Democracy and the Dragon: April 1992–April 1993
fn1 John Major was Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party from 1990 to 1997.
fn2 Freda Evans had been my parliamentary constituency secretary for two full terms and had worked tirelessly in and for the constituency. She was also heavily involved in voluntary work: for example, Crisis at Christmas. After my defeat, she worked full-time for voluntary organizations, particularly in the housing field, and then trained to be ordained in the Church of England. She became a parish priest in Birmingham working in a succession of parishes, most of them in socially disadvantaged areas.
fn3 Alastair and I had been friends for years, first meeting when we were both at university. He entered the House of Commons six years before me and became a minister in a variety of departments, at this time in the Foreign Office. Magnus was the older of two brothers. We had gone on holiday with his family from time to time so knew him very well. After university he had become a successful organizer of venture capital businesses.
fn4 Douglas Hurd had been Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, where I worked for him as a junior minister, Home Secretary and since 1989 Foreign Secretary. I had supported his campaign to become leader of the Conservative Party in 1990, when John Major won.
fn5 Lord Carrington was chairman of the Conservative party from 1972 to 1974 when I worked for him as his political secretary. He was Foreign Secretary from 1979 to 1982 and Secretary General of NATO from 1984 to 1988. He was the best man I ever worked for.
fn6 Tristan Garel-Jones had been a friend ever since we were both parliamentary candidates. After school he had joined his parents in Spain, where he had helped to run their business in Madrid. He was married to a Spaniard, Catali, and they had five children; their youngest – Victoria, the only girl – was my goddaughter. Tristan became MP for Watford at the 1979 general election. He was a very successful member of the Conservative whips’ office for many years and was minister of state for Europe from 1990 to 1993. He was my closest friend (though unlike me a teetotaller), widely read, a good linguist and a passionate pro-European. He was wise and full of guile but never duplicitous, and unlike most politicians devoid of most obvious ambition. There was hardly a week when I didn’t speak to him, wherever I was in the world, on at least a couple of occasions. He became a member of the House of Lords in 1997, which for a variety of fairly mysterious reasons he loved. He sometimes seemed almost as happy in the precincts of Westminster as in his home in Extremadura looking up at the mountains. He smoked himself to death, fully aware of what he was doing. He died in 2020. I still miss him.
fn7 Gordon Walker was a Labour politician who lost his Smethwick parliamentary seat in 1964 in a nasty racial campaign at the time when he was his party’s foreign affairs spokesman. He was nevertheless made Foreign Secretary by Harold Wilson, and then fought and lost a by-election in Leyton. He won Leyton in the following general election and became a Cabinet minister again.
fn8 After reading law at Oxford, Lavender had qualified as a barrister but had not practised while bringing up our family. When our youngest, Alice, was almost into secondary school, she got a place in a Chambers where they principally practised family law. Lavender had been successfully building her practice, which she would have to walk away from if we were to go to Hong Kong. Nevertheless, she was prepared to make the sacrifice, recognizing what a big opportunity it was for me with quite a large role for her as well.
fn9 Sir Christopher Bland was a British businessman perhaps best known for his period as chairman of the BBC from 1996 to 2001. He was also a good novelist.
fn10 David Owen was the Foreign Secretary in Jim Callaghan’s government from 1977 to 1979 and one of the founding members of the Social Democratic Party.
fn11 John Birt was a television executive who became director-general of the BBC from 1992 to 2000.
fn12 John Coles had been ambassador in Jordan and High Commissioner in Australia and was to become from 1994 to 1997 the permanent secretary in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
fn13 Robert Fellowes, later to become a member of the House of Lords, was the private secretary to Queen Elizabeth II from 1990 to 1999.
fn14 Lady Susan Hussey has been for many years a woman of the bedchamber to Queen Elizabeth II. She is the widow of Marmaduke Hussey, who was for a time chairman of the BBC, and is the sister of my friend the former Conservative Cabinet minister William Waldegrave
fn15 Norman Fowler had a long career as a minister in Margaret Thatcher’s governments and became Conservative Party chairman under John Major. He was a particularly successful Secretary of State for Health and Social Services from 1981 to 1987. His last public office was as Lord Speaker from 2016 to 2021.
fn16 There is a full note on Peter Ricketts and on the other FCO diplomats principally involved in work on Hong Kong and China in a note at the end of this diary.
