Friday 10 April
I woke up after about four hours’ sleep to the Today programme. Predictable headlines. Major wins surprising victory, party chairman loses seat. I don’t feel particularly depressed by what has happened. That’s partly because while I predicted that Johnfn1 would win the general election – I told him this last Monday – I also thought it was inevitable that I would lose my own seat because of tactical voting by Labour. When I also told John this, he thought I was simply being characteristically pessimistic. My relatively sanguine feelings are also in part the result of the unsavoury and unpleasant behaviour of the crowd outside Bath’s Guildhall when the result was announced. I think I would have felt worse if my opponents had behaved better. For millions of viewers the resulting pictures were obviously pretty disturbing. It all left a nasty taste in the mouth and must have been an awful shock for Laura and Alice, who were in Bath at our headquarters, and for Kate, who heard all this on the World Service in Latin America. They were all upset. But as Nelson Polsby, our American friend from Berkeley, said on the telephone earlier today – ‘Why are you worried that your kids are concerned about you? Most parents don’t have kids who care that much. You shouldn’t be worried. You should be grateful.’
The nasty stuff was much worse for Lavender and Freda.fn2 While I was trying to run the national campaign for at least part of each day, Lavender had fought the whole election on the ground in Bath with Freda and three marvellous young helpers, including Magnus Goodlad, the very engaging son of Alastair.fn3 She threw herself into it and found the insults of Liberal black propaganda on the doorstep about my allegedly inadequate performance difficult to sometimes take. One of the myths in politics is that the Liberals are always the nice guys. In reality they sometimes fight the dirtiest campaigns, much dirtier than Labour or my lot. I guess this is likely to be the end of my political career at Westminster, but I was buoyed up on my return to London in the early hours of this morning with a sort of Roman triumph in Smith Square. Lavender had none of that to ease the pain and disappointment. She is immensely brave and has dealt marvellously well with all the bitterness of defeat. She is incredibly resilient, but that shouldn’t make one underestimate how rough it’s been for her. I don’t think that I could put her through anything like this again. Maybe I should have taken the advice to switch to another constituency like Westbury when it was suggested (even offered). But I couldn’t face the prospect of confronting my party workers with what would seem like an admission of defeat. They have been so loyal to me and I think I owed it to them to be loyal in return. Even some of my friends seemed to suggest that this shows that I’m not really professional about my political career – ‘career’ that was, I suppose.
Anyway, since I got back to London at some God-forsaken hour yesterday evening, John has been immensely kind and generous. He kept on referring to his gloom at winning the election while I lost my own seat. No one could have been more considerate or more thoughtful. In among all the shouting and boozing and cheering, he took me into the little office next to my own in Smith Square where my political adviser used to work. He wanted straight away to run through some of the options for me. He mentioned the possibility of fighting a by-election, going to the House of Lords, continuing as party chairman without a seat in the Commons, or searching for a career in business and trying to get back into the Commons as soon as possible. But we agreed not to take things further that night. I slept on the options, insofar as I slept at all.
So on the morning of the unexpected (to some) Conservative victory and my own rather humiliating defeat, I walked over to Downing Street from our flat next to Westminster Cathedral. I went through St James’s Park, which is always good for morale, and climbed the steps into Downing Street getting a very demonstrative salute from the policeman on duty.
John and I met on our own in his study. We talked first of all about the Cabinet and ministerial appointments. He said that he had wanted to make me Chancellor of the Exchequer. I am at least spared that torture, especially given the difficult position that the economy is in. He then ran through all the options that faced me, adding the possibility of the governorship of Hong Kong. Almost the moment that he mentioned it, this seemed to me the best and most exciting of all the possible choices. We had briefly discussed candidates for this job before the election and I could remember thinking then that it would be a terrific challenge, and that in other circumstances I would have found it exceptionally attractive. Going through the other possibilities, he began with a ministerial job in the House of Lords, either departmental or as a sort of deputy and progress chaser for him. I don’t think that it is possible to run a major department from the House of Lords – either, for example, the Ministry of Defence or possibly following Douglas Hurdfn4 in due course at the Foreign Office. Having seen the difficulties that confronted my former boss, Peter Carrington,fn5 during the Falklands affair, it seemed to me that it just wasn’t possible to pursue a career in the long term at the centre of politics from the upper house. A by-election seems even more inappropriate. It would be both unseemly and reckless.
Saturday 11 and Sunday 12 April
Lots of speculation about my future, most of it well-meaning but without much reference to my own views. Some in the government, for example Tristan Garel-Jones,fn6 are already suggesting that Nick Scott should resign from his seat in Chelsea and that I should be parachuted into the constituency. This would be an exceptionally hazardous enterprise. What is a ‘safe’ constituency in these circumstances? I could easily be turned into the Patrick Gordon Walkerfn7 of Conservative politics. But above all I am wholly opposed to putting Lavender and the family through hell once again. As for trying to collect directorships and waiting for something to turn up, there is a real danger of me turning into a political wallflower – waiting for the next dance and then, when I’m finally made an offer, tripping over or treading on the constituency’s toes.
These are many negative reasons for feeling positive about Hong Kong. But there are other far better arguments as well. Hong Kong seems to be a proper job, probably impossible to do to the applause of the world but nevertheless an honourable enterprise. Lavender said when we discussed it, ‘if you don’t do it, you will probably spend the rest of your life regretting it’. But if I were to do it, it would be Lavender who would have to make the biggest sacrifice.fn8
For myself, I am immensely excited by the prospect of being a hands-on mayor of Hong Kong, as well as dealing with the difficult diplomatic relationship with China in what would be a historic mission as Britain’s last major colonial Governor. Add to that, I know from my work as Minister for Development that the Asian and Pacific rim is where so much of the action is going to be for the next generation and longer. It would be a difficult job, but I think it is important to show the world that we can handle this last imperial responsibility in a decent way and which doesn’t betray the people of Hong Kong.
When I came out of No. 10 on Friday and Saturday mornings, John very generously steered me into the waiting crowd with him, trying to ensure that I shared in his huge personal success. And this is what it had been. He had not rushed to the polls at the end of the Gulf War to fight a jingoistic campaign, as he could have done and as many had advised him to do. He had actually gone to the country when we were still in recession with very few glimpses of light at the end of the tunnel. Conservative MPs owe him a great deal. What are the chances of them showing it?
Monday 13 April
Douglas and Judy Hurd invited us to supper after a weekend of Cabinet-making during which a number of my friends spent a good deal of time on the telephone worrying about what they might be offered and taking my advice on what they might accept. I began all these conversations saying politely that it might not be very helpful for me to talk about other people’s jobs when I hadn’t got one myself! Although he set out all the good reasons for going to Hong Kong, Douglas leaned over backwards to make clear that the Prime Minister obviously hoped I would stay in the UK. Douglas added that in ideal circumstances he would have liked me to follow him at the Foreign Office. But he also admitted that the governorship of Hong Kong was much more interesting than most of the jobs available in British politics.
Tuesday 14 April
News of the possibility of my going to Hong Kong has leaked, I suspect because one or two of my friends have been so noisily advocating my remaining in British politics. The story has rapidly turned into the suggestion that a short break that Lavender and I are planning to take with Alice in France over the Easter weekend is intended to be my time to reflect on whether or not to head east. Truth to tell, Lavender and I have pretty well made up our minds already.
Thursday 16 April
In the business class lounge at Gatwick airport on our way to Toulouse, we encountered Christopher Blandfn9 and his wife. They were taking David Owenfn10, John Birtfn11 and their wives for a weekend at the Blands’ French home. It was an amusing encounter. David Owen’s name has been mentioned in connection with the governorship of Hong Kong. In fact, in public and in private, he has been extremely positive about my suitability for the job. But at Gatwick we both fenced very courteously over the subject. Christopher and John thought that I should not take it. I would be bored. There was nothing left to do. Even David wondered whether I would get bored very quickly.
Friday 17–Tuesday 21 April
We had a marvellous Easter weekend in France, staying east of Albi. I wrote a letter to the Prime Minister to say that I would like to go to Hong Kong, which I sent immediately on my return, and then talked to him on the phone in Huntingdon. He was understanding. I felt a bit guilty about leaving him and the government. But, as Lavender said, I wasn’t really to blame! The truth is that I am at the heart of a great irony in which the Governor of Hong Kong has been chosen by the electors of Bath, principally by Labour voters who decided for perhaps the first time in their lives – maybe the last – to vote Liberal.
The weeks until my departure for Hong Kong were crowded with meetings, lunches, dinners and briefings. At the end of June I summarized them and reflected on some of the main questions about the job ahead:
After I had spoken to John on my return from France, his private secretary, Andrew Turnbull, came on the phone to point out that I hadn’t discussed with the Prime Minister what honour I wanted to take with me to Hong Kong. I told him that all I had been was a politician and I had what amounted to my house colours – that is, I had been made a privy counsellor. I didn’t feel the need to take anything else but added that if anyone thought that there were likely to be riots in Hong Kong as the result of my not becoming a KCMG or something similar, I would of course be happy to reconsider the point. That was the last I heard of honours. I had to engage in some fancy footwork about not wearing the usual gubernatorial uniform, in which I was greatly helped when it came to this issue by the Foreign Office deputy secretary responsible among other matters for Hong Kong, John Coles.fn12 He thought there was a case for not wearing the uniform, and the permanent secretary was happy to agree. The Palace – particularly Robert Fellowesfn13 and Sue Husseyfn14 – was very understanding and so we disposed of the hat, plumes and all that nonsense. It must be more difficult to talk about openness and democracy if you’re wearing feathers in your hat. I must also admit that this isn’t just a consequence of a democratic instinct but plain vanity. Given my general shape I’d look pretty ridiculous in the sort of outfit which, to carry it off, needs rather more height and less bulk than I have.
There were 10 weeks between my appointment and departure for Singapore, and on from there to Hong Kong, to take up my duties on 5 July. I have still had to act as party chairman until Norman Fowlerfn15 takes over the job later in the summer. But I have spent most of my time in a small room at the Foreign Office crunching through briefing papers and meeting some of the diplomats who have been working on the Hong Kong handover to China. I have had an excellent temporary private secretary, John Morris, who confirmed with others all my views about the quality of our foreign service and about the populist nonsense which you often read in the tabloids about its disengagement from the realities of life in Britain. I am also extremely fortunate that the head of the Hong Kong department is a star called Peter Ricketts.fn16 He is clever, sensible, amiable and extremely well informed. He has understood some of my initial instincts very quickly. He also never hesitates to tell me when he thinks I am wrong but is able to do it in a way which doesn’t bruise my feelings.
