At the general election on 9 April 1992, Conservative Party chairman Chris Patten, who had been the MP for Bath since 1979, lost his seat to the Liberal Democrats. But this was far from the end of the story:  the Prime Minister, John Major, saw him as the ideal candidate to become the last Governor of Hong Kong… Here, in the first part of the exclusive extract from his diaries, he gives an unprecedented insight into fraught negotiations with China and the path to 'one country, two systems'.

Friday 17–Tuesday 21 April 1992

I wrote a letter to the Prime Minister to say that I would like to go to Hong Kong. I felt a bit guilty about leaving him and the government. But, as Lavender [Patten’s wife] said, I wasn’t really to blame! The truth is that I am at the heart of a great irony in which the Governor of Hong Kong has been chosen by the electors of Bath....