fn17 Lord Wilson of Tillyorn, as he was to become after he had retired as Governor, was a distinguished Sinologist who, as well as his career in the FCO, was also for a time the editor of the China Quarterly. He was Governor of Hong Kong from 1987 to 1992. In addition to other public positions, he became master of Peterhouse College, Cambridge, from 2002 to 2008.
fn18 Edward Heath was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1970 to 1974 and leader of the Conservative Party from 1965 to 1975. After he lost the leadership to Margaret Thatcher, he spent a good deal of time, during a period in his life known by others as ‘the great sulk’, working on his status as an old friend of China, not least to help sort out commercial problems. This sometimes led him to resile from what others would have imagined would be his commitment to democracy and human rights.
fn19 Martin Lee was a distinguished Hong Kong barrister who was the founding chairman of the United Democrats of Hong Kong. He was widely regarded as the principal political exponent of democracy in Hong Kong and reviled as a consequence by the Communist Party. They plainly found it difficult to understand why he was more popular than their United Front stooges.
fn20 Sir David Ford joined the Hong Kong civil service on his retirement from the army in 1972 and was the last non-ethnic Chinese Chief Secretary of Hong Kong and Deputy Governor from 1987 to 1993. He was then Hong Kong commissioner in London until 1997. He died in 2017.
fn21 Sir Percy Cradock was a Sinologist who was ambassador to China from 1978 to 1983 and a senior adviser to Margaret Thatcher during the Sino-British negotiations on the Joint Declaration. He was also for a time an adviser to John Major and chairman of the Cabinet’s Joint Intelligence Committee. Major removed him from these jobs not long after his very difficult visit to Beijing. Cradock is alas a fairly regular visitor to the pages of this diary.
fn22 Li Peng was Premier of the People’s Republic of China from 1987 to 1998, and ranked as number 2 to party secretary Jiang Zemin for most of this period. He became the most prominent defender of the Tiananmen killings in 1989. We had a masseur in Hong Kong called Li Peng who changed his name to Li Justice, so appalled was he to share a name with a politician widely regarded as having so much blood on his hands.
fn23 Ambassador Ma Yuzhen was China’s ambassador to the United Kingdom from 1991 to 1995. After the handover in 1997 he became for a time the representative of China’s Foreign Ministry in Hong Kong.
fn24 Lydia Dunn was born in Hong Kong to parents who were refugees from China. After university in California she returned to Hong Kong and pursued a business career, first in Swire’s and later in HSBC. She was appointed to the Legislative Council in 1976 and the Executive Council in 1982. She was the senior member from 1988 to 1995. She was made a member of the House of Lords in 1989. She married the penultimate Attorney General of Hong Kong, Michael Thomas, in 1988. She moved with considerable guile and elegant agility through the minefields of Hong Kong politics.
fn25 The treaty which codifies the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
fn26 Lu Ping, who was born in Shanghai, was a Chinese diplomat who was head of the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office, which was part of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China. He was the head of the office which was supposed to have responsibility for handling the handover to China of these two territories. It was never entirely clear how much authority he had to make policy in this area. He spoke beautiful English, loved classical music and was thought to be quite urbane. But he was under huge political pressure and this perhaps explained his occasional outbursts of temper. He did not appear to be in the best of health, which may also explain his irascibility. I have always thought it a pity that I couldn’t form a closer personal relationship with him, while recognizing that part of his attitude to foreigners was almost certainly the result of the anti-Chinese racism he had experienced while growing up and being educated in Shanghai. He was removed from his post shortly after the handover in 1997 and died in 2015.
fn27 Lord Gillmore, as he was to become, joined the FCO after being a teacher and rose rapidly to the top. He was High Commissioner in Malaysia and became permanent undersecretary in 1991. He helped John Major to get Britain out of a dead end in relation to apartheid South Africa. Not being a Sinophile, he approached issues involving China and Hong Kong with a great deal of common sense and commitment to our own values.
fn28 Martin Dinham was my private secretary at the Overseas Development Administration in 1986–7. After working in Hong Kong he went back to what had become the UK’s Department for International Development, where he was a director-general. After retirement from that job, he continued to work in the development field and became, for example, the chairman of the board of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. As a public servant, he was as good as they get.