All my briefings make me realize the conflicting pressures that I’m going to be under. First of all, in Hong Kong itself people both want a quiet life with China and at the same time a Governor who is prepared to stand up to China on their behalf. My predecessor, David Wilson,fn17 was criticized, sometimes unfairly, for not being tough enough with Beijing, an attack which came not least from members of the business community. I suspect that the number of people in the former category (the quiet life) will increase the nearer we get to 1997 and the number in the latter will decline. Secondly, one group in Hong Kong will be pressing with the enthusiastic encouragement of the world outside for greater democracy; they will get huge backing from the media everywhere, not least in North America. On the other hand, a more conservative and business-oriented group will argue (whatever they have said in the past) against anything which seems to annoy China. A lot of this group will have foreign passports in their back pockets. It is obviously perfectly possible to construct a wholly rational policy which will fall somewhere between the Bishop Muzorewa’s and the Mr Mugabe’s of Hong Kong, between those who will be happy to settle for anything provided it gives them a quiet life and those who are prepared to have a fight. But since we need a majority to get business through the Legislative Council, this will produce some problems for Hong Kong’s executive. Thirdly, the business community while wanting to avoid any trouble with China will also look for continuing certainty that the rule of law and the conditions of stability for an effective market economy survive. Hong Kong’s success depends not only on its free economy but also on freedom of speech and the rule of law. These are not things that you find where there is a communist dictatorship. Fourthly, there is the constituency at home to think about as well. On the whole people don’t much care about what’s happening in Hong Kong unless it goes wrong. They would like to feel a warm glow of satisfaction that we are doing the decent thing by Hong Kongers, but they feel somewhat constrained in their enthusiasm by dislike for the gerontocracy in Beijing, which doesn’t give much of a damn about concepts like human rights. Meantime those old bruisers in Beijing want Hong Kong to go on being successful economically but certainly don’t want it to appear as a focus for democratic dissent in mainland China. They plainly don’t trust Britain at all. They think that we want to rip off Hong Kong, taking all the loot with us when we go, and to leave behind a political timebomb which will blow their autocratic regime to smithereens. It’s extraordinary that given the effort we have put into the relationship with China – Sinophile experts in the Foreign Office, trade links and even Ted Heathfn18 at his occasionally charming – that this degree of misunderstanding should continue.
There are a lot of circles to square. It may even be more difficult than coping with the poll tax or looking after the Conservative Party’s interests during a recession. But it will certainly be more interesting.
The Chinese have evidently decided to give me a rough time when I arrive. I am told that they are anxious about four things. First that the Prime Minister and I used the word freedom as well as stability and prosperity when my appointment was announced. Secondly Alastair Goodlad, a long-time friend and the Minister of State for Asia in the Foreign Office, on a recent visit to Hong Kong said that the Basic Law could be changed if the Chinese had the political will to act, in other words to increase the pace of democratization. (Alastair has a deserved reputation for being a wise owl; like other wise owls, part of this reputation is a result of knowing when to keep quiet, so his remark on this occasion was entirely correct if slightly out of character.) Thirdly they are concerned that the Prime Minister saw Martin Leefn19 when the latter was in London and they think that we are planning to put Martin and his Democrat colleagues on the Executive Council – something that they vehemently oppose. Fourthly they are said to be worried that we have referred again to the announcement that we made back in 1990 that we would return to them before the 1995 Legislative Council elections to talk about the pace of democratization. They are obviously going slow on the airport negotiations to try to use these as a lever on me politically. Indeed they have proposed both to the Prime Minister and less formally that I should go to Beijing to sort out the airport before I even arrive in Hong Kong. The linkage between politics and the airport is not something we can concede. If I agreed with them informally not, say, to appoint Martin Lee to Exco, they would inevitably leak the news, so that I would arrive in Hong Kong as a Governor who had kowtowed even before setting foot in the city.
Clearly building a new airport in Hong Kong will play a fairly prominent part in the politics of the territory over the next few years. Hong Kong has an international airport called Kai Tak, which has served the city for over 70 years but is now inadequate for its huge job as a growing international air hub. It is situated in the east of Kowloon with a single runway which stretches out into the bay. Landing at the airport involves a pretty exciting flight path over Hong Kong from the west with a large right turn down into the final descent over high-rise blocks of flats and – it sometimes seems – almost through the washing lines. Anyone who has taken this journey, not least those who have managed to do it while sitting on the flight deck, knows that the excitement of this arrival is a guinea a minute. So Hong Kong has for years needed a new airport on environmental, noise and safety grounds – one which can accommodate night flights and with at least one more runway. There have been proposals on the table since the 1970s. Eventually a new and manageable scheme emerged from several consultants and planners in the 1980s. It involved flattening one small island (Chek Lap Kok) off the principal island to the west of Hong Kong called Lantau. This would involve a huge amount of reclamation, further development of the port (particularly the development of two additional container terminals) and a huge infrastructural network of bridges, roads, tunnels and rail links. The principal bridge, called Tsing Ma, would itself be a huge project. Along with the terminals, runways and concourses, this was going to be one of the largest construction projects of the century and of course very expensive. But the case for it was overwhelming, not just in terms of transport but also in expressing confidence in Hong Kong’s future and building up the belief in the community in its own prospects. The decision to go ahead was taken bravely and imaginatively by David Wilson (with the enthusiastic and very competent support of his and now my Chief Secretary, David Ford).fn20 This at around the time that the Tiananmen massacres in 1989 were undermining the city’s confidence.
Noting the priority that the British were giving to this airport, the Chinese took the view that they could use building it as a way of trying to tweak British policy overall in Hong Kong to their own advantage. China’s principal leverage was based on the fact that borrowing was likely to run beyond 1997, and so were many of the building contracts. So if they were so minded, they could throw large numbers of spanners in the works. While the costs were not insuperable for a community which had been growing its economy for almost 30 years and which had huge financial reserves and a superb credit rating, clearly some in China thought – or purported to think – that we were trying to leave Hong Kong with gigantic debts. Perhaps they also reckoned, in their most conspiratorial moments, that it was all a plot to get more business for British firms. I imagine that if the roles been reversed this would have been exactly what they would have been trying to do. Some of them also doubtless thought the priority should be given to developing the airport at Guangdong for the whole region. So my predecessor and the government had had great difficulty agreeing with China that the project should go ahead. Eventually and unwisely, his principal adviser at the time, Percy Cradock,fn21 supported by David Wilson, persuaded John Major that he should visit Beijing in order to sign an agreement with the Chinese Prime Minister, Li Peng,fn22 for the project to be given a green light. So it was that in September 1991 John Major was persuaded to become the first Western leader to visit Beijing since the murders in and around Tiananmen Square. The Chinese rubbed salt in the wounds, and added to John’s humiliation and the criticism he received around the world, by getting him to inspect a guard of honour in the square where so many students had demonstrated and had been killed. John had tried to make up for some of this indignity by raising human rights issues with the Chinese leaders he saw, especially the Prime Minister, one of the most hardline of Chinese leaders implicated in the murder of students and others. At the same time Percy Cradock (whose terrible idea this trip had been) was telling the journalists in John’s accompanying party that any references to human rights were just for show and didn’t really amount to anything. So John signed an agreement with the awful Li Peng. Major took a lot of stick for going through the whole disobliging business. Needless to say, none of this made any difference to the way the Chinese behaved. They simply went on dragging their feet about the project and raising one objection after another. Inevitably this had a considerable effect on John’s views on doing business with China and on the advice given by some of his senior officials, particularly the allegedly omniscient Cradock.
Thursday 2–Saturday 4 July – Last thoughts before departure
Ambassador Ma,fn23 a more genial Chinese diplomat than most, gave a dinner for me just before we left London at which I explained the general outline of what I wanted to do pretty robustly, making it clear that I couldn’t go to Beijing while the Chinese were stirring up controversy about things that they wanted me not to do in Hong Kong. Their constant criticisms of any idea of appointing democrats like Martin Lee to any significant posts will make the issue harder to handle whatever I decide to do. I had rather liked Martin Lee when I had met him before my appointment as Governor. Reading about him he seems a decent and brave fellow. He is certainly no radical. I would reckon that in British politics he would count as a moderate conservative. His real crime as far as Beijing is concerned is to believe in the rule of law and democracy. I hope that Ambassador Ma passes on my comments, though I suspect that in the Chinese communist system it is far more difficult than in ours to tell the truth upward.
In any event it’s clearly going to be difficult to untangle all these knots in a way which looks at all honourable to the rest of the world. To some extent our colonial history is going to be judged through the prism of the next five years. But, of course, the problems are very different to those we normally face in decolonization. A metaphor which I have found myself using is that our normal decolonizing job has been like firing a satellite into orbit. You put the rule of law, an independent civil service and the Westminster model on the launching pad, light the blue touch paper, and hope that the rocket takes off and puts the satellite into an independent orbit. With Hong Kong, we are talking about a docking in outer space – docking with a regime which, despite China’s formidable economic achievements, a lot of people don’t much care for. After all, a large proportion of Hong Kong’s population are refugees from communism.
The actual system of government in Hong Kong puzzles me. The Governor and his colleagues seem to be trapped in a no man’s land between executive-led government and some limited steps towards accountability. The existing Executive Council (Exco) is the top of the pyramid of surrogate democracy – lots of advisory panels in which good men (and women) and true from right across the community come together to participate in its administration. But perhaps they are not drawn from right across the community. Both those strongly in favour of democracy and the hard-line supporters of Beijing are usually overlooked. But with the arrival of greater democracy in the Legislative Council (Legco) as more of its members have been directly elected in recent years, the role of the executive and the relationship between the Executive Council (Exco) and Legco has ended up in a frightful muddle. What I’m inclined to do is to make a proper distinction between Exco and Legco and create some sort of hinge machinery between the two, which should probably turn out to be me. It would bypass the question of whether or not Martin Lee and other United Democrats of Hong Kong (UDHK) should be posted from the Legco onto Exco. I have explored this idea already with one or two people. I talked to my deputy, David Ford, about it. He’s an amiable, competent and decent man with huge experience, not least on security. He is evidently also excellent at dealing with people and managing big projects. He clearly wants to go out of his way to help me as much as possible. I’ve also talked to Lydia Dunn,fn24 the senior member of the Executive Council, and perhaps the most prominent member of the non-elective bits of political accountability in the colony. Lydia has also been a senior executive and director of Swire’s for a number of years.
Dealing with this may take up an inordinate amount of time for a modest outcome. Of course, it will be particularly important in managing my life as, in effect, the city’s mayor. I want to be able to tackle a lot of social and economic issues and to plan Hong Kong’s infrastructure for the future so will need a political base to do those things. But the relationships I am talking about should not delay too much my work on other matters, even though it always takes a long time to deal with anything in politics, or I guess elsewhere, where egos are involved. The three issues that I am really bothered about are these:
First of all, I have to push through arrangements to secure Hong Kong’s future judicial arrangements. These have focused recently on the establishment of a court of final appeal – the colony’s senior judicial body – on which there is as yet no agreement with anyone. Indeed an attempt to put arrangements in place in 1991 failed in the face of condemnations by both the legal profession and Legco. Part of the argument adduced against these proposals was that they had been produced secretly after discussions with China virtually alone. The critics, and they were in a big majority, thought that everything was being rigged behind the community’s back. This is a very strong argument for being as open as possible in handling big and consequential issues. It’s terrible politics if it looks as though proposals have emerged only after discussions in Beijing, and, of course, the first knowledge of what’s been agreed leaks very often out of Beijing itself.
