Political Commentary: What might have been in Chelsea

Fatty Pang is, by all accounts, going down quite a storm in Hong Kong. The irreverent nickname which Chris Patten enjoys among the colony's Chinese population suggests they quite like a Governor who rejects the ostrich feathers and stuffiness affected by some of the career diplomats who preceded him. The job is fraught with hazard. But the signs are that he has made an unexpectedly good start. Now that the recess has begun in earnest, it is worth reflecting whether Hong Kong's gain has turned out to be Westminster's loss.

However appealing, the Hong Kong governorship was hardly an offer Mr Patten could not refuse. A by-election could have been created for him. Nicholas Scott would apparently have given up his Chelsea seat (Conservative majority 12,789) for the sake of his old friend. Mr Scott could, after all, have gone to the Lords and retained his middle-ranking job as minister in the Department of Social Security. This was precisely the course urged on Mr Patten by Tristan Garel-Jones and Patrick Rock, his loyal and experienced special adviser.

By contrast, Douglas Hurd counselled against; this was partly, no doubt, because of the fastidiousness Mr Hurd had shown when he himself very nearly refused to stand for the leadership of the Tory Party in 1990, partly because he wanted Mr Patten to go to Hong Kong. Lord Whitelaw, the party's elder statesman, was also consulted. He too advised against a by-election, remembering that when he was elevated to the Lords, the Government had come uncomfortably close to losing the Penrith by-election. Sir Barney Hayhoe, another old friend, advised Mr Patten to go to the Lords, something which the demotic tendency in Mr Patten rather rebelled against.

What is clear is that Mr Major bent over backwards to keep Mr Patten in the Government. This gives the lie to the original criticism - now dissipated - in Hong Kong that the governorship had been awarded as a consolation prize to a failed politician.

Mr Patten could certainly have stayed had he wanted to. Indeed, Mr Major's efforts to establish Mr Patten's desires, and then fulfil them, were of such an intensity that Mr Patten went round London in the period immediately after the election describing the Prime Minister, in private conversation as well as in a Daily Telegraph article, as 'good'. In the mouths of many politicians the term is meaningless, or even faintly dismissive; but not in that of Mr Patten, a practising Roman Catholic who believes in original sin.

One point about Mr Major's appointment of Mr Patten as party chairman was that it ensured that if the Tories lost, Mr Patten would be no threat to the leadership. He would take much of the blame for the defeat. But Mr Major certainly did not bargain on the prospect that Mr Patten would lose his seat.

There are politicians who, inexplicably, want to be chairman, as did Lord Young. The present incumbent, Sir Norman Fowler, is another. He is the ideal candidate for the job - shrewd, competent, utterly loyal to Mr Major. Usually, the chairmen appointed immediately after elections are removed in mid-term because they do not have the skills to front an election campaign. Sir Norman is the first for many years who could last a whole parliament. Mr Patten certainly was not one of these; he was disappointed to be given the job, and he no doubt remembered that no party chairman since Neville Chamberlain had gone to No 10.

It would be wide of the mark, however, to assume that Mr Major was motivated, even subliminally, by guilt in trying to find a way of making Mr Patten stay. Defeat for Mr Patten in Bath was not in the script. For Mr Patten personally, the campaign was certainly something of a nightmare. Each afternoon he arrived in Bath to find constituency workers in a state of depressive anxiety; each evening he returned to London to find many of his Central Office staff every bit as jittery. Mr Patten had the help of John Wakeham, and, more in theory than in practice, Richard Ryder.

But it was Mr Patten who remained firmly in the front line, carrying the can for criticisms of the campaign - criticisms which will almost certainly resurface in the autumn party conference agenda - while desperately trying to hold on to his seat. Nevertheless, it is much more likely that Mr Major wanted to keep Mr Patten because of the value of having him in the Cabinet.

It is easy to see why. First, in the eyes of many, Mr Patten was the 'most able Tory strategist and thinker of his generation'. The words are those of Robert Shepherd, who, as Iain Macleod's biographer, knows about such things. Mr Patten's role as philosopher prince may be exaggerated.

But to the extent that elections are battles of ideas - rather than, as many politicians believe, simply a choice between rival bids to get the economy right - Mr Patten's role, fighting on the same turf as, say, Tony Blair, would have been crucial in 1996-97. He might have had a short-term role too; on central policy towards ERM and interest rates, Mr Patten, as a pro- European, would have been unshakeably orthodox.

But with a natural dislike of being 'boxed in', Mr Patten might well have been a fertile source of ideas for alleviating the worst effects of the recession if recovery still looks a far-off prospect by the autumn.

Second, Mr Patten was no threat, and not only because Mr Major now has his mandate. Indeed Mr Patten had told colleagues that he had given up any thought of running for the leadership, even in the kind of unforeseen emergency that no leading politician ever entirely banishes from his hopes and expectations. He came to believe, quite simply, that his candidacy would be too divisive. As an ex-wet, he certainly changed his views on economic policy in the mid-1980s, once famously recanting to Mrs Thatcher in the words: 'We were wrong and you were right.' But he had not, as his fellow Tory left-winger Kenneth Clarke has done with such marked success, built up a constituency on the Tory right. Indeed after Mrs Thatcher's deposition he became the leading target for the Thatcherites.

But that might have been a crucial part of Mr Patten's value to Mr Major. It is tempting to think that he might have developed a role akin to that played by Lord Whitelaw in relation to Mrs Thatcher. But the parallel is not quite right. Lord Whitelaw's real value to her was not, as often supposed, that he proffered welcome advice at crucial moments; it was more that he calmed her potential critics in the Tory mainstream. 'Willie's relaxed, so it must be OK,' the shire Tories reassured each other over their gin and tonics. Mr Patten, rather, would have been a lightning conductor.

Whether, most likely, at Defence, or possibly Education, or just conceivably, had he won Bath, at the Treasury, he would now be deflecting some of the right-wing criticism which has in his absence been directed first at Mr Hurd then at Norman Lamont since the election.

It would be silly to exaggerate all this. First, no politician is indispensable. Second, Mr Major's decisive victory in April, and the mandate it gives him, strengthens his position immeasurably more than the presence of any single Cabinet friend and ally, however valuable, could ever have done.

Perhaps the greatest strength of Mr Patten as a politician was that he could contemplate life outside Westminster. The paradox is that we would not have known that for sure if he had not gone to Hong Kong.