CHRIS Patten still has a constituency in Britain. Bath is long gone, prospects of a place in a British Cabinet vanished two years ago but the man who would be the final Governor of Hong Kong still finds he needs to address a British audience.
This week sees him in Britain again, his fifth visit in 12 months, and the third since the turn of the year. The Hong Kong Government insists he visits no more than his predecessor David Wilson; events would suggest otherwise.
Questions are being asked about why he needs to spend so much time in the UK, what does it mean of his commitment to Hong Kong? Is he trying to line himself up for a post back home if such a thing should exist? There was little lost irony in a speech Mr Patten gave at the Conservative Carlton Club last night. It focused on the political thought, political skills and place in history of R. A. Butler, the Tory Cabinet minister and one-time chairman of the party of Macmillan's era who became known (as also did Gaitskell and latterly John Smith) as the Best Prime Minister We Never Had.
Mr Patten made great play of the photo of Rab he keeps with him in Hong Kong. He has a ''daily liaison with the enigma of Rab'' he told his audience but with some restraint stressed that he had ''enough on his hands'' until June 30, 1997.
It would be too Machiavellian, too simplistic, too naive to suggest Mr Patten, in a lengthy analysis of the success of the man he described as ''the most intellectually creative and influential British political leader of the middle decades of the century'' was setting out his own stall for a return to British politics post-1997.
He is, in the words of one Tory tabloid editor ''yesterday's man'' in terms of British politics. Even were Mr Patten in Britain he would face the depressing fact that the currency of Conservative politicians at the moment does not run very high.
