Politics & Power Quote by Chris Patten

“Unnecessary baggage” is a sly piece of British political code: it frames intellect not as an asset but as awkward luggage you’re expected to check at the door before entering the commonsense world of retail politics. Patten is doing two things at once. He’s acknowledging the accusation - that he’s an “intellectual in politics” - while also exposing how provincial the insult is. The word “charge” carries courtroom weight, as if thoughtfulness were evidence of wrongdoing. That’s the joke, and it lands because British political culture has long rewarded the performance of plainness, even among the privately hyper-educated.

The intent isn’t self-pity; it’s preemptive reframing. By calling the label “regarded as” baggage, Patten suggests the problem isn’t the mind, it’s the audience’s suspicion of it. He positions himself as someone who understands the rules of the game but refuses to pretend they’re noble. That’s classic Patten: Tory pragmatist with a technocratic streak, comfortable in policy detail, uneasy with anti-expert theatre.

Context matters. Patten came up in a Conservative Party that oscillated between managerial competence and populist signaling; later, as the last governor of Hong Kong and then an EU commissioner, he embodied the internationalist, institution-minded tradition that became increasingly unfashionable. Read now, the line feels almost predictive of the post-expert era: a quiet warning about how democracies learn to treat intelligence as elitism, and then wonder why governing gets harder.