Exactly 10 years after handing Hong Kong back to Chinese rule, Chris Patten has few worries about the former British colonial territory but for one glaring omission: the lack of democratic progress.
Despite the efforts by Lord Patten, as he is now titled, to partially democratise Hong Kong during his five years as its last governor, after a decade of Chinese rule its people still cannot choose their own leaders.
This is a disappointment, he told the Guardian at his family home in south-west London.
"Hong Kong remains a free, plural society, with all the institutions and attributes of an open society, with the single exception that it can't elect its own government - which is pretty absurd - and doesn't have an agreed process of getting to a situation where it's going to elect its own government."
On the night of July 30 1997, Lord Patten rose to make his final speech as governor. His time in the territory, he told the assembled British and Chinese dignitaries, was "the greatest honour and privilege of my life".
Later that rain-lashed, steamingly humid evening, the 28th and final British governor of Hong Kong - who finished his speech blinking back tears - sailed out of the famous harbour on the royal yacht Britannia.
A decade after handing the tiny colonial parcel back to China, Lord Patten admits he has only very recently been able to watch a recording of his speech.
"I'd never seen any of those moments before - leaving Government House, the drenching rain, the speech in the rain, leaving in Britannia, and all the rest," he said.
"And watching it for the first time - well, it brought back memories from 10 years ago, but it was also, even at this distance, a bit emotional."
After leaving Hong Kong, the former Tory minister, now 63, became the EU's external relations commissioner and then chancellor of Oxford University. But he still recalls his five years in Hong Kong as the happiest of his career.
"It was an extraordinary experience for a European politician to spend five years, in effect, as the mayor of a huge and successful Asian city," he said.
"Outside commentators, of course, focused principally on the row with China. But most of my time was spent doing other things: managing the economy, managing education and health, and social services and investment in the infrastructure.
"And in Hong Kong, I never had to make the sort of awkward decisions about the difference between increasing tax and cutting public spending, or increasing public spending. Every year we increased public spending on our priorities, every year we were able to cut tax; there was no sales tax. Every year we were able to stuff more money into the reserves ...
"Now, if I'd ever been able to do any of that in British politics, I'd have been prime minister for life."
Lord Patten was a hugely popular figure in Hong Kong, in part for his refreshingly approachable personal image - one assisted by his glamorous daughters and the family's ubiquitous Yorkshire terriers, Whisky and Soda.
It is arguable that the dogs were the more famous. Even today their photograph takes pride of place on a Chinese chest stationed in the middle of the Patten family living room, while the daughters' pictures sit on the sidelines.
But the last governor also won over Hong Kong by trying his best to extend democracy as far as was possible within the Sino-British Joint Declaration, which set out the general principles of the handover eight years before he arrived.
When he left in 1997, Lord Patten boasted an approval rating of 79%, almost unheard of for an elected politician, let alone a colonial envoy appointed from 8,000 miles away.
These days when he returns to Hong Kong, he says, he is treated something like an "ageing rock star".
"The emphasis these days must be on the ageing," he added. "And I'm not sure I want to be seen as the Bryan Ferry of politics."
"But I am greeted with great enthusiasm, which I love. And what's quite interesting is that I am recognised quite a lot when I am travelling by mainland Chinese, and not just Hong Kong Chinese. And you know, I wouldn't be normal if I didn't say that wasn't rather good for morale."
This is particularly surprising given that the Chinese government spent much of Lord Patten's time as governor showering him in choice insults, among them "sinner for a thousand generations" and, even more colourfully, "tango dancer".
"'Tango dancer' was quite interesting, because I had said once, if I was asked if I was prepared to negotiate something with the Chinese - I can't remember what it was now - I said it takes two to tango. So that became, through the artifice of Chinese propaganda, a tango dancer as a term of abuse."
His years in the Thatcher and Major governments, however, inured him to such abuse, Lord Patten recalls.
"It never had much impact on me; as I used to say to people at the time, I'd been the minister who didn't invent the poll tax - the wretched bloody thing - but had the responsibility for implementing the poll tax.
"And having been through that, nothing the Chinese could say about me was likely to meet what people had, in some respects legitimately, said about me when I was the secretary of state for the environment."
Nonetheless, in a relief at least to his descendants, if not the man himself, Patten is no longer officially considered a sinner for a thousand generations, as he explains: "When I was a European commissioner, the Chinese foreign minister came to see me, and reading very carefully from a piece of paper said that the Chinese leaders had considered my position and they now regarded me as 'a force for concord rather than discord'.
"The next day a senior member of the Chinese embassy in Brussels phoned up my private secretary to check that he'd taken the words down correctly."
However forgiving Beijing might now be towards the ex-governor, it has, as yet, not shown any enthusiasm for his hopes for democracy in Hong Kong.
In April, Donald Tsang, a former civil servant who worked closely with Lord Patten, was handed another term as Hong Kong's chief executive. This was not after a general election, but a vote by an 800-member election committee overwhelmingly loyal to Beijing.
The Chinese government has yet to give a timetable for democratisation.
Lord Patten admits to disappointment that nowadays, Hong Kong "is, in a sense, less democratic now than when I left".
However, he refuses to criticise either Mr Tsang or Tung Chee-Hwa, the Beijing-friendly shipping magnate who was Hong Kong's first chief executive from 1997 until 2005.
"Stanley Baldwin, I think it was, said that when you left the bridge of the ship, you shouldn't spit on the deck," he explained.
"My successors know my views about the importance of whoever is the chief executive in Hong Kong being seen to be a representative of Hong Kong people in Beijing, or in my case in Beijing or London, rather than the representative of Beijing and London, in my time, or just in Beijing now, in Hong Kong.
"And I think the dilemma that a chief executive has is earning in Hong Kong the legitimacy which goes with being seen to stand up for people's interests there, without on the other hand losing the confidence of the leadership in Beijing. It's a difficult bridge to walk over and I hope that Donald Tsang manages to do it. "