Current Affairs: Lord Patten writes so vigorously, and with such style, that one constantly regrets his absence from political leadership. "The best leader the Conservative Party never had" - the current contest in Britain reminds us of the calamitous state of opposition politics across the water, while Chris Patten writes good books and raises funds for the two universities of which he is chancellor. Why on Earth didn't his former party get him back?
Perhaps because he would have been streets ahead of any of them.
This is not the book of a diplomat, and we are all the beneficiaries of Patten's freedom to speak as he finds. Funny and razor-sharp analysis of everything from "little Englanders" to the much vaunted "Special Relationship" between the UK and the US - under Thatcher and Reagan "the relationship was sprinkled with stardust and put to music". His view is that there is no special relationship, and that the US always treated Britain as a useful ally when needed, but no more. But "the truth, hot and strong, is rarely well received in diplomacy" - and Britain hated Dean Acheson's shower of cold water in December 1962, when he noted that "Great Britain has lost an empire and not yet found a role . . . the Commonwealth was a precarious and fragile entity . . . the special relationship was just about played out . . ."
Patten finds with devastating accuracy the inherent contradictions in so much of policy-makers' public actions. When he took part in US conferences on security policy in Northern Ireland, as chair of the Patten Commission, he found himself in company with Peter Sutherland and Mary Robinson - "we were three moderates from either shore of the Irish sea" - while Northern Ireland nationalists and unionists told American audiences how different they were from each other, "while with every passing row they appeared more and more similar". Patten reflects bitterly on the American latitude in letting the IRA raise money "pretty openly" in the US to fund terrorism - and also on the grilling he got in the US by people intent on seeing that the PSNI would have proper transparency and human rights protection for the people of Northern Ireland: "This has cast an interesting light on Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and other related matters . . ."
What he describes as "the long-running psychodrama" of Britain's relationship with the continent of Europe is the subject of one of his more hilarious chapters. When Blair appointed him as an EU Commissioner, the Daily Telegraph said "he was turning his back on the British way of life". Even to ask the question "well, what exactly is the British way of life?" risks provoking a row likely to break through the bounds of public decorum, ". . . it touches a raw nerve of xenophobia; we hear the distant wail of air raid sirens in the night and catch a whiff of the garlic breath of duplicity and cowardice . . ."
When Britain stood alone in 1940 and 1941, King George VI told his mother how much happier he was "now that we have no allies to be polite to and pamper". Patten goes on to puncture the myth of Britain's economic and social superiority to the rest of the EU. (I have had to do a bit of puncturing myself when occasionally working with British people in eastern Europe, correcting their description of "poor" Ireland and "dysfunctional" everywhere else in Europe.) Patten deplores Blair's role in throwing Britain's lot in with the US and not with our European neighbours, leaving his country "bruised and bleeding, in what Winston Churchill once called the thankless deserts of Mesopotamia".
Discussing Thatcher's famous Bruges speech in September 1988, when she insisted that every country getting freedom from Russia should remain firmly independent and beware of conceding any sovereignty, Patten reminds us that the first thing the newly freed nations did when they escaped from Soviet domination was to apply to join the EU as fast as they could. On the Europe question he concludes that Britons have long felt that even if God was not actually a British passport holder, he had a particular affinity for the people of these isles.
The final chapter of this not-so-diplomatic "tour de table" casts a sober eye over the current state of the world. The US he admired so much in the past, which yielded so much "soft" power, especially in the greatest research universities, has, he believes, turned its back on its history. Its treatment of countries across the world is entirely predicated on its "war on terror" and often serves to bolster tyrants and corruption. Therefore, Europe has a critically important job to do to persuade both the US and Asia (China and India) to accept "a development of the multi-lateral system and the rule of law" which will enable the older re-emerging powers to live peacefully and prosperously side by side with the more recently established powers of the West. A tall order indeed.
Gemma Hussey is director of the European Women's Foundation, a former minister for education, and author of At the Cutting Edge: Cabinet Diaries 1982-87 and Ireland Today: Anatomy of a Changing State
Not Quite the Diplomat - Home Truths About World Affairs By Chris Patten Penguin Allen Lane, 324pp. £20