When he was governor of Hong Kong, Mr Chris Patten was reviled by the Beijing media as a "prostitute for a thousand years" for trying to force China into accepting a more democratic Hong Kong. Yesterday, Mr Patten returned to torment the Chinese, this time as External Relations Commissioner of the European Union attending an EU-China summit in Beijing.
Wearing this hat he received a reception which he said was as civil and courteous "as might be expected". In other words the Chinese didn't fall over themselves to welcome their hated adversary.
The official media ignored his presence on the EU team and state TV cameras zoomed in on everyone at the summit except Mr Patten. The Chinese Premier, Mr Zhu Rongji, hugged the European Commission President, Mr Romano Prodi, and described Mr Prodi and Finland's Prime Minister, Mr Paavo Lipponen, as "old friends", but gave Mr Patten only a perfunctory handshake.
The Chinese President, Mr Jiang Zemin, however, allowed himself a grin as he shook hands with his former antagonist when they met in Macau on Monday. Mr Patten for his part toned down the sort of rhetoric he has used in the past, especially in his 1998 book East and West.
In it he described a "brutal" China that "bullies its way around the region", urged the West to stop kowtowing to China over human rights, and compared the still-revered Mao Zedong to an "angel of death" like Hitler and Pol Pot.
During the two-hour summit, Mr Patten did take China to task over its human rights record but the former Hong Kong governor told reporters he suffered no abuse in return.
"I learned as a child that God moves in mysterious ways his wonders to perform," he said. "They know that I am the Commissioner for External Relations, God willing, until the 22nd of January 2005 and they were as civil and courteous as you would have expected."
Privately EU diplomats say that the dialogue they embraced two years ago has failed to bring about fundamental change in human rights in China, where many members of the Falun Gong spiritual sect were recently locked up after it organised mass protests.
The EU urged China to open talks with Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, to abolish capital punishment and to ratify two UN covenants on political and economic rights it has already signed.
"I've always been in favour of engagement, which I've always argued should be vigorous rather than supine," Mr Patten said, in defence of the policy of dialogue rather than confrontation.
Mr Lipponen said there were no concrete results from the meeting on human rights but they detected "positive signs". He added that "the European Union expressed concern about the pace of China's evolution towards a more open and transparent society".
Mr Patten chaired the recent review body on policing in Northern Ireland. There the man abused by the Chinese for promoting the rule of law in Hong Kong was criticised by the Rev Ian Paisley for producing proposals on the RUC which the DUP leader said represented "the ultimate corruption of the integrity of the rule of law".