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Jonathan Braude

RUMOUR of the month: Chris Patten has told Executive Councillors (who will not confirm this because their meetings are absolutely secret) that he's got no more friends in Hong Kong.

  So when he goes off on his holiday this time, he's not coming back.

  Not at all credible, say we. Emily Lau Wai-hing, Christine Loh Kung-wai, Anna Wu Hung-yuk, Lee Cheuk-yan and Dr Conrad Lam Kui-shing all voted, in the chief secretary's grateful words, to 'depersonalise' Wednesday's no-confidence motion against him.

  Instead, they favoured Miss Lau's version calling for a vote of no-confidence in the British and Chinese governments.

  So that's five friends for a start. Miss Lau and Dr Lam rather blotted their copybooks afterwards by voting for the personal attack on the Governor, when her attempt to change the wording failed.

  But, hey, that's OK, at least they showed they cared. MR Patten does have one other friend.

  Flora Cheong-Leen told us: 'I really like Patten. I think he's a great guy and doing a great job.'   The businesswoman-cum-socialite is absolutely mortified - possibly more so than the poor, lonely Governor himself - by an article in Life, the colour supplement of the London Observer, in which she is said to have accused him of gung ho tactics that have caused unnecessary acrimony with Beijing.

  Worse, she is quoted as saying: 'He's behaved like a clumsy seducer who tries to rip a girl's knickers off on the first date.'   'How could I say that?' Ms Cheong-Leen asked us, plaintively.

   'Patten is doing his best. It's really not nice. How can one attack a person like that?'   Not that the words weren't hers. It's just that she says they weren't intended personally.

   It was a discussion about a smooth transition and how one had to build a rapport with the Chinese first.

  'I didn't attack Patten,' she said. 'He wasn't my concern. It was supposed to be a metaphor for the way Westerners, not just English people, try to go into China.

  'You can't go so fast. It's like dating.'   Now she is wondering how to put things right with the Governor. BUT if Ms Cheong-Leen's going about with her tail between her legs, the Government's getting distinctly twitchy about other, less humble, types of doggy behaviour.

  Biting and mauling for instance.

  Hence that little item of news earlier this week that the powers that be were planning to introduce controls on potentially dangerous dogs and classify particular breeds according to their threat to the public.

  Category one, pit bulls and other fighting dogs, would not be allowed into Hong Kong.

  Other undesirables, such as rottweilers, with a history of attacking people would also be banned. Dobermans, German shepherds and similar unpredictable hounds would be muzzled and placed on a leash when in a public place.

  All others are considered harmless.

  Government officials, we understand, have drawn up a list already.

   The Democratic Party's Cheung Man-kwong, hero of Wednesday's motion of no-confidence in the Governor, tops the the fighting breeds category. Guaranteed to savage any civil servant within a 10-kilometre radius, he will be exceptionally tough to put down. However, he will not be imported into the future Special Administrative Region.

  Nor will Martin Lee Chu-ming. He may have the build and aristocratic bearing of an Afghan hound, but he has been caught with his teeth in the necks of Pekinese.

  Emily Lau, who was originally to have been muzzled, has been demoted after her attempt to amend the motion.

  She now comes into the harmless category, albeit on a probationary basis.

   NEWS of the Democratic Party's fund-raising party at the Regent last weekend comes in two versions: the 'it was a great success' edition, and 'the most depressing event I've been to in a long time' edition.

  The auction, alone, raised a gratifying $850,000, say the optimists, $50,000 more than the target. And the total for the whole bash was $1.15 million.

  The pessimists ask: 'Yes, but how many big names were there to donate money openly?' The fund-raiser boasted talk show hosts Albert Cheng King-hon and Raymond Wong Yuk-man as masters of ceremonies and auctioneers. Yes, but they were among the fattest cats to turn up and had to dip into their own pockets to get others to chip in on 'joint bids'.

  No worries; that was part of the fun.

  The Liberal Party's Eric Li Ka-cheung forked out $10,000 for a Zun Zi cartoon of the DP's leaders, which he solemnly promised to burn - even though Raymond Wong had stumped up the other $10,000.

  Two pieces of caligraphy by Szeto Wah - one with the coded message 'a marked man dares to storm the fortress' - fetched $50,000 each.

  Mmmm . . . but the most valuable item on sale was a watercolour by Huang Yongyu, with a reserve price of $300,000.

  The auctioneers said a mysterious person had offered to buy at the reserve price. Nobody bid anything in public, of course.

  The Hongkong Bank's Vincent Cheng, a fairly fat cat, paid $8,000 for a mobile phone. But Martin Lee ended up paying more than $30,000 over the course of the evening, for a party he already spends a fair amount of money on.

  As sceptical outsiders we steer a middle course.



Patten's lonely planet