complexities and difficulties and paradoxes of being human to get through these difficulties. And John XXIII did it in a wonderfully funny, outward-looking way. Talk about charismatic. I mean, he was terrific. I was very struck as well by, I mean, Pope Benedict had a reputation for being a very firm ideological and theologian.

Lord Speaker:

And you organised his visit.

Lord Patten:

And I had to organise his visit, which was itself quite funny because the then Prime Minister's chief of staff phoned me up one day and said that the Queen had been very concerned at her first audience with the Prime Minister David Cameron, about the fact that the arrangements for a papal visit, which had been much talked to, hadn't really been made, and they'd have to do something about it. And the chief of staff said to me, Edward Whelan said to me, "The Prime Minister wonders whether you'd be prepared to take it on?" And I said, "You must be joking. I could see all the complexities."

And two days later he phoned me back and said, "I think we've got a problem. The Prime Minister told the Queen, you're going to do it." But I then I found it a hugely engaging, and it was interesting to see attitudes to Pope Benedict change during the course of his visit. I mean, he made a wonderful speech here. And he was of course pretty tough theologically, but he'd been driven to the right after the Vatican Council because he was a teacher at a university and he was horrified by the 1968 student-

Lord Speaker:

He was a liberal at Vatican II, wasn't he?

Lord Patten:

Yeah, he was, he really was. But I think for the Catholic Church to believe it's there to be generous and not endlessly judgmental is terribly important. I'm delighted that one of my favourite priests, who's been a very important part of my life in some ways has just been made a Cardinal, Timothy Radcliffe at Oxford.

Lord Speaker:

Dominican.

Lord Patten:

Dominican, yeah. Who was head of the Order of Preachers, who's a really wonderful man. He's the sort of reason why if you didn't think you needed to believe in God and you met Timothy Radcliffe, you'd start to think twice about it because he's such a wonderfully open-minded decent man. So yeah, it's been an important part of my life. I agreed to do a job in the Vatican to try to reorganise the communications department, and we actually produced rather a good report, and then it was given to a group of, dare I say, Italian clerics and que sera, sera. But it was actually a wonderful political education working in the Vatican. I shouldn't tell this story, but I used to stay, at least initially in the Santa Marta where the present Pope lives.

Lord Speaker:

It's a little hostel, isn't it?

Lord Patten:

It's a hostel. Yeah. I stayed there a couple of times and then I thought it was too much like a sanatorium for me. But I used to hold my meetings there and I was there on one occasion in the canteen, and at the other end of the canteen there was a whole phalanx of Cardinals and Archbishops with this scarlet and purple. And I said to the very, very nice priest who was my secretary there, "What on earth are they all doing?" And he said, "Waiting with the Pope to die."

Lord Speaker:

Very good.

Lord Patten:

But it's an extraordinary bureaucracy because when it comes on the whole, with the exception of China, to knowing what's happening in the world, they're incredibly good. You want to know what's happening in Burundi or Nicaragua or whatever. The Vatican Foreign Office will know more than anybody else.

Lord Speaker:

You quote the Analects of Confucius where the master is asked, what are the three most important issues? Enough food, weapons, and the confidence of the people. Now what's the first he would discard? He said weapons, obviously. What's the second he would discard? Food. Leaving confidence. And he said that, "Because if confidence in rulers is taken away, is sapped, then nothing will stand as a result of that." Now, given all the problems that there are today and the geopolitical issues we face and the huge experience of that area, does that get any resonance?

Lord Patten:

I think it's true, but it's also affected by something else Confucius says about the best and worst things a prince can do. And he says in effect, it's put much better than this. "Well, the best thing is to have good advisors. The worst thing is to have advisors who just tell you what they think you want to hear." And I think the people who do that are least likely to understand the other bit of Confucian thinking.

They've got lots of quotations of the Analects in some of my books. I will say the poet I quote most is Cavafy, who has said the most wonderful things about public life. So between them, I think they've given me a lot of inspiration. And when I stood down as Chancellor of Oxford, I remembered a wonderful... I was reminded by a young English Don, she's actually Greek, of a poem by Cavafy called King Dimitrios. Who when he steps down from the throne, takes off his robes and his purple buskins and puts on his street clothes like an actor and goes off into normal life. And I think it's hugely true, and I don't think you can go on pretending that you're grand and important. I think that a certain amount of humility and normality are good for you. I think in some jobs in politics, you can get terribly spoiled.