The second issue is how we can bring Hong Kong’s laws into line with the Bill of Rights that was introduced in 1991. This was partly done in order to try to steady morale after Tiananmen and partly to ensure that the provisions of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rightsfn25 are clearly understood and accepted as applicable to Hong Kong by Beijing before the handover. The Covenant itself is included in the Basic Law. This will involve getting rid of some colonial legislation (which no Governor these days could possibly use), much of it enacted in order to deal with the Cultural Revolution riots in the 1960s when over 50 people were killed. I guess that every effort to remove a bit of legislation which could be used to turn Hong Kong into something nearer to a police state will be opposed by China. Due process does not feature prominently there.
Thirdly, and most immediate, there is no agreement yet on how to conduct the 1994 elections for Hong Kong’s local government and the Legco elections in 1995. We have got very little time, but there’s no plan yet for what to do. The only clear agreement with Beijing is not to increase the number of directly elected seats unilaterally. I couldn’t try to overturn this even if I wanted to do so. This ordains that there should be no more than 20 directly elected legislators from geographically based constituencies in the legislature after 1995; 30 members drawn from the so-called functional constituencies (which are supposed to represent the main interest groups in the city – like lawyers, teachers and agricultural workers); and 10 elected from a so-called election committee, the precise composition of which is unknown. I realize that I can’t increase the number of directly elected legislators – the most obviously democratic part of the whole system. But I’m absolutely sure in my own mind that within the rather narrow confines which are left I can make the whole package more open, fair and obviously accountable. I expect Chinese apparatchiks will be unnerved by any attempts which seek to secure a fairer electoral process.
In all of these matters, while the Joint Declaration and Basic Law provide parameters, there is much more flexibility than some people seem to suppose. But we can’t determine how much simply by waiting to see what the elderly bruisers in Beijing have to say. There are also very different views across the Foreign Office about how to deal with all this. Some of the differences are explicable in generational terms. There is a cadre at the top of the service of older Sinophiles who think that, at the end of the day, only people with their experience of dealing with the Chinese know quite how to behave. They pretty well take it for granted that ultimately you have to go along with Beijing rather than risk arguments. Beijing rules – UK. It may be that if you spend years of your life learning Mandarin, reading Chinese history and immersing yourself in the country’s culture you inevitably fetch up taking this sort of view. Thus my predecessor in Hong Kong, David Wilson, a man of great integrity and a formidable China scholar, is certain to regard my political instincts with some distaste. There is a group in the middle of the foreign service about my own age who seem to be prepared to be rather more robust with the Chinese. They’ve spent a lot of time in the last 10 years engaged in hand-to-hand combat in the trenches with Chinese diplomats over the Joint Declaration and then over the airport. A younger group are much more ebullient in their views and think we should flex our own muscles occasionally. I’m bound to say that I’ve got increasingly cross about references to Chinese ‘face’ (by the older group in particular) and feel that we need to refer ourselves to British ‘face’ from time to time. I made this point to a glamorous Hong Kong United Front activist called Nellie Fong, an emissary allegedly sent to me by my opposite number in Beijing, Lu Ping.fn26 She seemed rather shocked by what I had to say. Why did I not understand the honour of dealing with those who had the mandate of heaven? She didn’t quite say the master race but it was what she implied. I suppose she could have noted that I didn’t even have the mandate of Bath.
The permanent secretary in the Foreign Office, David Gillmore,fn27 seems to take a view closer to my own about dealing with China, making clear that we care about what local citizens in Hong Kong think and have to say. He seems much more concerned than many others about the responsibility we have for their future. He certainly doesn’t subscribe to the view that all the people in Hong Kong bother about is business and money and that they don’t care anything about politics. He reminds me of the number of Hong Kong citizens who left mainland China because of the consequences of communist politics, and the number as well who have been to university and read as many books about what an open society is as he and I have.
I get John Morris to take a full note of my principal meeting with Gillmore and I do the same when I meet the high priest of all things Chinese in British policy, Sir Percy Cradock. He has been involved in every aspect of Chinese affairs since he worked in the embassy in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution, when a mob broke into the embassy where the ambassador and staff were playing bridge with very stiff upper lips and perhaps good cards. The last telegram before the embassy was burnt down allegedly began with the words, ‘I had just bid three no trumps’. Cradock himself eventually became ambassador in Beijing and did every senior job in negotiations with China over the Hong Kong transfer of sovereignty. He became a principal adviser to Margaret Thatcher as well as to John Major, especially though not exclusively on China, and plainly regarded the Joint Declaration as very much his own work. He doesn’t like politicians; it is our vulgarity I suppose. He is undoubtedly clever though intellectually spectacularly vain. When I say one or two things about dealing with China, he does everything except roll his eyes. He makes it clear to me that virtually every jot and tittle has been decided about the handover to China in five years’ time. There is nothing else to do. We should just try to ensure that the train which he has constructed stays on the rails which he has laid down with a variety of Chinese partners. It may be a bit unfair but I’m not sure that the interests of people who live in Hong Kong are of very much concern to him, though he plainly thinks that they will be best off if nobody disagrees with him when it comes to planning their future. I normally like intelligent senior officials but this clever, conceited, acerbic man puts my back up. The feeling is obviously mutual. He gets particularly cross when I refer to debates about the Joint Declaration in the House of Commons when our commitments to democracy were referred to again and again by MPs and even (less robust) by ministers. He doesn’t quite say, ‘they don’t know what they’re talking about’, but this is what he implies. During this meeting, which had quite an effect on me, Sir Percy uttered the lines which I am told he has often used before. Referring to his experiences during the Cultural Revolution and to subsequent events, not least the murders in 1989, he told me that the Chinese leaders may be thuggish dictators but that they were men of their word and would stick by what they had promised to do. I hope that is true.
I’m clearly going to have to do quite a bit to beef up the way that the Governor’s job will be done in the last five years of British sovereignty. Douglas Hurd has suggested to me that I take what he rather charmingly calls a small ‘équipe’. I’ve managed to persuade two of the best people who have ever worked for me to come to Hong Kong. Martin Dinhamfn28 was private secretary when I was Minister for Overseas Development. He is charming, very good company and hard-working, and everyone likes him. He jumps at the chance of coming to Hong Kong with his wife and two young children. I also ask Edward Llewellyn,fn29 who helped me when I was party chairman, particularly with the international side of the job. He was very valuable when I was trying, successfully as it turned out, to negotiate the Conservative Party’s membership of the European People’s Party in the European Parliament. I want him to keep links with politicians back in London, not just John Major but Margaret Thatcher as well. He knows them both and they get on well with him, as does pretty much everyone else. Edward is unencumbered by family. He hardly ever stops working, is great fun, loyal and again clever. He’s a good linguist but I doubt whether his abilities to speak French and German will enable even him to learn Cantonese in Hong Kong with all its difficult tones.
Much of the time during the summer is spent saying goodbye to our friends and above all to our daughters Kate and Laura. It is going to feel horribly like the break-up for the time being of a very close family. Kate is in Uruguay as part of a Latin American gap year between school and Newcastle University. Just as she heard about my defeat in Bath on the BBC World Service, she also learned about me going to Hong Kong in the same way. This was not ideal! But I think she’s okay. Her main worry has been that I might have bullied Lavender into going to Asia. I hope we have reassured her about this. It’s typical of Kate to be thinking about others rather than herself. She is a terrific young woman and it is not easy to have had to make big decisions which will affect her when she is so far away from home. She has a great deal of gumption and I think she will eventually enjoy the adventure. Laura has decided that she doesn’t want to come to Hong Kong to work or study. She is not interested in trying for university but is set on going to the superb Prue Leith cookery school in London. Laura is far cleverer than she ever wants to demonstrate to her teachers, as they clearly recognize, somewhat to their annoyance! She is very close to both her sisters and I hope she won’t mind too much the fact that one will be in Newcastle and the other in Hong Kong, because that is what Alice has decided she wants to do. We offer her the chance of staying in Britain and going to boarding school. Thank heavens she didn’t want to do so. She is very bright, went to secondary school a year early and behaves with considerable maturity without being either precocious or a know-all. If she grows up like this, she will be a very lovely human being. We are obviously going to miss Kate and Laura very much and hope that Laura doesn’t regret her decision. She is a lovable girl but at the moment very much a teenager – she knows what she wants to do and that’s that. She will come out to Hong Kong with us for a few weeks’ holiday before returning to become a cookery student. I think most parents sooner or later come to understand that as their children grow older they morph from colonial dependencies into rival sovereignties.
There is one other meeting I should mention with someone who is not a member of our family. (She has her own to cope with.) We had 40 minutes with the Queen at Windsor Castle in a beautiful room approached by a long corridor with corgis in its shadows waiting to leap out in ambush. She was in sparkling form, very knowledgeable, had read all the recent telegrams, and was full of stories about her recent state visit to France. She commands affection as well as respect, if it’s not lèse-majesté to say this.
Sunday 5 July – off to Hong Kong
I went to mass in the cathedralfn30 and then we left on our adventure. Five years ago, on a Sunday morning, I would probably have been sitting here doing my boxes as Minister for Overseas Development. When I’m back here in five years’ time what on earth will I be preparing to do and what will Hong Kong have done to the Patten family? As Mother Julian of Norwich apparently said – though hardly anything else is known about her – ‘all things shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well’. Leaving home was particularly emotional for Alice and Laura, above all Alice, who is coming for as long as her mother and I are there. She stood in the bedroom which has been the centre of her childhood in floods of tears. I said to her, ‘I bet you cry in five years’ time when you leave Hong Kong.’
Monday 6 July
We flew on Singapore Airlines. I slept on the flight thanks to some sleeping pills which our neighbour next door, a doctor, had given us. We were met at Singapore airport by the High Commissioner, Gordon Duggan, and taken in his Daimler to his residence, Eden Hall. It’s a handsome neo-colonial house, all verandas and whirling fans, and a garden with a swimming pool and lots of lush vegetation. The weather was of course sticky and the air conditioning in the bedrooms made them feel like refrigerators. But we were made very welcome and looked after rather as though we were being prepared for some great sporting competition.