fn29 After Hong Kong, Edward Llewellyn came to work with me in Brussels when I was European Commissioner for External Relations. He then worked for Paddy Ashdown in Bosnia, and from there went to be David Cameron’s chief of staff, first in opposition and then when Cameron became Prime Minister. When Cameron resigned, Edward was made ambassador in Paris and later ambassador in Rome. He became a member of the House of Lords in 2016.
fn30 Westminster Cathedral is next to the block of flats where we had lived pretty well ever since I became an MP. Our daughters had been largely brought up there.
fn31 Lee Kuan Yew was Prime Minister of Singapore between 1959 and 1990, after which he continued to keep a watchful eye on the city state’s progress until his death in 2011. A clever Cambridge graduate, he had opinions on most international political subjects and very occasionally would listen to the views of others on the same subjects. He can properly take credit for much of the success of Singapore, though for many people it retains a ‘Marmite’ quality.
fn32 Richard Hoare had been my predecessor’s private secretary and he worked for me for more than a year. He then became director of administration before taking fairly early retirement to live near Chichester.
fn33 Jiang Zemin was General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party from 1989 to 2002 and President of the People’s Republic of China. His generally ‘bonhomous’ nature made many underestimate his qualities as a politician. But I never believed that he could have survived for so long at the top of Chinese politics without formidable cunning and ruthlessness.
fn34 Leo Goodstadt was an Oxford-trained economist who arrived in Hong Kong in the 1960s, taught at the University of Hong Kong, wrote for a number of publications and was a prominent broadcaster and investment adviser. He was appointed by my predecessor Lord Wilson as head of the government’s Central Policy Unit in 1989 and continued in that role when I was Governor. After the handover in 1997 he retired to Dublin and became a professor at the Trinity Business School there. He was a very serious believer in the obligations of Catholic social policy.
fn35 Sir William Purves spent most of his life as a banker with the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank and was appointed chairman of the group it controlled just before the purchase of the Midland Bank. He retired from HSBC in 1998.
fn36 Sir Joseph Hotung was a successful businessman, a great collector of Chinese and French Impressionist art, and a very generous philanthropist donating to education, health and artistic causes. He has been a particularly substantial benefactor of the British Museum. He died in 2021.
fn37 David Young, who was ennobled by Margaret Thatcher in 1984, was a businessman brought into government as an adviser on training and employment by Thatcher and her economic soulmate Sir Keith Joseph after the 1979 election. He was later put in the Cabinet as Employment Minister and Secretary of State for Trade and Industry. He was regarded by Thatcher as a loyal ‘can-do’ supporter and was credited with helping deliver her enterprise agenda, though others were more sceptical about the actual scale of his achievements. Before Margaret Thatcher left office, he had resigned and gone back to business, becoming among other things executive chairman of Cable & Wireless. He was a strong leader of many important charities.
fn38 Richard Needham came into Parliament in the same intake as me in 1979 for the neighbouring constituency of North Wiltshire. He had beaten me for the selection as Conservative candidate there. An Irish peer, not entitled to take a seat in the House of Lords, he became a hugely successful minister in Northern Ireland from 1985 to 1992 responsible for pioneering much of the redevelopment in Belfast and Londonderry. He then became the trade minister from 1992 to 1995 after which he resumed a successful career in business and wrote entertainingly about the relationship between politics and business. He was and is one of my best friends, brave, principled and probably as funny a raconteur as anyone should wish to be. As a minister, he got things done which sometimes involved vigorous activity with omelettes and eggs.
fn39 Michael Sze was born in mainland China but his family moved to Hong Kong. After his education he joined the civil service and rose to become Secretary for Constitutional Affairs from 1991 to 1994 and then Secretary for the Civil Service from 1994 to 1996. He was appointed as executive director of the Trade Development Council from 1996 to 2004. A competent official of unquestionable integrity, Sze was the sort of public servant who helped to make Hong Kong such a success and so decent a society.
fn40 From the mid-1970s Vietnamese families had fled first the war and then the communist regime in their country. The great majority came by boat, a perilous journey. By the early 1990s there were well over 50,000 in Hong Kong. Some were classified as refugees and others, according to UN criteria, were put into a repatriation programme.
