Chris Patten event

Chris Patten explores politics and identity
in First Confession: A sort of Memoir

Wednesday 14 November

 5.45pm – 8.15pm

Join us at a

Rathbone Brothers Plc

8 Finsbury Circus

London EC2M 7AZ

for an evening with Chris Patten as he explores the theme of politics and identity.

Followed by: Q&As • Drinks and canapés • Book sales and signings

Chris Patten (Baron Patten of Barnes) who served as the 28th and final Governor of Hong Kong from 1992-1997, is currently Chancellor of Oxford University. He has been a crossbench member of the House of Lords since 2005. As MP for Bath (1979-92) he served as Minister for Overseas Development, Secretary of State for the Environment and Chairman of the Conservative Party, and was described by The Observer as “the best Tory Prime Minister we never had”.

Chris Patten’s political hero is that epitome of one-nation conservatism, Rab Butler. In the memoir he published last year, First Confession, he quotes with approval Butler’s disdain for austerity economics. “Those who talk about creating pools of unemployment should be thrown into them and made to swim.”

Patten grew up in an Irish Catholic family in north-west London, the son of a music publisher whose forbears had come to England from Co Roscommon. In First Confession he describes it as a 1950s childhood of “Mass and privet”. He made his way to Oxford via Our Lady of the Visitation parish and primary school, run by the Pallottine Fathers in Greenford, and then St Benedict’s, Ealing.

“Part of my complicated identity”, Patten told The Tablet last year, “is that I am a practising Catholic – words that are used as if you are hitting a ball against a wall all the time. It’s part of me, even if some people may not like it.”

Copies of First Confession and a selection of other titles will be available for purchase at a discounted price on the night

  With grateful thanks to our hosts       

Ticketing

Tablet subscriber tickets before 24 September: £35 (£40 thereafter)
Standard tickets before 24 September: £40 (£45 thereafter)

Bookings

Visit: https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/3521661
or call 020 8748 8484

This is a fundraising event for The Tablet Trust 
Charity No. 1173924