But Patten’s masters in London were not interested in the politics of freedom. What was denied by Major in Britain could not be offered by Patten in Hong Kong.Tim Heald’s artlessly written account of his visits to Hong Kong as a guest of his old Balliol friend, Chris Patten, is a much better book than its rambling start suggests. In explaining what makes Patten tick, the more official biographies will not do a better job. Heald has written not just an elegy in the last graveyard of British colonialism, but an anthem of farewell to his and Patten’s England – a place of minor public schools, Oxbridge, Denis Compton and mess dinners.Patten, observes Heald, never bothered to get to grips with the Chinese.
Instead, the last Governor spent his spare hours in Hong Kong learning French It is not Britain that says goodbye to Hong Kong on 30 June It is China and Asia that say adieu to England. Britain’s future lies in making a success of Europe, not quick bucks in Asia.Patten understands this. Can he persuade his party, or has the Tory generation that he, Heald and John Major represent outlived its purpose, at home and abroad?. As his title shows, Graham Harvey is not afraid to use a sensational phrase. Within his first few paragraphs he refers to the “living garment” of the countryside, a metaphor coined by W H Hudson to describe the flowers covering chalk grassland, and declares that it is turning into a shroud. This impassioned book demonstrates that such language, far from being histrionic, simply meets the case.
Our countryside is indeed being killed, and by the very people who are charged with its care. What makes Harvey’s book valuable is the intensity of his feeling. He grieves the wanton extinction of our “national treasure” – the mixed-farm structure of the prewar years – and fervently resents the alliance of politicians, civil servants and landowners who have grown rich on its bones.
Harvey is an angry man, and his anger allows him persuasively to restate a case that has become wearisome in its familiarity. It seems scarcely credible that we have now been deprived of 97 per cent of our meadowland. And who can believe that after all the pleas on their behalf, hedgerows are still being lost or, rather, plundered at the rate of 10,000 miles per year? The populations of our so-called common songbirds are falling at a desperate rate.
The tree sparrow’s numbers have dropped by 89 per cent in the past 25 years, and the skylark’s by 58 per cent. As we in Suffolk can testify, Harvey does not exaggerate when he speaks of “silent fields”.His chief concern is to show how the countryside is being killed by the subsidy system, which currently costs you and me pounds 10bn a year. Not only are we helping to enrich the already rich, we are paying twice – once with our taxes, and again by surrendering our countryside to poison or plough. And we pay again when we buy food that is nutritionally void and contaminated with the chemicals that fuel the agribusiness machine.If I have a criticism of Harvey’s splendid tirade, it is that he does not analyse in sufficient detail the formidable lobby that keeps the gravy pouring onto the plates of the landowning class. Land and political power turn out to be branches of the same indestructible plant.Harvey points out that landowners, not country inhabitants, dictate the shape of the landscape. Whitehall and the agricultural industry work together to reshape the countryside, a symbiosis of public service and private capital that leaves the suckered public to pay the bill. He says that country people, a third of the population, “live on the periphery like temporary expatriates in some foreign land”.