Tuesday 7 July
Today I read a lot of telegrams, continued reading Jan Morris’s brilliant book on Hong Kong, and looked again at my speech for my arrival in Hong Kong. I had meetings with the Prime Minister, Goh Chok Tong, and with the senior minister, Lee Kuan Yew,fn31 with whom I had had conversations a couple of times before. The presidential palace is a handsome white stucco building in parkland with a golf course. With its skyscrapers and neat streets, I recalled again how much Singapore reminds me of Rex Warner’s satirical novel from the 1930s The Aerodrome, just as the senior minister reminds me of the Air Vice-Marshal in the book. It gives a marvellous view of some of the social engineering consequences of mostly benevolent authoritarianism. Mr Goh is a perfectly friendly fellow, though rather low on charisma, and conversation was a bit of a struggle. On the other hand, talking with Lee is no problem at all. He hits a lot of shots and one doesn’t often get much of a chance to hit the ball back. He is highly intelligent. He and his whole family are decorated with double firsts from Cambridge. He speaks very eloquently, using precise words to convey what he means, so for example he spoke of the danger of implosion in China rather than explosion. His main message was that he was pretty confident about the next 10 to 20 years in China and in Asia as a whole. Second, he thought the reforms in China were probably irreversible but it was a pity that both Deng’s originally chosen successors had fallen by the wayside. He thought that Zhao Ziyang had shown weakness during the Tiananmen Square crisis. I didn’t get the impression that Lee thought it should have been handled with more delicacy! Third, he said that the job in Hong Kong was not the usual decolonization task. I would have to cope with a unique situation while sensitively ignoring pressure from Europe and North America. He was not wildly optimistic about being able to square all the circles, but thought that it would be right to set out clearly in my first speech to the Legislative Council in October what I wished to do and the criteria by which I believed we should be judged in Hong Kong. I should then stick to my guns. I should regard this as being like the Prime Minister with a new government in a new country setting out an agenda. Fourth, he believes that the iron parameters of our job in Hong Kong are the Joint Declaration and the Basic Law and that I should not try to push China too far beyond them. Fifth, he stressed that the Chinese were unlikely ever really to trust Britain. They would always think that we were attempting to make off with all the booty. He is impassive, shows little emotion, but delivers all these views with considerable force. To his credit he did listen a bit to what I had to say in reply, which is more than can be said for many world leaders.
I had a lunch with leading members of the British business community – Shell, ICI, Standard Chartered, Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank and so on – the general view was that Hong Kong and Singapore shouldn’t be seen as competitors. (But, of course, they are.) Singapore was always likely to attract multinationals because it had no real local entrepreneurial base and was a comfortable place for executives to live. Hong Kong’s great strength was its entrepreneurial vitality and growing links with southern China.
The Duggans took us out to a Singaporean family restaurant for supper. It was huge, throbbing with noisy and cheerful families, and with delicious food. I hope we can go out to eat in Hong Kong, but when I’ve suggested this to people from time to time they look as though I’m crazy. They honestly think that the Governor should be wrapped up in Government House and in oodles of protocol. I suppose that the ubiquitous press corps may make it more difficult to get out informally in Hong Kong; even in Singapore they are all over us.
Wednesday 8 July
This morning I met the finance minister, who told me an amusing story about a meeting he had with his Chinese opposite number in Guangdong where people seem to be showing increasing signs of independence from Beijing. The Chinese minister’s Cantonese hosts had teased him that the waitresses in the restaurant were earning more than he did and were very patronizing about the central government. He thought the Chinese were coming to Singapore to try to learn about how to run a successful economy while keeping a reasonably tight grip on the population. He wasn’t sure that Chinese communists really understood the means but thought they were very keen on achieving the end.
Edward Llewellyn rang from Hong Kong to say that he and Martin had already formed some fairly clear ideas about what needed to be done to change and improve things. They were very keen to see me as soon as possible after I arrived. They also wanted to have a go at my diary to get an early meeting with the secretaries – Hong Kong’s cross between ministers and permanent secretaries – and with the political parties. They also think that I should get out and about around the territory without too much formality, seeing the bad things as well as the good.
Before dinner in the evening my private secretary from Hong Kong arrives. Richard Hoarefn32 is a career civil servant in the Hong Kong government and a decent, sensible, hard-working guy passionately interested in tennis and the theatre. He came with my marching orders for the next day’s inauguration and started to sound me out on how I want to run things in Government House. There is evidently a degree of apprehension about what my arrival is going to mean. More political mayor, less colonial Governor.
Lee Kuan Yew came to dinner with his wife, who is just as sharp as he is, a lawyer from Girton College, Cambridge, with, naturally, a first-class degree. He was again fascinating about the job ahead. He thinks I need to find an interlocutor in matters that have a bearing on China, an interlocutor with whom I can be candid and firm and whom the Chinese side will also trust. He also speaks of the importance of ensuring that we don’t lose control of things before we leave in 1997 – so we need to make certain that the police, Special Branch, the anti-corruption squad and so on are in good order. He says that if the Chinese really want to make trouble, they will do it by subversion rather than by any more frontal attacks. But our period of responsibility ends in 1997, not earlier.
Thursday 9 July – the Big Day
We got up early in the High Commissioner’s residence, repacked some of our nine suitcases, and said our goodbyes. We went to the airport with the Duggans and their nice 11-year-old son, Tom. He very much reminds me of Jim in Empire of the Sun, a marvellously old-fashioned bright spark. He gave us a spirited lecture at the airport on how to fill the holes in the ozone layer. I could have done with his advice when I was Secretary of State for the Environment, a point with which he seemed to agree. He interrupted our conversation later on with a loud humming, which we assumed initially was coming from the air conditioning. It turned out that he was trying to discover whether humming made one’s teeth rattle. Answer – probably not.
We travelled on Cathay Pacific, giving loads of interviews and being photographed most of the time – eating, blowing our noses, reading, going about our business, and in Alice’s case going up to the cockpit for the final descent into Hong Kong through the washing lines. I talked to some of the accompanying press from the UK as well as to some of the locals. Jonathan Dimbleby is with us and his director, Francis Gerard. They are going to do fly-on-the-wall documentaries about my five years in Hong Kong. We will give them access with the promise that they’ll try to give a pretty faithful record of how we spend five years in this last colony, how it treats us and how others behave in the run-up to 1997.
After we landed, we went straight to the main airport building, where our clothes were brought to us so we could make an appropriately well-dressed entry to the city. Lavender and the girls look terrific. I have a rather smart double-breasted grey suit which I bought just before we left from Aquascutum; later it was described by the appalling Nicholas Fairbairn as a Harry Lime outfit. At least it doesn’t have broad chalk stripes and wasn’t like most of my suits bought – off the peg on to the floor – at Marks & Spencer. I get my first insight into the marvellously competent way in which my life is going to be arranged from now on. My ADC, an immaculately dressed police superintendent, Felipe D’Oliveira, who is part Portuguese by background, has brought a couple of extra pairs of cufflinks and a belt just in case I forgot them myself. I’m to learn in due course that I’m not really trusted to dress myself any more. We drove from the airport to the quayside in Kowloon through cheering, waving crowds. They were very responsive when I practised my royal wave. They were probably more interested in the girls.
Then we embarked on the Lady Maurine. It is a spick and span little vessel, built originally I think before the Second World War to deal with fires and other emergencies. It was redesigned to provide occasional maritime relief for the Governor and has been performing that role for some decades. We crossed the harbour, one of the great journeys in the world. Fortunately, it had stopped raining and there were some occasional flashes of sunlight. Fire boats spray water; a 17-gun salute resounds from HMS Tamar, the onshore naval base; and there was a fly-past by planes and helicopters. I was never greeted like this in Bath.
We disembarked and shook a lot of hands and I saluted the guard of honour. Then we went into the City Hall for the swearing-in by the Chief Justice and for my inauguration speech. I had dictated what I wanted to say to Edward Llewellyn weeks before and then redrafted the whole thing myself. After that we had to telegram it to Beijing and Hong Kong for comments. We ignored most of them – particularly the suggestion from our Beijing embassy that it was wrong to talk about cooperation between two ancient civilizations since China was so much older than Britain. I am trying to be polite but I have never favoured pre-emptive cringes. I am certainly not going to accept the Chinese communist view of history. When Jiang Zeminfn33 went to Cairo and Egypt, he was told as he looked out at the Nile and the pyramids that civilization there was more than 3000 years old. When he got back to Beijing the party line was quickly adapted to assert that China was 4000 years old, later adjusted to 5000.
I’m supposed to know about making speeches and this one seems to go perfectly reasonably. Naturally, I can’t really tell whether people are just going to tell me (even more than is the case in other occupations) only what I want to hear. I try to project the image of being strong, calm and reasonable. Perhaps I really am! After the speech, there was a great bunfight and we were introduced for an hour to various groups of leading citizens, and then we took off in the Daimler for Government House.
Nicholas Witchell from the BBC was at the gate of my new home to give me a smart salute. BBC’s Breakfast Time apparently took the whole show live. We swept up to the entrance of Government House. Then took another salute from a guard of honour and went into the huge front hall. There was a horseshoe of GH staff, both domestic and private office. It was an awesome sight. There were private secretaries, valets, maids, cooks, gardeners, personal protection officers – the one on duty today is called Rocky, the other two are Wise and Alex. Along with their police colleagues in special protection, all are set to become friends. (Much the same thing happened when I was a Northern Ireland minister with my protection officers.) It was an overwhelmingly warm welcome.
We were then shown around the house. The great front hall is the crossroads between my domain and Lavender’s. As you enter, to the left are the housekeeper’s office and the office of the social secretary. The housekeeper, Elspeth Collins-Taylor, a young Scottish woman who is tough, competent, charming and blessedly normal, is responsible to Lavender for the four cooks, their staff, the stewards led by Ah Mo and Ah Chak, the cleaners, and the rest of the household and garden staff. We simply make over the household budget to Elspeth and she spends it as is necessary. Lavender leaves all that entirely to her. Also on this side of the hall are Lavender’s social secretary, Louise Cox, and her PA, Candy. Louise is not only responsible for the invitations to all GH functions, such as receptions and dinners, but, more important, she looks after Lavender’s myriad activities as the Governor’s wife. In addition to accompanying me to many functions – we are told that we will go to more charity balls than ever before or again – Lavender has her own engagements which crowd her diary. There are, for instance, over seventy charities of which she is going to be patron or in which she has to take a particular interest. She is a core part of the team. She seems to have something to do outside every day.
On the other side of the hall is the private office under Richard Hoare, which looks after me and is the link with the rest of the government. Alongside the private secretaries, I have a press spokesman and of course Martin and Edward who have already taken up their jobs here. Between Lavender’s domain and mine, the general office staff, for example Frankie and Johnny, rule the roost. We are told that Frankie knows everything you need to know in Hong Kong, where to get it and where to buy it at the best price. He turns out to be a superb wheeler-dealer who can also fix videos or hi-fi, type, do photo copying, deliver messages, meet Alice’s occasional technical or retail requirements, and generally (with Johnny) keep the house running.
We had a delicious dinner in a small dining room off the main official one. I imagine we will eat here most of the time when we’re on our own. If, that is, we are ever on our own. The food was superb – beginning with crispy duck pancakes. What another treat! We have a private flat on the first floor of the house and the girls have bedrooms in the tower, which was added by the Japanese during their occupation. It makes the whole house look a little like a Japanese railway station. We are all very happy with our accommodation, which is very much larger than the flat in Westminster. How could we possibly grumble? We look out at the view of the harbour which we can catch glimpses of in the gaps between the high-rise buildings that surround our gardens. The new Bank of China building by I. M. Pei is elegant and awesome. I’m not quite so keen on the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank building. Princess Margaret is said to have remarked that it looked like the back of a fridge. To which the obvious response was – ‘But how does Princess Margaret know what the back of a fridge looks like?’