fn41 Andrew Li Kwok-nang was born in Hong Kong and graduated from Cambridge University. He practised as a barrister back in his home city and was a member of the Executive Council from 1992 to 1996. He had already served as a deputy High Court judge and held a number of other public service appointments. He was appointed in 1997 as the first Chief Justice of the Court of Final Appeal by C. H. Tung. He stepped down from that post in 2010, subsequently receiving numerous honours and awards including an honorary degree at Oxford University.
fn42 Rosanna Wong was a social work administrator mainly with young people before being appointed as a member of the Legislative Council from 1985 to 1991 and the Executive Council after that. I made her the convener of the council on Lydia Dunn’s retirement in 1995 and she also served on the council for a time after the handover. She was chairperson of the housing authority from 1993 to 2000. She was awarded a DBE in 1997.
fn43 C. H. Tung was born in Shanghai; he was the oldest son of the shipping magnate who owned the Orient Overseas Container Line and took over the firm in 1981. OOCL was bailed out by the Chinese government when in financial difficulties in 1986. He was a member of the Executive Committee from 1992 to 1996 and, after the handover, was appointed Hong Kong’s Chief Executive from 1997 to 2005. In that year he became a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Committee. He was thought to be a useful spokesperson for Chinese viewpoints in the USA, though despite his affability, his hostility to democracy and the freedoms usually associated with an open society probably limited this value. He sold his shipping business to the Chinese state-owned Cosco shipping line for $6.3 billion in 2017.
fn44 Zhou Nan joined the Communist Party in 1946 and worked as a political commissar in Korea interrogating POWs. He joined the Chinese diplomatic service and rose to become ambassador to the UN in 1980. From 1983 he was engaged as a vice foreign minister and then head of the New China News Agency in Hong Kong during the negotiations for the transfer of the territory to China. The description of him on Wikipedia as ‘a witty and urbane’ man who ‘liked to charm people’ shows that political irony is not dead.
fn45 Lt Gen Sir John Foley had been director of the SAS in 1983. After being commander of British forces in Hong Kong from 1992 to 1994, he became Chief of Defence Intelligence. On retirement from the army he became Lieutenant Governor of Guernsey from 2000 to 2005.
fn46 Anson Chan was born in Shanghai to a family whose profound Chinese patriotism was unquestionable. Her maternal grandfather was a general who fought in the Sino-Japanese war. Her uncle was an orthopaedic surgeon who helped to care for Deng Xiaoping’s son after he was defenestrated during the Cultural Revolution. Her mother, Fang Zhaoling, was probably the greatest female Chinese painter of the last half-century or more. (Her work can be seen in many galleries including the Ashmolean in Oxford.) After her father’s death, Anson was brought up and educated in Hong Kong. She joined the civil service and rose to become Chief Secretary in 1993. She remained as the number two in the territory after the handover until 2001. Following her resignation from the civil service, she became more outspoken about the freedoms of Hong Kong and was elected to the Legislative Council from 2007 for one term after which she established a commission to monitor and comment on constitutional reform. She retired completely from public life after the passage of the National Security Law in 2020. Her husband Archie, after a business career, was Commandant of the Hong Kong Auxiliary Police. He died in 2010. Anson’s many honours included an honorary GCMG from Queen Elizabeth II (the equivalent of the honour customarily given to governors), and the Hong Kong government’s Grand Bauhinia Medal.
fn47 Sir Stephen Wall was private secretary to John Major from 1991 to 1993, responsible for foreign policy and defence. He became ambassador to Portugal in 1993 and Permanent Representative to the European Union in 1995. He was later EU adviser to Tony Blair. He is writing the official history of Britain’s relationship with the European Union. What a fortunate chap.
fn48 Michael Heseltine, a very successful businessman with his own publishing group, had served in senior positions in Margaret Thatcher’s and John Major’s governments. He had strong ‘one nation’ Conservative views believing both in the role of government in economic and social policy and in Britain’s membership of the EU. This did not make him popular with right-wing conservatives, but even they had to accept that he was a formidably effective minister. He made things happen and they were usually sensible things. Heseltine was unashamedly broad-brush but the paintwork was visible and popular. We disagreed on China but this did not affect my huge admiration for his talents and likeability.
