In the small hours of the morning of April 9, 1992, newly elected British Prime Minister John Major fought his way through the jubilant crowds to the staircase of the Conservative Party's London headquarters to address party workers. Despite a steady run of opinion polls against them and a campaign notorious for its nastiness, the Tories had won. Crammed beside Major in the melee on the staircase was the man who had run that successful campaign. But party chairman Chris Patten looked as though he had just swallowed a ferret. He had expended so much energy winning Major's race that he lost his own, in a Bath constituency. After 13 years in parliament, three of them as a cabinet minister, Patten was in need of a job.

There are a number of options in British politics for an erstwhile cabinet member who is tossed out by his local electorate. He can take a seat in the House of Lords, though that geriatric parking lot seems tame after the House of Commons and opens the hastily ennobled politician to accusations of anti-democratic airs. He can parachute himself into another constituency, though voters don't always play along, and the double humiliation of losing a safe seat that way can be a fatal blow to a political career. Or he can drift off to a lucrative job in the City and wait for better times. None of these appealed to Chris Patten, but the proposition that John Major put to him the next morning certainly did.

The final colonial governorship of Hong Kong was not only a glamorous job, but it also guaranteed a place in history that few cabinet members could hope to earn. Patten accepted at once. There was little in his curriculum vitae suggesting either that he was qualified for the job (beyond his friendship with Major) or that he would take to it the way he did. His own account of his life to that moment confirms that he drifted late into politics much in the way that many careers are determined: something happens, you go along with it, something else happens, you go along with that and before you know it you are an estate agent or a journalist or, in his case, a cabinet minister. This is not to decry Patten's abilities, but to make the point that he was not, even as a member of the Thatcher Government, a "conviction politician." This was fortunate for him, as it happens, because when he acquired convictions later, they were not ones that would have recommended him to Margaret Thatcher.

Not until he went to Hong Kong, Patten disarmingly confesses, did he have to think hard about what he believed in and why. The result of this reflection forms much of the material in East and West (Times Books; 320 pages), Patten's eagerly awaited account of the five years he spent managing the transition to Chinese sovereignty of Britain's last major overseas colony. From the evidence, there seems to be no overwhelming reason why he shouldn't have spared a little time to think before. His beliefs can be summed up quite briefly: free trade is the foundation of liberty, and the United States is the global guarantor of freedom; economies thrive with honest representative political systems and come to grief without them; individual rights are a universal entitlement, and "Asian values" have been a cloak for tyranny. And, er, that's it, folks. An undoubtedly worthy creed, if not very original.

So why should we bother to get through the more than 300 pages it takes to elaborate these beliefs? Firstly, because this is, after all, the book that Rupert Murdoch ordered his minions at HarperCollins to ditch in order to keep his nose clean in Beijing. Secondly, because Patten, as the last Governor, was embroiled in so many rows that we are keen to see if he takes revenge.

He does, up to a point. Villains there are a-plenty in these pages, enemies not just of Patten but, as he would see it, of liberty. What are missing, except in the case of the Beijing leadership, are the names. It's a bit like reading a roman a clef--the cognoscenti will have no difficulty in guessing the faces behind the references, and the victims will be sputtering apoplectically into their port, but the general reader may miss out on a frisson or two. I recommend keeping handy a copy of Jonathan Dimbleby's excellent 1997 book, The Last Governor. A quick shuffle through the index supplies the names of Patten's targets.

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