Friday 10 July
After getting up this morning, I wandered into my dressing room and found my clothes for the day laid out neatly – boxers, socks, shirt, tie, suit, beautifully polished shoes. My very nice valet was hovering over them looking slightly nervous. I had to explain to him that I thought he had done brilliantly, but that in future I thought I would be able to dress myself in the morning. I hope I didn’t hurt his feelings. Dressing is part of the job that I should be able to manage myself. I’ve cleaned my own shoes since my dad taught me when I was a small boy. As I have got older, I have taken less and less time over this sartorial task. From now on I can count on having the most shiny shoes in Asia.
My first Friday in the office began with a meeting with the Chief Secretary, David Ford, and the Financial Secretary, Hamish Macleod. We very briefly discussed some of my initial thoughts, then I had to go off for what amounted to a full day of interviews with the press. I also had half-hour chats with the Anglican Bishop Peter Kwong (I’m not sure that I’m going to like him very much) and with the Catholic Cardinal Wu, who seems both amiable and holy.
The press interviews didn’t go too badly, though they began with a disaster. There was a great gang of journalists. I had thought it would be a good idea to attempt a cross between John Major’s Downing Street briefings and an American president’s rose garden media encounters. I suggested that we should get the media together in an easily recognizable place for something which wasn’t quite a press conference but which enabled me to say a few words about what was going on. I thought – crazy fool – this would make it easier to avoid endless door-stepping. But what a mess. I had wanted to hold the conference in front of the house on the steps under the rather palatial pillared entrance. But our media specialists suggested that the back garden would be better. I walked down to the microphones and began speaking to a whole battery of them surrounded by a throng of radio, television and print journalists. Unfortunately, we discovered that the microphones didn’t work! I then had an extremely uneasy 20 minutes with questions being thrown at me, which I would then repeat before attempting to answer without saying very much at all. It was not a happy experience. I feared that the press would be worse than it turned out to be. For example, it would have been reasonable to say that open and accessible government was obviously finding it difficult to get off the drawing board. I backed away from the microphones and headed back into the house as quickly as I could.
We then went through what a journalist subsequently described as a rather less restrained occasion than the campaigning that he had once covered with Rajiv Gandhi in Mumbai. I went to Mong Kok – not exactly the most salubrious area of Kowloon – and then on to Shatin and a squatters’ encampment at Diamond Hill. We travelled to Mong Kok on the Metro surrounded by sweating, jostling radio, television and newspaper journalists, and lots of photographers. It was two hours of mayhem. I was worried that the old ladies and children whom we encountered would be trampled underfoot or beaten into submission by photographers and their large cameras as we heaved around the Metro and then the streets of this busy working-class area. Mong Kok is a district of fairly dilapidated small shops and flats with, not surprisingly, problems of crime and prostitution. I am told that it is the most densely populated place in the world; in the mid-1970s there were over 650,000 people per square mile. There were street markets everywhere, many of them selling obviously fake designer kit. It might have made good television but I’m not sure that I made as much impact with the public as I would have liked, although the people we saw seemed cheerful enough.
We went out to dinner with David Ford and his wife Gillian at their home, Victoria House, three quarters of the way up to the peak. The view from the terrace and garden in front of the house is absolutely stunning. We looked down on the mid-levels in the city from a position that was about the same height as the top of the Bank of China building. Hong Kong stretched glittering in front of us with the ships and the harbour, planes coming in low over Kowloon to make the final right-hand turn into Kai Tak, and high-rise flats in every direction. I wondered whether Britain really understood what had made Hong Kong – or what we had helped to make of it – or whether for that matter Beijing officials had the faintest notion of what Hong Kong was like these days. It’s an astonishing mixture of Chinese hard work, entrepreneurialism, self-discipline and individual guts along with good old-fashioned British public administration. Where I’ve just come from there’s not as much about of that as there used to be!
Sunday 12 July
Laura alas was taken ill over the weekend. She was rushed into hospital with appendicitis and had an operation today. Fortunately it went well, but it’s not a very good introduction to Hong Kong for her. Of rather less importance during the intervals between everything else, I had some fittings for suits – one from a more expensive tailor and the other from a man everyone knows called Mr Sam. When it comes to his tailoring activities you could not regard him as a shrinking violet. I chose to go with the cheaper Mr Sam under the advice of my ADC, Felipe, himself immensely handsome and dapper; he gives sound advice about the right number of buttons on jackets and the seemly length of my trousers. If I don’t look sufficiently gubernatorial, it won’t be his fault. No more Harry Lime.
When I got back this afternoon from seeing Laura, whose operation went very well, there was a big mob outside Government House made up of illegal immigrants from mainland China. All of the men were without their wives and wanted an amnesty so that they could bring them into the colony. I was told that they would only hand over their petition to a member of the staff who wasn’t a policeman. It was suggested that Elspeth, our marvellous housekeeper, should go out to collect it. I thought this was pretty daft and that I should do it myself. This was apparently regarded by some as a dangerous precedent and by others (Martin and Edward) as a sensible example of open government in action. It just seemed to me to be the right thing to do. When I walked out, the crowd who surrounded me looked quite rough. They were held back by policemen and were pushing children into the front line. As it turned out they were perfectly well-behaved. Try going to a political meeting in some parts of Britain. To my embarrassment a lot of them fell on their knees in gratitude after they’d handed over the petition. Then the crowd withdrew peacefully without any more genuflections and certainly without any bloodshed.
This encounter with the real world was followed by a meeting with some of my political officials, particularly those involved in the foreign policy area. My main political adviser from the Foreign Office, William Ehrman, is charming and clever with a sharp as mustard deputy called Stephen Bradley. The Governor has a Central Policy Unit whose head is Leo Goodstadt,fn34 a serious economist and analyst of the local financial markets. He is a Catholic with a very strong sense of social responsibility. I made no decisions but sent everyone away to write papers.
Monday 13 July
I start every day with a routine office meeting at 9am with what is called by ministers in London ‘morning prayers’. (I think it is rare for there to be any spiritual element to these occasions, though perhaps some ministers brought their beads along.) This is just an occasion to sit down with my private secretary, my spokesman, Martin and Edward, and any senior officials that we need to see urgently about my engagements for the coming day and to review the press. Whenever we have a big political issue to take, particularly anything involving China, we have what is called for rather obvious reasons an ‘ad hoc’ meeting. The core membership of these meetings are senior Hong Kong government officials, like the Chief Secretary and the Financial Secretary, other officials with line responsibilities, like the Secretary for Constitutional Affairs, my FCO political advisers, the leaders of our negotiations in the Joint Liaison Group, the head of the Central Policy Unit, Martin, Edward and my private secretary and spokesman. One of the most important reasons for these meetings is that they give us the opportunity to talk through the formidable range of issues which the JLG have to cover. The JLG had been established under the Joint Declaration and had to deal with all the details of changes affecting the transition, from infrastructure to civil liberties. The work here is incredibly tough, not least because the Chinese negotiators are usually programmed to be as unhelpful as possible unless they get their own way, and this changes sometimes with bewildering irrationality and speed.
I hope that my very clever advisers don’t torpedo too many of my initial ideas. I have been knocking all these thoughts about with Martin and Edward; I’m so pleased they are here.
We are trying to sort out our information and communications. My main spokesman is a British civil servant, Mike Hanson; slightly improbably his home department is Customs and Excise. I like him. I would guess he is straight up and down, middle of the pack Labour (I have never asked people who work for me what their political views are), with a hefty dose of cynicism about what we are all trying to do. I don’t think he trusts China’s intentions an inch. Martin and Edward clearly rate him; if he gets on well with them, then there will be no problem about getting on with me. He doesn’t give anyone any crap, including the Governor.
I talk to David Ford and Hamish MacLeod about the political agenda, how to embark on the budget process and the expenditure round, and what to do about my Executive Council. I consulted others on the same subject, including Lydia Dunn once again and Willie Purves,fn35 the chairman of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. He seems to me like a thousand other Scottish bank managers down the ages. He is as tough as old boots but doesn’t appear to have any great perceptions about political issues. I’ve always thought that it is better that bank managers should be like this. The idea of a flashy bank manager should be a contradiction in terms. We finished the day with a big party and dinner for all the members of the existing Exco (inherited from my predecessor) and their spouses.
Tuesday 14 July
There is to be a meeting with Exco every Tuesday morning. It’s like an informal Cabinet, a group of people from across the community chosen by the Governor to balance official advice. One of my first jobs will be to reconstitute Exco with people I have chosen myself. There were two tricky pieces of business on the agenda. First, I had to encourage members of the council to support our line on the airport negotiations. The Chinese have been suggesting that we should get on with the airport reclamation project – the airport is going to be built on reclaimed land – without settling the overall financial package. This is plainly daft and would leave us with very little negotiating room once we had built on and around the island of Chek Lap Kok with nothing connected to it. We had counter-offered with a deal on the overall financial package for the airport but no deal yet on the airport railway. Beijing plainly wants an armlock on Hong Kong whenever they wish to apply it. They have already used the airport issue to inveigle the British Prime Minister to go to Beijing on a pretty humiliating visit. He got damn all for his pains as he well knows. This is an issue on which we have to stick to what we think is right and there is very little wiggle room.
I managed to get Exco signed up behind this and then move on to another issue which is dear to the Liberal Party, as it has taken to calling itself (not a very accurate description). It’s a group of rather pro-establishment characters which seems to have taken to defining the establishment as Beijing rather than Hong Kong and London. I like its leader, Allen Lee. He is a plainly decent man, though even his closest colleagues would not regard him as the sharpest pencil in the box. But I’m sure he does what he thinks is in the best interests of Hong Kong, which rather passes by the question of whether Beijing has in mind the best interests of Hong Kong. He is pressing us to support his group’s proposals in Legco to quash the attempts being made by Martin Lee and the Democrats to get rid of an idea that they believe would amount to a rigged election system in 1995. The so-called ‘rigging’ would consist of establishing multimember constituencies with one vote per person in each one. I think we managed to avoid being drawn into supporting the Liberals on this, but it certainly demonstrates to me that if we tried to build our foundations on the support of Allen and his colleagues, we would discover very rapidly that we were building on sand.
Our ambassador in Beijing, Robin McLaren, and his wife, arrived in the afternoon for dinner and a talk. I’m not going to make life any easier for Robin, but he is a decent professional and will go along with any ideas which are supported by the government. I’m going to have to make a reasonably early visit to Beijing but not before I’ve announced in Hong Kong what I want to do. For him, that is the tricky bit.
