Patten’s patter
From Jonathan Mirsky
Sir: In his otherwise excellent article on the folly of selling arms to China (‘Selling out to China’, 26 February), Andrew Gilligan falls into a familiar trap: failing to recognise when Chris Patten is joking or being mordant. He writes: ‘There was a need, he [Mr Patten] said, to satisfy China’s “amour-propre”. Beijing, he said, was “humiliated” by being bracketed with the likes of Sudan and Burma.’ I saw this again and again in Hong Kong, where I covered Mr Patten’s entire reign as governor. He would make a little joke such as suggesting he knew nothing about China. The next day some of the local papers would shriek, ‘Patten admits ignorance of China’. Beijing knew this not to be true. That’s why the government there called Mr Patten, among other things, ‘a whore for 10,000 years’.
Jonathan Mirsky London W11
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