fn49 Lord Murray MacLehose was born in 1917, trained Chinese guerrillas behind Japanese lines in the Second World War, and afterwards joined the Foreign Office. He was ambassador in South Vietnam and was appointed the 25th Governor of Hong Kong in 1971. He held the post longer than anyone else for four successive terms until 1982. A British Labour Party supporter, he was responsible for a huge programme of social reform and infrastructure development. He was not much of a believer in political change in Hong Kong but a great colonial administrator. He died in 2000.
fn50 Deng Xiaoping emerged from the bloody turmoil of the Mao years as the paramount leader of China until his death in 1997. He was responsible more than any other Chinese communist leader for his country’s boom years of spectacular growth, and for its opening to the West. During much of his time as the principal architect of China’s success, Deng’s only official post was chairman of the China Bridge Association. He certainly left China with a very good hand of trumps.
fn51 After working as a journalist and an official in the Communist Youth League, Qian Qichen spent some time in Moscow and then joined China’s foreign service. He held a number of senior diplomatic posts before becoming Foreign Minister, a member of the politburo and Vice Premier from 1993 to 2003. No other diplomat in China in recent years has held more senior positions for so long, a mark of his intelligence and skill. Qian died in 2017.
fn52 Geoffrey Howe was a Conservative lawyer, MP and peer who played a hugely influential role in developing and implementing Conservative policy under both Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher. In her administration, he served as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Foreign Secretary and Deputy Prime Minister until these two Conservative politicians fell out over the EU. His resignation from her government help to expedite her own departure from office. He was Foreign Secretary during much of the period when the Joint Declaration was being negotiated. In later years he tended to overlook the promises that had been made at the time of its negotiation by the British government about the development of democracy in Hong Kong, particularly whenever that issue threatened to increase tensions in relations with China.
fn53 Zhu Rongji was denounced as a ‘rightist’ after criticizing the economic policies of Mao but was brought back into the government as an extremely effective administrator, especially in the economic field, by Deng Xiaoping. As Mayor of Shanghai in the late 1980s he was known as a tough opponent of corruption. He was promoted to be Vice Premier with responsibility for economic affairs under President Jiang Zemin and clashed with the Premier Li Peng over economic reform. He was Premier of China from 1998 to 2003. I dealt with Zhu when I was European Commissioner for External Relations and thought him one of the cleverest public officials that I had ever met. He was prepared to engage in pretty open argument without ever departing from his Communist beliefs. He would almost certainly have got to the very top in any system of government.
fn54 Sir David Akers-Jones was a career colonial civil servant who worked in Hong Kong from 1957. He rose to become Chief Secretary from 1985 to 1987 and stood in briefly as Acting Governor of Hong Kong in 1986/7 after the death of Sir Edward Youde. He was a critic of government policy in Hong Kong before the handover. He died in 2019.
fn55 Vasco Joaquim Rocha Vieira was a professional army officer who worked as Portugal’s 138th and last Governor of Macau from 1991 to 1999. A thoroughly decent and friendly man, he was constrained in his role by Portugal’s pervasive political embarrassment about whether it actually held any meaningful sovereignty over Macau.
fn56 Gareth Evans is a barrister, politician, academic and international policy maker. Before becoming Australia’s Foreign Minister from 1988 to 1996, he held a number of ministerial positions in the Hawke and Keating Labour governments. He was president of the conflict resolution organisation the International Crisis Group from 2000 to 2009, taught at the University of Melbourne and was Chancellor of the Australian National University from 2010 to 2020. He was a member of several international commissions and panels and was particularly active in campaigning for nuclear disarmament. He was a strong believer in standing up for human rights internationally and was a good friend of Hong Kong and its democratic aspirations. He is one of the best reasons for loving Australia, despite their cricket team.
fn57 I recruited Michael Portillo, who joined the Conservation Research Department in 1976 after Cambridge. He was an MP from 1984 to 1997 and held a number of ministerial posts, for some time as one of my junior ministers of the environment and finally rising to become Defence Minister in 1995. His father was a left-wing political opponent of General Franco who lived in exile until his death. Portillo moved to the right in Parliament as a Thatcherite, becoming rather unjustly a much-attacked political punchbag among Guardian readers. He subsequently pursued a career as a television presenter, successfully getting on and off trains around the world.