Wednesday 15 July
I spent much of the day looking at the present airport – Kai Tak – and the proposed new airport and container terminals. Kai Tak is already one of the busiest airfields in the world. It has as many passengers as Gatwick and as much freight as anywhere in the United Kingdom. I am amazed at the scale of what is required to build the new airport and also at the confidence with which David Ford and others regard this massive enterprise. Can it really all be completed in five years? The general response implies that I would think like that having just come from Britain and Europe – impossible there but something which Hong Kong should be able to take in its stride. David said to me, ‘You will probably be at the opening of this before you leave.’ Not, I thought to myself, if the Chinese have anything to do with it.
I also met Li Ka-shing at one of his own container terminals. He is with his two sons. Li père is an exceptionally interesting man, probably the most famous of all Hong Kong’s success stories. He is spoken of as a sort of financial genius and I rather believe it. He clearly regards the money he pours into charities as his third offspring. He speaks an amalgam of languages and it is not always easy to catch exactly what he means. But you know what he means when he laughs – a very engaging chuckle. I liked him a lot but probably shouldn’t tell too many people this.
Thursday 16 July
After intelligence briefings, I had lunch at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank with Willie Purves and a group of local business leaders, including the taipans of Swire’s and Jardine’s. Apart from the guy from Jardine’s, Nigel Rich, the conversation doesn’t strike me as being terribly high-powered. They all seem rather naïve about politics and don’t seem to understand that things just can’t go on as they have been. If this is where political advice was coming from for the last quarter-century, no wonder we’ve got into the present difficulties. But there was one surprisingly liberal fellow there, called Joseph Hotung.fn36 Apparently he funds pro-democratic political activities and other good causes and is also a great collector of Chinese furniture and Impressionist paintings. The others, while being quite well-meaning, don’t seem to comprehend that we can’t just stand where we are. That is not an option. We have to convince the Americans and everyone else to go on investing in Hong Kong – not easy if the Chinese insist on trying to amputate most of its political structures and the attributes of a free society.
I didn’t get much more sense of sophistication when I met Lord Young,fn37 who is now the chairman of Cable & Wireless, which owns Hong Kong Telecom – a huge part of its revenue and profits. When he was in Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet I always thought he had rather an inflated reputation; we’ll see how good a businessman he is now that he is running Cable & Wireless. I’m not surprised to discover that the ministers he’s talked to in Beijing want 20% of the shares in Hong Kong Telecoms. He seems to think that, provided he’s nice to them, they will give him a reasonably free run in the telecoms sector in China. A likely story.
I almost forgot the most important event of the day – or, as Alice may argue, of most days. When she said she wanted to come with us to Hong Kong, she talked quite a lot about the desirability of having a dog, or maybe two. Lavender had a dog when we were first married and we are rather keen on canine company. We also thought that in a home as cavernous as Government House a dog or cat would have much to be said for it, though we are slightly more doggy people than cat lovers. I think cats can be very patronizing. After much discussion we settled on getting a couple of Norfolk terriers; they are the ones with ears that are flat to the head rather than standing. The first of our Norfolks, a male aged 10 months, who is to be called Whisky, arrived today. His companion, a bitch who is a bit younger, will arrive later. Whisky came via the hold on a BA plane and emerged from his temporary incarceration looking rather bemused on the lawn of our home. He is a very pretty little fellow and doesn’t seem to bark. Perhaps it was just that he barked himself hoarse on the journey. I think everybody who works with us will take to him in a big way, though no doubt we may need recourse to sponges, mops and buckets for some time.
Friday 17 July
I spent much of the day with the police and got a very good briefing from some of the senior officers. Quite a few of them are expatriates heading towards retirement and a variety of occupations, including looking after an apartment in Andorra and breeding dogs in North Yorkshire. I was taken on a visit to the police tactical unit, where all the training is done for internal security and where Hong Kong’s equivalent of the SAS train. They are very impressive and, like my own police protection officers, built like small wardrobes. I hope we don’t need their services but, if we do, they certainly look up to the job. I was also taken up to the border to look over the barbed wire fence at the growing city of Shenzhen. The first time I came here, when I was a young backbencher in 1979, all you could see was a sleepy fishing village and paddy fields. Now the city is springing up complete with skyscrapers, and (the police say) with all the problems of raw capitalism – prostitution, Triad crime and so on. I am not sure whether Adam Smith would have been surprised by what is happening.
This week we have done several national day receptions and tonight we had a charity event – a concert by the Hong Kong Medical Association raising money for AIDS. This will clearly be the pattern for week after week. In the case of charitable functions, it’s plainly the case that Hong Kong is a very generous community, which may have something to do with the low levels of tax but may also be the result of a real sense of community. I see more of Lavender than I used to do when I was a minister. She turns up at all these functions looking glamorous, well-dressed and cheerful. But she would concede that at the moment most people are mainly interested in Laura, who has happily emerged from hospital in good nick.
Saturday 18–Sunday 19 July
We went for the weekend to the Governor’s country house at Fanling: it’s in the New Territories, quite close to the border. It’s a very nice, manageable villa, a bit like a 1930s Sunningdale or Wentworth home; and suitably surrounded by golf courses. There is a small but cheerful staff who have looked after the place for years, Ah Lam and his wife Ah Fong. Ah Lam got very excited on my first evening. Feeling rather exhausted after the week and wanting a serious pick-me-up I asked him whether he has any gin and vermouth so that I can make myself a dry martini. At the words dry martini his eyes sparkled. ‘Dry martini’, he enthused, ‘I have not made one since Lord MacLehose was Governor. Lord MacLehose had one dry martini every day at six, second dry martini 6.15, if third dry martini big trouble.’ So no problem in that department. In the circumstances it seems appropriate that we watch Dead Poets Society after supper on the television. Dry martini? – ‘Carpe diem.’
Last Sunday we went to the cathedral for mass and were mobbed by photographers. The parish priests made a great fuss of us and gave us a present when we left. Naturally we were asked to pose for lots of photos. This Sunday we went to mass in a little church in Taipo. It’s quieter with some jolly American priests and a congregation full of Filipinos. There was lovely singing and again everyone wanted to be photographed with us. Getting photographed has become, as it were, consubstantial with going to mass. We went back to Hong Kong central by one of the helicopters which is always going to be available for longer trips around the territory. It landed on the front lawn at Fanling house and whirled us back across the countryside to Kowloon and the harbour, landing among the skyscrapers on Victoria Island. This is quite a lot easier than enduring a Sunday evening traffic jam on the M4.
Monday 20 July
A full day of meetings. There are three issues which we covered that will obviously come to dominate a good deal of my time over the coming months and maybe years. First we discussed the airport with the Chief Secretary, Financial Secretary and the head of the Joint Liaison Group, Tony Galsworthy, who does all the negotiating on detailed aspects of the handover with the Chinese. We agreed that we should be calm but firm, pointing out that sooner or later the airport will be built, but should keep to the position that we cannot do any more at the moment to allay alleged Chinese anxieties. We should also make plain that the Chinese should not be so naïve as to think that we would accept some linkage between political issues and agreement on the airport. If the airport is to be built, so be it. We can do it, and Hong Kong will be able to pay for it without much difficulty. But if the Chinese are determined to force us into a political row with the citizens of Hong Kong as the price for letting us build the airport with the territory’s own money, then there is no game in town.
Second, I was also able to discuss with the CS, the FS and other senior officials how we can use our five-year spending horizon as the core of my first speech to Legco. I’m very keen to find easily identifiable targets for extra expenditure in areas like education and welfare without appearing to the business community to be getting too soft. Frankly, they’re not going to be too upset about spending provided they don’t have to pay more tax.
Third, as Martin and Edward have urged, I met some of the political parties, one by one. Martin Lee and his Democrats are much the most rational on political and constitutional issues. Unlike Allen Lee’s so-called Liberals, who don’t seem to know whether they’re coming or going, the Democrats understand that one of the options in front of me is to make a complete break between the Executive Council and the Legislative Council. They also accept that one alternative to an increase in the number of directly elected members in Legco would be to change the election committee before 1995, for example by forming it out of the directly elected members of other local and district councils, and to increase the number of people who can vote in functional constituencies. Corporate voting in the functional constituencies leads to the creation of some really scandalous rotten pocket boroughs. It’s much easier to see how you can do business with people provided you know what their price is likely to be and what their bottom line is.
John Major phoned to ask how Laura is getting on. I miss talking to him and some of my other friends. Tristan phoned the other day. I suppose this is the first week for years that I haven’t had a really good natter with him about politics.
The dominating character today has of course been Whisky. He is starting to wander about the house; he came breezing into the private secretary’s office and has found his way to the kitchen. He tends to sniff guests’ trouser legs when they come in for meetings. One thing that has been resolved is the question of whether he has a bark. This morning he came into my dressing room, jumped up on a cushion, and started busily examining himself in the mirror. He found the sight of another dog rather exciting. He had a good bark at it and spent some time trying to get closer to the object of his animosity. I suspect that it won’t take mirrors to set him off in future.
Tuesday 21 July
We spent a lot of time discussing the forthcoming meetings with Douglas Hurd and Richard Needham,fn38 the trade minister, who are both arriving later in the week in Hong Kong. At this morning’s Exco meeting, the main subjects were pensions, on which we had a consultative document, and once again the airport.
In the afternoon the most interesting meeting was with Emily Lau. Emily has been for so many years one of the most outspoken and articulate of all the Democratics. She is generally thought by visiting British ministers to be a firebrand. This simply reflects the fact that what some ministers think to be an impossible and extreme position is a perfectly rational expression of legitimate aspirations in Hong Kong, which though difficult to deliver are wholly comprehensible. She is very articulate and plainly immune to my charm but I think recognizes that I am at least trying and that I have a good deal of sympathy with her general objectives. The fact that for a variety of reasons, some buried in history, you can’t do what someone wants doesn’t mean that you can’t sympathize.
Wednesday 22 July
Two typhoons hit Hong Kong today. The meteorological office registered a warning at level 8, which is pretty severe. It rained very large cats and dogs, which means that I had to postpone a visit to housing estates. There was another blast from Lu Ping and Chinese officials about the airport. We decided to make it clear that we had published all the details of our position on the airport; we had been entirely open; and we thought the airport could easily be sorted out ‘on its merits’. I suspect that people may be starting to see the linkage which Beijing is trying to make between the airport and other matters.
The second typhoon to arrive was the trade minister, my friend and former neighbour in his Chippenham constituency, Richard Needham. He was in wonderful form. When is he not? Richard makes things happen and gets things done. He did a fantastic job in Northern Ireland helping to develop Londonderry and Belfast after the bombing campaigns there. He gave us all a lecture within moments of arrival about how he was going to open up China and what we should all be doing. I had a late night drink with him and a long gossip about who’s up and who’s down at home, and about what I’m trying to do here. He wants to descend on us with about five score relatives at Christmas and the New Year. I love him to bits, though I know that for some less discerning people he may be a slightly acquired taste. I have always liked gin in my tonic. My dad claimed that in French West Africa during the war when he was there, you had to ask in the officers’ mess for ‘gin tonic avec gin’. Richard is a whole litre of the stuff.
