The Chinese nicknamed him Fei Pang — or Fatty Pang. The name, explains Hong Kong’s very own Lord Mountbatten, is a cheerful Cantonese remark, because “plumpness is considered by the Cantonese — not by my wife — as a sort of indication of good humour and prosperity and it is propitious. My wife would say that I was far too propitious.” There’s just a hint of a smile as he admits he isn’t very good at staying away from the good things of life.

One doesn’t expect such self-deprecating humour — delivered with an absolutely straight face — from any politician, especially from one with as distinguished a career as Christopher Francis Patten, Baron of Barnes. But then, Lord Patten has never shied away from striking a different path.

When he took over as the last governor general of Hong Kong in 1992, he raised quite a few eyebrows by refusing to don the imperial regalia. It was partly out of vanity. “I’m not tall and elegant. I am of middle height and sort of paunchy,” he says, as the buttons of his blue shirt strain against his abdomen, as if on cue, “and I think I would have looked ridiculous in all that.”

Hong Kong happened as a twist of fate. As chairman of Britain’s Conservative Party, he had engineered its fourth consecutive victory in 1992. But he lost his own seat — Bath. The man who would have been John Major’s chancellor of the exchequer (finance minister) was at a loose end. So off Patten went to Hong Kong, to preside over the transfer of one of Britain’s last colonies and hand it over to the Chinese in 1997, much like Mountbatten presided over Indian independence 50 years earlier.

Actually, the shunning of the pomp and pageantry of office was Patten’s conscious attempt to change the image of a typical colonial government and to drive home the fact that he was part of the transition to a more open and democratic society. Horrifying many, he went out — usually unannounced — into the streets and less privileged neighbourhoods of Hong Kong, acquainting himself with the clogged lavatories in run-down tenements and ill-equipped hospitals. He found it useful to know what was going on and people got an opportunity to grumble directly to him and let off steam.

It made him extremely popular but the Chinese were not amused when Patten’s zeal carried over into ushering in democratic reform in Hong Kong’s institutions. That led to a face-off with Beijing, sparking an economic crisis in Hong Kong. Reforms came after 18 months of negotiations with the Chinese — that’s the only thing, he says, he wouldn’t repeat if given a chance. “It sounds vain, but the truth is I wouldn’t have done anything differently.”

Eleven years after he took the British flag home from Hong Kong on 30 June 1997 — “the end of a chapter in British history” — he still gets emotional when he thinks of his stint but is happy that what he initiated has stood the test of time. He gave people a sense of confidence and encouraged them to believe that even if they weren’t going to get instant democracy, they had all the institutions and values of a free society. “I felt very strongly that if you put panes of glass in the windows, it was more difficult for anybody subsequently to burgle Hong Kong’s freedom.”

His entry into politics was also accidental. His “gently Conservative” parents — his father was a professional musician turned music publisher — considered politics “slightly vulgar.” Politics as a career was never on his mind when he was studying history at Balliol College, Oxford, dabbling in acting, editing a magazine and playing cricket. Journalism was, as he had a graduate traineeship with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). But while on a scholarship to the United States in 1965, he got involved in a political campaign and when he returned to Britain he told the Beeb that he wasn’t interested in the job anymore (“which they regarded with some surprise”) and joined the research department of the Conservative Party in 1966, becoming the youngest head of the department eight years later.

He’s also proud of his work as chairman of the Independent Commission on Policing for Northern Ireland, which, in 1999, proposed far-reaching changes in the policing system. That got him on to the hit list of the Irish Revolutionary Army for several years.

A close encounter with one face of terror happened several years later when he was the European Union’s Commissioner for Foreign Affairs and External Relations. In November 2003, he went to Sri Lanka to support Norwegian efforts to broker peace in the island nation and decided to meet LTTE chief Vellupillai Prabhakaran (“a thoroughly wicked man”), sparking a controversy. “You would have thought that somebody who had been responsible for that much death would have a more striking personality. He came across as a rather weak, shifty man,” he recalls and laments that Sri Lanka is an “example of a genuine political grievance having been turned into a conflict, totally unnecessarily, by thoroughly bad political leadership.”

Addressing legitimate political anxieties and competent policing are the two ways to address terrorism which, he says, the world will always have to live with. “Terrorists try to get states to over-react and thus create martyrs and new recruits for terrorists. It is very important for democratic societies in particular to recognise that they have to fight with one hand tied behind their backs. That’s the difference between being a civilised man and being a terrorist,” says the man whose two closest friends were victims of terrorism.

Violence as a solution was also the subject of Rang De Basanti, a film close to his heart since it starred daughter Alice. The acting genes didn’t come from him, says the fond father, but from his mother who was a very good amateur actress. The other Hindi film he enjoyed was Lagaan. Interestingly, both films have British colonialism as a motif. “Nobody would seek to justify colonialism today. Some things that colonial powers did were good, some things — like the Jallianwallah Bagh incident — were murderous.” But he gets emotional when he thinks of the 350 young men from his college who came to India between 1850 and 1947. “The reason for their being here is completely unjustifiable in modern terms. But they weren’t all wicked. A lot of them came to love India so much that they became great scholars and some of them changed their nationality in 1947.”

He may be ambivalent about colonialism, but his faith in globalisation remains unshaken despite the American banking sneeze having been transformed into a global financial tsunami. It may not be perfect, he admits, but “globalisation remains the principal route to a more prosperous world and it needs to be managed more effectively.” That’s the theme of his book What Next: Surviving the Twenty-First Century to promote which he was in India. That was also the subject of his talk — the second Penguin annual lecture — in New Delhi last week.

Patten does not believe the bailouts of failing banks by western governments will mean a return to greater state intervention in the economy. Governments are only doing what is required to restore confidence in borrowing and lending, he notes. He points to a silver lining in all this. “I think we are going to live in an era in which bankers will once more become boring. Hurray.”

Once he’s through with his book-related touring, he’s going to take time off from his numerous professional commitments — chancellor of Oxford University, co-chair of the International Crisis Group and the Indo-British Round Table, head of several charities — and take wife Lavender, three daughters and five grandchildren to Australia for Christmas. “It is great. Somebody once said that the wonderful thing about grandchildren is that you can give them back in the evening.”

What Next is dedicated to them, for the twenty-first century is “their century.” He had read a book by a British astronomer which said the world had a 50:50 chance of getting through this century. He couldn’t share that “depressing and bleak conclusion” and set off to demonstrate that most of the world’s problems have roots in history and were manageable. “I don’t think if you are a grandparent you can despair.”