fn58 Kenneth Clarke, who was an MP from 1970 to 2019, retiring then as father of the House of Commons, held many of the most important government positions during a career characterized by eloquent outspokenness, not least in favour of Britain’s membership of the EU. He was one of Britain’s three most successful post-war Chancellors of the Exchequer (alongside Rab Butler and Roy Jenkins) from 1993 to 1997. Having served as a senior minister under Thatcher, Major and Cameron, he was in effect thrown out of the party by Boris Johnson for opposing a ‘no deal’ departure from the EU. He had strong and well-informed opinions on most subjects from jazz to birdwatching and from sport to the condition of the Conservative Party. On the last subject he proved alas to be all too accurate.
fn59 Martin Barrow was an appointed member of Legco (from 1985 to 1995) and a company director of Jardine’s Matheson. He had particular responsibility for their Japanese business and was vice-chairman of the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce. He was a strong supporter of the autonomy promised to Hong Kong.
fn60 Malcolm Rifkind was MP for an Edinburgh constituency who had ministerial posts under both Margaret Thatcher and John Major, in whose Cabinet he was first Secretary for Transport and then Secretary for Defence from 1992 until 1995, when he became Foreign Secretary. He lost his Scottish seat in 1997, but returned to Parliament as MP for Kensington and Chelsea from 2005 until 2015. He was a brilliant forensic speaker in Parliament.
fn61 Jim Prior was a Conservative MP from 1959 to 1987, until he retired from the Commons and became a member of the House of Lords. He was close to Edward Heath and was Minister of Agriculture and Leader of the Commons in the Heath administration before 1974. He later served as Employment Secretary and Secretary of State for Northern Ireland under Margaret Thatcher. They did not get on; she regarded him as too soft on the Union and general economic policy. I had worked for him when he was Peter Carrington’s deputy as chairman of the Conservative Party before the 1974 election, and also as one of his ministerial team in Northern Ireland. After politics he had many directorships and was chair of GEC.
fn62 Henry Keswick is a senior member of the family of the same name which has built up and run the Jardine Matheson company. He has been a director, managing director and chairman of the company. A right-wing Conservative, he owned the Spectator magazine from 1975 to 1980. He was also chairman of the National Portrait Gallery. Jardine Matheson was one of the original Hong Kong Hong trading houses. Its very successful business is mostly in Asia. Keswick himself, perhaps inevitably, has tended to see Britain’s imperial role as largely about safeguarding the company’s interests. He was usually hostile to governors who did not share this view of the world. Keswick once told me that having reached the age of 70 he had decided to forgive me for my sins. Without questioning his Catholic virtues, I have my doubts about whether this has actually happened.
Round and Round the Mulberry Bush: April 1993–April 1994
fn1 Mike Medavoy is a successful film producer who co-founded Orion Pictures and Phoenix Pictures and was charman of Tristar Pictures. He has overseen the production of many notable films, including Amadeus, The Silence of the Lambs, Sleepless in Seattle and The People v Larry Flynn. He is keen on politics; we first met at a conference organized by the Aspen Institute when I was a back-bencher. He has been a major West Coast supporter of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
fn2 John Newhouse was a distinguished American journalist, mostly at the New Yorker. He also worked as a government official and was a negotiator at the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. With a grant from the Ford Foundation he lived and wrote in Paris for some time about European affairs; for example, his book Europe Adrift. He died in 2016.
fn3 Lloyd Cutler was an American lawyer who worked as White House Counsel for both Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. He died in 2005.
fn4 Bill Bradley was Democratic Senator for New Jersey from 1979 to 1997. He lost to Al Gore in the nomination race for presidency in 2000. He had been a basketball star and played professionally in Europe while an Oxford student.
fn5 Henry Kissinger’s fame, not least his role in building contacts between the United States of America and communist China, overwhelms any description. Volumes of biography, the size of telephone directories, weigh down library shelves. I have always found him interesting and friendly and he seems especially good at dealing openly with students of international affairs of all ages. His views on China however are not mine.
fn6 Charles Powell was Margaret Thatcher’s main foreign policy adviser in Downing Street. He left the Foreign Office in 1991 and pursued a business career with seats on several boards including Jardine Matheson. He was clever and ubiquitous. He became a peer in 2000.