A telegram came in today from Beijing commenting on our embassy’s views on my ideas. The Foreign Office – this may mean the admirable Peter Ricketts – are bothered that I may find it too critical. The ambassador, Robin McLaren, who is in London at the moment, takes a similar view. I think that’s a good sign. It suggests at least some officials want to be reasonably accommodating. We’ll see how things go when Douglas Hurd comes at the weekend.
Thursday 23 July
Lots of meetings in the morning about security issues and illegal immigration. We’ve been dealing pretty successfully with smuggling by high-powered speedboats from Canton (Guangdong). The trouble is that they have now started using lorry containers too. I suggested during the meeting that we should purchase more x-ray equipment for looking at containers. I was told that very often the gangs cut up the cars which they have stolen into four pieces which makes them more difficult to spot. When I look back on some of our family vehicles down the years I think I must have purchased some of those with the parts put back in the wrong order. One issue which should affect the trade minister’s agenda is that apparently the cars most frequently stolen and smuggled are Mercedes, BMWs and Lexuses. Nobody seems to care much about Jaguars.
Among the political groups that I saw in the afternoon, much the most interesting were the people from the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment of Hong Kong (DAB HK) – the long title for the pro-Beijing United Front lobby. This group was led by a couple of sharp fellows who delivered yet another message from Lu Ping, who they have just been up to the capital to see. I gave them a frank talk about my objectives in Hong Kong – Britain was not going to make off with all the treasure; we weren’t trying to design a timebomb to blow the government of the PRC to smithereens, and so on. They responded rather well rhetorically to the points I made. The chairman, Tsang Yok-sing, is a middle school headmaster whose brother is the editor of one of the two principal communist newspapers. If he wasn’t so obviously bound into the United Front, I think I could get on with him rather well. In his favour he plainly believes much of what he says; his main aim is to see the colonial power on its way, but within reason I think he wants to stick up for Hong Kong’s interests. Presumably, he doesn’t want to see one colonial power followed by another, far more brutal one.
People keep on asking me, maybe not as bluntly as this, what my game is. So what is it?
First, I don’t want to be seen as Beijing’s man in Hong Kong, nor as somebody whose principal concern is British commercial interests. I have to be seen as somebody who is prepared to stand up for Hong Kong both with Beijing and with London. I also want to talk to Hong Kong openly about the future and about my intentions.
Secondly, I don’t want to lose control of what’s happening in Hong Kong before we actually depart.
Thirdly, I obviously have to embed as far as possible the laws on human rights and freedoms in Hong Kong and to defend the independence of the judiciary, the whole question of due process and the cleanness as well as the openness of government. I suspect it’s going to be more difficult as we get closer to 1997 to prevent corruption creeping in.
Fourthly, without breaking the Joint Declaration or the Basic Law I think we have to fill in some of the gaps in the present proposals for the 1995 elections to ensure that they are as fair and clean as possible. I think we can actually increase the number of people who are able to vote without breaking any agreements.
Fifthly, I want to use Hong Kong’s spectacular economic success not only to build the airport and other important infrastructure projects, but to set in train some of the social changes and reforms which will help to close the huge gap between rich and poor. I don’t want to increase taxation but I do want to do something about some of the really big social problems in education, health, welfare and pensions. Housing will be more difficult because of the relationship between the stock market and land supply. But we should be able to do rather more to give people decent accommodation.
That should keep me going. I don’t know what Douglas Hurd will think about it this weekend. There will be a lot of criticism from both flanks about my ideas on elections, which are actually rather limited. In particular there will be loads of rubbishing of anything I suggest which annoys Beijing. Some people seem to take the view that the main measure of success in Hong Kong is to avoid being criticized by the communists up north. That certainly seemed to be the idea the other day of Lord Young (who will be here regularly since Hong Kong Telecom represents a huge chunk of the revenues and profits of Cable & Wireless). His enthusiasm for democracy seems to be pretty vestigial, partly perhaps because he’s never stood for election to anything.
Friday 24 July
After the typhoon a lovely bright day on which I focused on education, making a number of visits accompanied by the secretary who covers education and manpower, John Chan. He is regarded as the front runner to be the first Chinese Chief Secretary.
We went first to the University Grants Commission, where we were briefed by the very bright chairman, a Cambridge-educated lawyer called Andrew Li, a successful barrister. We then went on to a teachers’ in-service training centre and witnessed a display of martial arts by primary schoolchildren. They were led by a little bruiser aged 11 who hailed from Beijing and took no prisoners. There are a lot of educational projects funded by the Jockey Club, with whom I had lunch. Hong Kong has a very unusual arrangement – no betting tax but all the huge revenues from horseracing go to this autonomous body with the assumption that it will give loads of dosh to the charitable sector. This seems to work pretty well and there doesn’t seem much point in changing it. People in Hong Kong are mad about gambling and bet almost as much in an evening at the races as would be gambled in a good part of the season in England.
After visiting the Chinese University (the Vice-Chancellor is a Chinese scientist who is regarded as one of the fathers of fibreoptics) I was greeted by a very polite students’ demonstration about a Public Ordinance on the right of assembly. Are all students this polite? This was the first visit I’ve made to a university. There are seven or eight. I am required to be Chancellor of all of them, and since they all require different gowns my valet is going to have to pay attention when kitting me out for my visits. I tried to suggest that making the Governor Chancellor everywhere might not be a very good idea and suggested that perhaps universities could choose their own chancellors. No one seemed to think this was acceptable. I think in the universities themselves there is a nervousness that I might give up theirs and stick to one favoured institution.
Saturday 25 July
We took Richard Needham for a cruise on the Lady Maurine. It must be the smartest boat in the orient, admirably old-fashioned and neat as a pin. There is a small and well turned-out crew and we had a lovely little voyage along a coastline which looks magnificent, with rugged green hills falling down into the sea. We anchored off Lamma Island and the crew got the speedboat out so that Richard, Alice and her friend Kitty Dimbleby could waterski. While I was having a quiet swim, I suddenly found myself confronting a couple of large, battered-looking wooden freight vessels which came rather too close without (I think) noticing that I was in the water. The men driving our speedboat were rather alarmed. it’s not in their terms of reference to have the Governor run over while on a voyage. When I got back to the Lady Maurine, we realized that the other ships were clearly smugglers – a Taiwanese vessel and a mainland Chinese ship offloading supplies onto it. My protection officer got on to the marine division of the police and as we sailed back towards Victoria Island we were passed by a police vessel with sirens blaring heading in the other direction.
We had a lovely supper anchored in Repulse Bay and – a reward for my efforts to stock the wine cellar – we drank a lot of very good Saint-Véran. We sailed back past Aberdeen and its floating restaurants with their glittering lights, and on round the west of Hong Kong island to come back into the main harbour between the mainland and the island itself. I suppose it’s one of the greatest journeys you could take anywhere. I hope I manage to stay for the full five years!
Sunday 26 July
Richard left and Douglas flew into town. We had a good walk with him and his Hong Kong-based son and lots of staff on Lantau. We went to matins at the Anglican cathedral; I always have difficulty singing the psalms in the Church of England. After we had played tennis with Richard and Rosie Hoare (they beat us), Douglas got back from other meetings and we talked about some of my initial ideas. While there will have to be some consultation with the Chinese, we mustn’t put them in a position where they can undermine the political impact of what we agree to do through selective leaking and general unhelpful noise. The other thing we agreed at dinner (with our respective officials) is that we can’t commit ourselves to consultation for an indefinite period during which one idea after another is gradually sunk, as has too often happened in the past. Leo Goodstadt and Michael Szefn39 – who is responsible for constitutional affairs in the Hong Kong government – were particularly animated at dinner. The more I see of Goodstadt the more I like him. He is immensely knowledgeable about individual community figures and their foibles, and has a marvellous ability to think and jump laterally.
Douglas and I had a chat on our own after dinner. He is worried about the Prime Minister being tired, and the Prime Minister is worried about him being tired. Douglas obviously has a killing routine and is about to tell Judy that part of their holiday is going to be clobbered by the next Yugoslav peace conference. He encouraged me to go on thinking about domestic politics. Well okay, but even after a couple of months I feel rather out of things and disengaged. But he says that I should go on phoning John from time to time. It seems to be perfectly obvious that John needs one or two friends with him on the spot. I suspect that when he is there solo, he spends too much time reading the newspapers and thinking of everything that can go wrong.
Monday 27 July
After visiting a Buddhist temple, Douglas and I had a walkabout in a housing estate. It was a bit like electioneering again. There was lots of well-managed enthusiasm, with a pack of journalists and cameramen forming a scrum around us. Douglas noted that the only thing we weren’t saying was ‘I hope I can count on your support.’
Wednesday 29 July
Today was a health day – I visited hospitals and clinics. I kissed my first baby or rather a baby kissed me. This will puzzle the old United Front lags at the New China News Agency, Beijing’s main operational outfit in Hong Kong. We had a difficult meeting to discuss the awkward business of the forcible return of Vietnamese boat people, trying to ensure that we don’t make too many rods for our back with the media and, to be fair, so that we handle the Vietnamese refugees themselves as well as is possible.fn40 We went out with Felipe, Elspeth and some of the private office to dinner at Sai Kung. Again, there is a big enthusiastic crowd. One man pushed his daughter forward to get my autograph – or so I thought. What he really wanted to do was to announce that she was at Wycombe Abbey School and that his son was going to Prince Charles’s old school, Cheam. It seems some distance from Sai Kung!
Friday 31 July–Monday 3 August
A succession of themed days. First one with briefings and visits about trade and industry. Our trade department is quite significant internationally. We have independent status as a full member of the WTO and have long been advocates for free trade across the board. The department is run by a neat, bright, bow-tied fellow, Donald Tsang, who has two sons at Ampleforth. I also visited the Industry Department, the Productivity Council and a number of individual businesses. One of the most impressive factories I visited makes plastic mouldings and is run by a genial patriarch who has given away all his shares, mostly to his staff. His workforce is well trained, committed and fit – all his apprentices have to go on a long hike every year in order to show they are fit enough to be technicians in the plant. Most of the managers I met turned out to be engineers with MBAs. I also met the boss of the Trade Development Council (promoting our exports), an entrepreneur called Victor Fung who runs a hugely successful import–export business.
I did another day on transport and discovered at the Mass Transit Railway Corporation that they not only make a profit but have a better credit rating than the People’s Republic of China. Talking to some of the senior transport figures, I was told that there is a huge backlog of trucks waiting to go into China because officials on the Chinese side are conducting health checks. If these were necessary in either direction, they should be affecting Chinese vehicles coming into our territory. The suspicion of course is that backhanders have a part to play in all this.