Lord Speaker:

Yeah, absolutely. So quite a humble comment to near end with the result. We haven't mentioned the House of Lords, and you said it's got a hazy view of what its future should be. So do we want the part that, we've enjoyed the conversation today or any comment you want to make?

Lord Patten:

Well, what has always worried me is that changing, reforming the House of Lords can't be done unless the House of Commons-

Lord Speaker:

Agrees.

Lord Patten:

... agrees. And the House of Commons is always likely to be very reluctant to make the House of Lords more credible. And I'm not quite sure how those things balance out. I think there are some things which the present government can and will do, which would still leave an identifiable House of Lords, but probably not enough to give it the political force which it needs to really take on the government sometimes. I think what's most disappointed me was when I used to take more of a part in the House of Lords during the Brexit debates, and we'd win argument after argument, and then things would just simply be put back without much discussion when they went back to the House of Commons. The thing which I've found most impressive are the contributions made by Crossbenchers, by some of the lawyers and the Crossbenchers and so on. Really good speeches, really well done. Much better debates than you get in the House of Commons.

Lord Speaker:

Yeah.

Lord Patten:

Although looking back, I heard some great speeches at the House of Commons. I think Michael Foote's speech on the Saturday of the Falkland Islands War was an astonishing speech.

Lord Speaker:

And Ron Brown lifting the mace. I don't know if you were there at the time, but there was a debate on it and we thought, well, this is really going to be boring. But Foote and others participated and it was a fantastic debate about the Constitution and the powers limits of the House of Commons, whatever.

Lord Patten:

Yeah. But I think it's going back to what I said earlier, I think it's very important that people in the House of Commons and the House of Lords should recognise the importance of argument in order to get an answer-

Lord Speaker:

But you say there's a difference between argument and quarrelling

Lord Patten:

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And I think it's important to remember that. Very often you can have hugely robust arguments with people who are your best friends-

Lord Speaker:

Absolutely.

Lord Patten:

.. and avoid it being a quarrel.

Lord Speaker:

You've just given up after 21 years as Chancellor of Oxford University. What did you learn and what's the place of universities in the world?

Lord Patten:

Well, I'm the first Chancellor to resign while alive as it were.

Lord Speaker:

Well your boots are off.

Lord Patten:

Since 1715, otherwise they've always died in office. As I said to them, I wanted to leave with a farewell dinner rather than a memorial service. I think what I learned was two things. First of all, how universities, and it was true in my case, can transform lives. And I was extremely lucky to begin my life at Oxford and to end it with the responsibilities I had in Oxford. Secondly, I always shudder when people talk about a good university simply being about being able to make more money as a result of a degree.

Higher education, education is about much more than that. It's about developing your personality, your interests, your moral sense. And the other thing which I found, which I think is very important, is to recognise our responsibilities to train, as well as provide an academic education. Now, that means that you have to recognise that even if you esteem them all in the same way. Not all higher education is the same. Not every institution can do the sort of research which Imperial College or Oxford or Cambridge can do. But a university which is doing apprenticeship courses alongside degrees or as part of degrees, a higher education establishment, which is helping people to become plumbers or electricians or whatever, is just as important as universities. Are all part of making us more successful and a more congenial society.

Lord Speaker:

Last point, Michael Caine in the Italian job, his last line. "Hang on a minute, guys. I've got a great idea." What's your great idea to finish?

Lord Patten:

It is a wonderful line, and I think I used it in relation to people's arguments that we should get out of the European Union. I think mine is a great idea. I think it's what I said earlier though, which doesn't sound very profound, is that people can make a difference. And it's very important to give as many people as possible the chance of making a difference. Which means, for example, looking very hard at our education system, and the points that Theresa May made about it are profoundly true.

So the other thing I think is to recognise that whether we're Labour or Conservative, ultimately we want the government to work. We may disagree with it on the fringes. What you don't want, if you are a Conservative today to hope that Sir Keir Starmer and his colleagues fail, you can't possibly think that. You must want them to succeed, and you must recognise, not at least by reading the incomparable Paul Johnson, what a difficult job they've got. Wow.

Lord Speaker:

Yeah. My late father said to me, "Just keep in mind," he said, "That the small things in life are really the big things."

Lord Patten:

That's true.

Lord Speaker:

So you have articulated that in other ways in your interview this morning, our discussion. It's been a real pleasure for me to have you along. So Chris, Lord Patten, I'm indebted to you. Thanks very much.

Lord Patten:

Thank you very much. Great to talk to you. And to notice that your bands are much better than mine ever were when I was Chancellor of Oxford.