fn7 Sir David Tang was an extravagantly generous, highly intelligent and civilized entrepreneurial businessman. He was as well known in Britain as in Hong Kong. He strongly supported democracy and the promised autonomy in his own city. Tang died of liver cancer in 2017.
fn8 Helmut Kohl became leader of the CDU in Germany in 1973 and was the Chancellor for 16 years from 1982 to 1998. He shared with Bill Clinton the ability to draw principles and quite profound lessons from simple anecdotes. I enjoyed his company and so did John Major. But experience does not suggest that he ever did as much to meet British positions in the EU as we thought he would.
fn9 Francis Cornish had been the Foreign Office spokesman for Douglas Hurd and deputy private secretary to the Prince of Wales. He was senior Trade Commissioner in Hong Kong from 1993 to 1997 and British consul-general after that date until 1998. He then became British ambassador to Israel from 1998 to 2001. After retirement from the diplomatic service, he was chairman of South West tourism and had a smallholding in the Quantocks. Magnificently unflappable as some British businessmen flapped all around him.
fn10 Tsang Yok-sing was born in Guangdong and moved with his family to Hong Kong as a child. He was a founding member of the pro-Beijing party.
fn11 Vincent Cheng was an economist who spent most of his commercial career with the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank rising to a number of senior positions in it. He was an appointed member of both Legco and Exco, and in 2008 was appointed a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.
Winning the Big Vote: April 1994–April 1995
fn1 Richard Mueller was the US consul-general who retired from Hong Kong to become a school principal, first in Massachusetts and then back in Hong Kong.
fn2 Li Chuwen was deputy director of the New Chinese News Agency in Hong Kong from 1983 to 1988. He died in Shanghai aged 100, in 2018.
fn3 Peter Sutch was a popular chairman of the Swire Group in Hong Kong from 1992 to 1999. He died in March 2002.
fn4 Anthony Howard was a distinguished left-wing journalist who was editor of New Statesman, deputy editor of the Observer and obituary editor of The Times. As a Sunday Times journalist covering Whitehall, he annoyed the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, in the 1960s by campaigning for greater government transparency.
fn5 Jenny Best was my private secretary throughout my years in Hong Kong. She was outstandingly competent and an important member of the Government House team.
fn6 Masaki Orita later became Japanese ambassador in Denmark and the United Kingdom.
fn7 Sarah Hogg was an outstanding economic journalist who was appointed by John Major as head of his Policy Unit. As chairman of the Conservative Party, I worked closely with her and formed the highest opinion of her wisdom and good sense. She married the Conservative politician Douglas Hogg, pursued a successful career in business after his retirement from government, and was made a member of the House of Lords in 1995.
fn8 Lord Chalfont, who died in 2020, was a retired army officer and military historian who was made a Foreign Office minister and member of the House of Lords by Harold Wilson. He left the Labour Party to no one’s great surprise in the early 1970s and supported Margaret Thatcher’s election in 1979.
Starting the Countdown: May 1995–May 1996
fn1 Jeremy Mathews joined the legal service of the Hong Kong government in 1968 and became a competent and reliable Attorney General in 1988, serving in that post until 1997. After that date he retired to England and became chairman of the Overseas Service Pensioners Association.
fn2 David Steel was leader of the Liberal Party, and briefly of the merged Liberal and Social Democrats before Paddy Ashdown, and later became a member of the Scottish Assembly and its Presiding Officer.
fn3 Robin Cook was a Scottish MP who became Foreign Secretary in the Blair government from 1997 until 2001 and then Leader of the House of Commons from 2001 until 2003. His speech after his resignation from the government because of his opposition to the Iraq war was a tour de force. I greatly admired his rhetorical skills and was nervous on the few occasions that I had to debate him. Apparently, despite his republican views he got on well with the Queen because of their shared enthusiasm for horseracing. He died of a heart attack while walking in the Scottish Highlands in 2005.
fn4 Michael Howard was a Conservative lawyer and MP who held cabinet jobs under both Margaret Thatcher and John Major. He was briefly one of my junior ministers when I was Environment Secretary and a very good and hard-working one. I saw him most frequently when he was Home Secretary from 1993 to 1997 and we clashed a good deal over the rights of people who lived in Hong Kong to settle in Britain. Once a strong proponent of British membership of what was then the European common market, he later became an articulate Brexit campaigner. He was fairly right-wing in most of his views (which was probably the main reason why he was elected leader of the Conservative Party in the run-up to the predictably unsuccessful 2005 general election) and politely inflexible in expressing them. Nevertheless, he was personally courteous, and the fact that he had an extremely nice wife and children always rather disposed me towards him. He became a member of the House of Lords in 2010.
