Remembering the handover

His first cabinet appointment came under Thatcher when he was made secretary of state for Scotland in 1986 before heading up transport and defense on the way to the foreign office.

Rifkind says he is not surprised that China has emerged as such a powerful economy over the past 40 years.

"It was always inevitable that would happen. You cannot have a country the size of China with such a huge population as well as its historical and cultural identity going back 2,000 years where that was not the case," he says.

He believes former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping's reform and opening-up agenda in the late 1970s proved the catalyst.

Rifkind, who supported the UK remaining in the European Union, says the UK's uncertain status makes it more difficult for the Chinese and others to make investment decisions.

"Clearly, any major companies from other parts of the world, who have a European market with a headquarters in the UK, ask themselves: 'What does this mean for us?'"

He, however, believes the UK will prove resilient in the end.

"If you have only 65 million people and you are the fifth or sixth largest economy in the world, that is an enormous economic achievement. That strength didn't begin when we joined the EU and it doesn't disappear because we have left it."

Rifkind had to resign from his seat before the 2015 general election having been caught up in a sting by the Channel 4 Dispatches program, where he was secretly filmed discussing a potential board position for a fictitious East European company.

Suggestions that there was a conflict of interest were later dismissed as groundless by the parliamentary standards commissioner.

The veteran politician, who was about to address a conference on the Middle East, says he felt it was the right time to set the record straight on many aspects of his life by writing his autobiography.

"I'd always sort of assumed that in the dim and distant future I would sort of write a book of this kind. And it was about a year ago that I gradually had to come to terms with the fact that, as I was approaching 70, the dim and distant future had arrived."

Contact the writer at andrewmoody@chinadaily.com.cn