Christopher Francis Patten, Baron Patten of Barnes (Chinese: 彭定康; born 12 May 1944), is a British politician who was the Chairman of the Conservative Party from 1990 to 1992, and the 28th and last Governor of Hong Kong from 1992 to 1997. He was made a life peer in 2005 and served as Chancellor of the University of Oxford from 2003 to 2024. He is one of two living former governors of Hong Kong, alongside David Wilson.

Patten was born in Thornton-Cleveleys in Lancashire and subsequently raised in west London. He studied history at Balliol College, Oxford, and, after graduating in 1965, he began working for the Conservative Party.

Patten was elected Member of Parliament for Bath in 1979. He was appointed Secretary of State for the Environment by Margaret Thatcher in 1989 as part of her third ministry, becoming responsible for implementation of the unpopular poll tax. On John Major's succession as Prime Minister in 1990, Patten became Chairman of the Conservative Party and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. As party chairman, he successfully orchestrated a surprise Conservative electoral victory in 1992, but lost his own seat.

Patten was then appointed the last governor of Hong Kong, to oversee the final years of British administration in the colony and prepare for its transfer to China in 1997. During his tenure, his government significantly expanded the territory's social welfare programmes and introduced democratic reforms to the electoral system.

Following his governorship, Patten led the Independent Commission on Policing for Northern Ireland, a major implementation step of the Northern Ireland peace process pursuant to the Good Friday Agreement from 1998 to 1999. He was European Commissioner for External Relations from 1999 to 2004 and Chairman of the BBC Trust from 2011 to 2014.

Patten was born in Thornton-Cleveleys in Lancashire, where his mother had fled to from Exeter, which had recently been significantly damaged by the Baedeker raids. Patten grew up in an Irish Catholic family in west London, the son of an unsuccessful music publisher whose ancestors had come to England from County Roscommon, Ireland. Patten's father, Frank, dropped out of university to become a jazz-drummer, later, a popular-music publisher. Frank and his mother Joan sent him to a Catholic primary school, Our Lady of the Visitation, in Greenford, and later awarded a scholarship to the independent St Benedict's School in Ealing, west London, where he won an exhibition to read Modern History at Balliol College, Oxford.

After graduating with a second-class honours degree in 1965 and winning a William Coolidge Pathfinder Award travelling scholarship to the US, Patten worked for the campaign of then-Republican New York Mayor John Lindsay, where he reported on the television performance of rival William F. Buckley Jr. He worked for the Conservative Party from 1966,^{[citation needed]} first as desk officer and then director (from 1974 to 1979) of the Conservative Research Department.

Patten was the Conservative Party candidate for Lambeth Central at the February 1974 general election, but lost to the Labour Party candidate, Marcus Lipton. He was elected as the Member of Parliament for Bath in 1979, and served until he was unseated in 1992.