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Chris Patten lets rip in undiplomatic last blast Former premier Zhu Rongji is for hailed as "formidably impressive." But elsewhere in Asia, Pakistan's President Musharraf fares less well. "Whatever you say about General Musharraf, he is not a democrat," adding that he "will not last forever." Patten also recounts a "bizarre" trip to North Korea, where President Kim Jong-Il has "a bouffant hairstyle all his own, in which each hair seems to have been individually seeded in his scalp." "We banqueted with Kim and a group of grumpy old men, with faces like Christmas walnuts... We were served much better Burgundy than we would have drunk in Brussels. Outside, the people starved." In Moscow, meanwhile, President Putin is now in power, and Patten is not impressed with a man who is "very cold-eyed, with a good line in hectoring argument." At one meeting when Putin was still prime minister the Russian claimed that carnage at a Grozny market was an "own goal" by Chechen militants whose own arms were on sale at the bazaar, but somehow blew up unexpectedly. "I had never been so blatantly lied to at a meeting like this before. Normally, mendacity comes in better disguise," he writes. More recently Patten laments the time that Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi made a "toe-curling" defence of Putin's Chechen campaign, during an EU-Russia meeting under Italy's EU presidency in 2003. On a lighter note on the EU stage, Patten confirms the widely-held -- but not usually publicly voiced -- view that Dutch Prime Minister Jan-Peter Balkenende "really does look like Harry Potter." Back at home in England, Patten is clearly enjoying the newfound freedom to do and say things he couldn't during all those years in the international spotlight. But his passion for public life is clearly not completely exhausted. He
describes his latest book as "a farewell despatch... at least for the time
being."
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