fn5 Sir Jimmy McGregor, after service in the RAF, joined the Commerce and Industry Department of the Hong Kong government and later became the director of the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce from 1975 to 1988. He represented a functional constituency covering commerce in Legco until 1995 and was a member of Exco from 1995 to 1997. After 1997 he retired to Vancouver where he died in 2014. Jimmy was a brave and consistent supporter of democracy in Hong Kong.
fn6 This 11th Earl of Elgin was a former soldier who after his retirement from the army held a number of business posts.
fn7 Paddy Ashdown was the leader of the Liberal Democrats from 1988 to 1999. He was High Representative for Bosnia from 2002 to 2006 and later a member of the House of Lords. He died in 2018.
fn8 A British Olympic sprinter, Menzies Campbell was leader of the Liberal Democrats from 2006 to 2007. He became a member of the House of Lords in 2015.
fn9 Douglas Hogg, son of Viscount Hailsham, was a Conservative MP from 1979 to 2010 and Minister of Agriculture from 1995 to 1997. He joined the House of Lords in 2018. A barrister, he was decent, brave, combative and a good parliamentary speaker.
fn10 Boris Johnson was a successful journalist who blagged his way into politics, the mayoralty of London, the leadership of the Brexit campaign and then of the Conservative Party, and thus became Prime Minister in 2019. He was correctly described by a former Conservative Attorney General as a ‘moral vacuum’.
fn11 David Chu is a United Front Hong Kong member of Legco and of the National People’s Congress of the PRC. He cancelled his US passport in 1994.
fn12 Peter Woo is a billionaire businessman in Hong Kong who is married to the second daughter – Bessie – of the late Hong Kong shipping tycoon Sir Y. K. Pao. Politically ambitious, but unsuccessful garnering public support.
fn13 Stephen Lam, a Hong Kong career civil servant, was the director of the handover ceremony in 1997. As the rain bucketed down, he asked me whether the ceremony should be curtailed. I replied firmly in the negative and like many others got very wet. After 1997, Lam became Secretary for Constitutional and Mainland Affairs and Chief Secretary for Administration. After retiring from the civil service, he studied theology at the University of Oxford.
fn14 Yeung Sum was a lecturer at the University of Hong Kong who in 1990 became the founding vice-chairman of the first pro-democracy party in Hong Kong and was elected to Legco during the 1990s and again from 1998 until 2008. A moderate member of the Democrats, he was briefly Martin Lee’s successor as chairman of the party 2002–4. He was arrested for taking part in the protests against the extradition bill in 2019. Courageous and genial, the fact that he was targeted as an enemy by communist hacks says most of what one needs to know about them.
fn15 Henry Tang was a member of a very rich mainland family who had close ties with some Chinese communist leaders and became Financial Secretary of Hong Kong for 2003–7 and Chief Secretary from 2007 to 2011. He was defeated for the post of chief executive by C. Y. Leung in 2012, which took some doing, but he was equal to the task.
The Empire Goes Home: May 1996–June 1997
fn1 Nicholas Ng was a civil servant who moved up through senior positions becoming Secretary for Constitutional Affairs from 1994 to 1997. He was appointed Secretary for Transport from that year until 2002. He became chairman of the Public Service Commission in 2003 until his retirement in 2014.
fn2 Sir T. L. Yang was born in Shanghai and moved to Hong Kong after studying law in England. He climbed steadily up the judicial ladder from magistrate to District Judge to Justice of Appeal, and was finally appointed Chief Justice of Hong Kong by David Wilson in 1988. He was the only ethnic Chinese lawyer to hold this post during the period of Britain’s colonial rule. He remained in that post until 1996. In the election by the specially appointed small committee to select the first Chief Executive of the SAR he was defeated by 320 to 42 by C. H. Tung. In retirement he pursued his interest in translating Chinese classics into English.
fn3 Michel Camdessus was an economist who became Governor of the Bank of France and managing director of the International Monetary Fund from 1987 to 2000.