I interviewed Chris Patten when he was still Governor of Hong Kong and asked him, "what have you learned from the Chinese?" He replied: "Oh, I think that's simple. If somebody tries to bully you and you roll over, they do it again."
He added by way of explanation: "We all become so obsessed with the differences between cultures that we don't notice the similarities, and I think that there is absolutely no reason at all why we should treat China in a completely different way from how we treat anybody else."
He said he had kept in touch with progress on Northern Ireland, where he had been a Minister in the 1980s, and when I asked if he thought the situation was closer to resolution, he replied, "God, I hope so."
He recalled how Norman Dugdale, one of his personal secretaries in Northern Ireland, had quoted from Louis MacNeice's episcopal father something which he had never forgotten. It was along the lines of "one should understand the past the better to forget it", he said.
Students of the career of the former Conservative Party chairman might find clues in these words as to how Mr Patten will approach the difficult task in Northern Ireland of chairing the commission on policing. He certainly did not "roll over" for the Chinese, though some of his critics say it may not have been such a good idea to provoke them as he did, for the Chinese put a lot of store in face.
Chris Patten was appointed the 28th and last governor of Hong Kong in 1992 after winning the general election for the Conservative Party but losing his own seat in Bath. He ruled the territory for five years from the colonial-style Government House, where he hung a crucifix on the wall behind his desk as a mark of his devout Roman Catholicism. In this regard he was at home in Hong Kong, where many leading government officials and local political leaders like Martin Lee, head of the majority Democratic Party, were regular Mass-goers.
He soon developed ideas for extending the limited franchise in the local legislative assembly and enhancing civil liberties by removing old and unused repressive legislation, neither of which had been a serious British priority in the decades before the 1984 joint declaration under which Britain and China set the date for returning the colony to the mainland.
"When I came to Hong Kong in July 1992 I went around the political groups trying to find, within the constraints of the joint declaration and the basic law, an acceptable way of running our elections. The democrats by and large wanted me to increase the number of directly-elected seats but I never thought that was possible at this stage of the transition.
"What I tried to find was everybody's second best, which was by and large what we came off with. I found myself criticised by the democrats for not having gone far enough and the pro-Peking United Front brigade as having gone too far." He would not create a less democratic assembly because this would have been "doing the dirty work for some Chinese officials". Beijing was furious. It denounced Mr Patten as a mongrel dog and promised to dismiss any legislature elected under the new rules, which it duly did the day after Mr Patten sailed away with Prince Charles on HMS Britannia.
However, during his time in Hong Kong, the Governor was a popular figure with the six million Chinese inhabitants. He played the role of city mayor rather than governor, riding the underground trains (once or twice) and pressing the flesh at every opportunity.
Despite misgivings about the wisdom of antagonising their incoming masters, Hong Kong people generally liked him and said so in opinion polls. Those who truly detested him were the old Foreign Office hands, who said his style of dealing with the Chinese came from a House of Commons culture unsuited to the Far East, and argued that he could have achieved more by attempting less.
"We might have had a quiet time with China" if that had been that case, Mr Patten conceded, "but we'd have had a hell of a noisy time here. I certainly don't think it would have given us four years of peace and stability." He argued that the Chinese 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy students in Beijing's Tiananmen Square had changed things in Hong Kong just before he arrived and that the people were more insistent on new democratic structures.
Mr Patten went to considerable lengths before leaving last year to defend British imperialism as an instrument which created a caring, free, capitalist society and which could be taken as a model for all Asia.
In a valedictory address to the legislature, he listed several bench-marks by which the world would judge the new rulers in Hong Kong. Among them were a number which will resonate in his new job in Belfast, such as: "Are new constraints imposed on freedom of assembly?" and "Is anybody being prosecuted or harassed for the peaceful expression of political, social or religious views?"
The record he brings to his new job is one of a politician who tried to put in place protections for people's civil liberties, and who saw himself as a reformer who could stand up to a bully.
"I think it's worth remembering that I had a reputation in politics for being irredeemably wet and excessively consensual and I haven't changed at all," he told me before the handover. But, he insisted, "I wouldn't have been able to govern Hong Kong so well if I had simply rolled over."