Tuesday 4 August 1992
I had quite a big speech to the Hong Kong Chamber of Commerce with the biggest turnout ever – over 700 people. I suspect (which is often the case) that the most interest was not in what I said but the fact that I spoke with just a few notes. This professional politician’s facility may wear thin after a bit, but for the time being I got a good response to what I say about the airport, political developments, stability and prosperity in the long term.
My most important visitor was Ambassador Ma from London, who was paying his first ever visit to the city. We spent a lot of time planning the logistics. We didn’t want to take up valuable time besieged by the press and photographers. Felipe, my ADC, organized a spectacular decoy exercise so that we could get the ambassador, me, our wives and advisers onto a helicopter to one of the outlying islands, where we could pick up Lady Maurine, sail back to Lamma and stop there for dinner. Before this I had a long conversation with him and tried my usual act of being friendly but candid and firm. I told him that it would be useful if I had somebody in Hong Kong that I could talk to frankly. The head of the local New China News Agency, who is supposed to be China’s man on the ground, is apparently a complete nightmare. He is an old communist hack and plainly believes in every conspiracy theory about the colonial power. I told the ambassador that so far I have done exactly what I said I would do when we last spoke in London. I want to go to Beijing after my speech at Legco; I’m postponing a visit to Canada (to speak to large meetings of the Hong Kong diaspora there) until I’ve been to Beijing. But I really can’t go there before I’ve told people in Hong Kong what I would like to do over the next few years. I hope that I’ll be able to develop a personal relationship with Lu Ping. I’ve decided to have a strong Executive Council separate from the Legislative Council. I can’t be seen to be rigging the elections for 1995; it’s not in anyone’s interest that I should be regarded as Beijing’s puppet. I will go to Washington in due course to lobby in favour of MFN status for China. MFN will mean that China will enjoy trade terms with the USA that are no worse than those of other countries given the same status.
I said that we have been making much too little progress in the Joint Liaison Group and add once again that any attempt to establish linkage between building the airport and political matters is not only clumsy but doomed to failure. Ambassador Ma is a courteous diplomat and gives the impression of being keen to convey the message that I’ve given him in the terms in which I delivered it. He seems to be a reliable and competent fellow, but quite what anyone will make of what I’ve said, heaven alone knows. Anyway, politics apart, or even politics included, it was a lovely evening which I think Ambassador Ma and his wife appreciated. We literally pushed the boat out for them and enjoyed it ourselves too.
Friday 14 August
We’re starting to build a consensus within the team around the composition of the electorate for the functional constituencies, the composition of the election committee and the voting methods not only for 1995 but also for elections to the district boards the year before. At a meeting with the district councils on 5 August they were very critical of any idea that they should include a much larger elected element. I’ve thought that this should happen ever since I first came to Hong Kong in 1979. I don’t think this is an argument which they are going to win. Flatteringly, after our really open discussion about all this with all my senior colleagues on 6 August, Leo Goodstadt and Mike Hanson said that they think it’s the best meeting they’ve ever had in Government House. There is of course no point in having clever and well-informed people working for you if you don’t give them their head a bit. While Margaret Thatcher was splendid in many ways, I don’t think she got the best out of her team by announcing before the beginning of a discussion what its conclusions were going to be.
I’m getting fairly good press from most of the media, but the United Front papers are starting to run articles criticizing my political behaviour. They argue that I should be sorting out problems with China not appealing for public support. I suppose they must be a bit worried about me and don’t really know how to cope with my approach at the moment.
Lavender had a good meeting yesterday about equal pay and job opportunities for women. There is no equal opportunities legislation in Hong Kong. She intends to visit both the women’s centre and the legal advice centre and is clearly pleased to be able to pursue issues about which she knew a great deal as a barrister.
Felipe, Elspeth and Lavender’s social secretary, Louise, have got lots of ideas about how we can give the house a bit of a facelift and start opening it up to the public for charitable events and concerts. On the downside Laura returned to London. She’s going to stay with Tristan and Catali for a time. Talking to Tristan he says that the economic news at home is pretty bleak. The upturn in the economy seems not so much belated as non-existent. People are starting to get a bit frisky as Tristan puts it.
Saturday 15 August
We spent much of the day with our housekeeper, Elspeth, Lavender’s social secretary, Louise, and my deputy private secretary, Anne Shepherd, looking at pictures and furniture that will make the house look rather better. The Museum of Art has promised that we can borrow some paintings, which will make a change from what we have at present – usually old copies or replicas of long dead British royals. I was particularly struck by one painting of a group of Chinese 19th-century men in the company of a few Western businessmen wearing top hats. It’s a very dark, slightly eerie picture. I’d love to have it in Government House, but its size and gloomy quality probably make it impossible for us to take it. We found quite a bit of furniture in the back streets of Kowloon, where there’s a lot of old stuff which has plainly been brought in from the mainland. We bought a wonderfully ornate altar table, a huge wickerwork dresser, and a big sideboard and one or two other pieces all for about £550. So far all this is for us personally, which we will use in GH. We also looked at some new furniture for the government to purchase for the house.
I’m still getting lots of messages from people who claim to be intermediaries from Lu Ping. But my main meeting this week – which is not going to be easy – is to be with the local head of the New China News Agency, Zhou Nan.
Monday 17 August
I spent a lot of time today with David Ford, Leo Goodstadt and a few others talking about the membership of Exco. I will obviously keep senior officials like the Chief Secretary, the Financial Secretary and the Attorney General on the council, but would like to bring in some other local Chinese officials – probably taking two from John Chan, Michael Sze and Anson Chan. I also think that I should retain Lydia Dunn as senior member and Willie Purves, the boss of HSBC. But I want to drop all the rest, including the Commander British Forces, which I hope won’t cause ructions with the Ministry of Defence. It would obviously be quite difficult to keep the PLA [People’s Liberation Army] off the Executive Council after 1997 if we had had a British general on it until then. The people I’m keenest to have from the outside are Andrew Lifn41 (barrister), Denis Chang (another barrister), Rosanna Tam Wongfn42 (youth organizations), Professor Felice Lieh-Mak (a legislator at present and an academic), Edward Chen (an economist), Victor Fung (industry and trade), and C. H. Tung (business and shipping).fn43 Tung’s business used to be largely with Taiwan, but when all the main shipping operations got into trouble a few years ago his firm was largely bailed out by Beijing interests. Beijing plainly trusts him because of their commercial connections, but also because he’s deeply conservative and knows America well. I think that most of his family have American passports. His conservatism runs deep. He’s not a bad man at all, indeed I rather like him. But he plainly thinks that democracy is not something that flourishes in Asia, and indeed I suspect he reckons there’s too much of it in America and Europe. It’s just nice for his family to be able to live there if they want.
Tuesday 18 August
I had three visitors today representing foreign interests. First I saw the Japanese consul (Masaki Orita). The Japanese invariably send first-class diplomats to Hong Kong, often I think to recover from more strenuous jobs they’ve had back home. The list includes my friends Yukio Satoh and Koichiro Matsuura, who is now the Vice Foreign Minister. He was my opposite number when I was aid minister. The Japanese have a very close economic relationship with Hong Kong and want it to go on working well. They seem to be quite good at getting messages through to Beijing without making the Chinese cross. Orita invited Lavender and me to Japan in November. I had to tell the Canadian consul who comes in next that I’m not going to be able to go to his country for the end of the Hong Kong festival in October, but will rearrange the visit for November so that I can visit Beijing first. He understood the point perfectly well. He thought it’s very difficult to know who makes policy on Hong Kong in Beijing and reckoned that even good up-and-coming Chinese officials would try to keep well clear of policy on Hong Kong, regarding it rather as British politicians might think about Northern Ireland. He is obviously sympathetic to the Democrats’ ideas about political issues and thinks one of my jobs is to try to find some centre ground for political activity between now and 1997. But he reckoned that the Chinese will be very suspicious of anything which looks as though it’s increasing accountability in Hong Kong.
After this I had a meeting with an American senator from Montana, Max Baucus, and the local consul. He is one of the few Democrats who seems to be in favour of continuing MFN status for China, presumably on the grounds that he comes from a farm state and doesn’t want to prejudice exports, principally of wheat. I noted that since Hong Kong at present represents about 19% of China’s GDP (if you add in neighbouring Guangdong it must be almost 28%), any interruption to free trade would inevitably have a devastating effect on our local economy.
Wednesday 19 August
I’ve started having tennis lessons. I play early in the morning with a very amiable chap called Hans Franklin. Even playing at about 7.30, and taking both a cold shower and bath afterwards, I’m still sweating two or three hours later. I wish I’d played tennis earlier in my life. I’ll never be better than the average club player now.
The head of the monetary authority, Joseph Yam, told me just how much we’ve got in the kitty supporting our strong currency. I’m very keen that we shouldn’t run mindlessly large surpluses when we could be spending money on worthwhile social and infrastructure projects.
Thursday 20 August
A talk with my inner group of senior officials about functional constituencies (which we want to increase from 21 to 30 so as to cover most parts of the community). We also discussed how much I should say is unamendable when I make my speech to the Legislative Council before going off to Beijing. Plainly I won’t want to set everything in concrete but will want to have a credible package. I suspect that whatever happens we will find ourselves falling somewhere between Martin Lee and Lu Ping. But the most important thing I have to do is to make sure that the majority of the community is supportive, and that, I guess, means that Martin Lee and his colleagues are the vital part of my audience. If I lose the community, and have no local political support, things will be pretty unstable in the run-up to 1997. I’m not sure that the Chinese will understand this, but they won’t want to take over a city in which there is political turbulence. As we know, their idea for dealing with turbulence is to knock people over the head – and that’s if they’re lucky.
I had a meeting with Zhou Nan,fn44 the local NCNA [National China New Agency] head. He’s been a member of China’s diplomatic corps for many years, is well known to our own Foreign Office people, and has a reputation for being some distance from amiable. He does speak beautiful English – and is not unreasonably rather proud of this – but he is cold and arrogant. He gave me some familiar warnings but seemed pleased that I was enthusiastic about paying a visit to Beijing. I stressed that I felt strongly that a smooth transition would not be possible if I had to sacrifice fair arrangements for the 1995 elections in order to get it. I’m sure this is going to be the point around which argument will revolve for the next few months. The Chinese continue to stress that what we must support is the concept of what they call a through train. What this means is that whatever is in place before 1997 can continue unchanged afterwards: but the underlying text is that they should determine what happens before 1997. We would have to take the blame for whatever we did on the ground and they would simply inherit it after the handover. I guess we may have to contend with Chinese threats of disruption in 1997, which the local community would need a good deal of self-confidence to cope with. I don’t want in any way to be seen to be reneging on the Joint Declaration or the Basic Law. That’s part of my bottom line. But the way the Chinese communists define the through train makes it sound like a funeral hearse for British sovereignty, British honour and British competence in governing this great city.
Friday 21 August
The most important meetings during this week have been, first, to flesh out my Legco speech and, second, to get all my political proposals in reasonable shape. Lydia Dunn is very supportive when I talk to her. She argues that one has to be firm with China though not go too far. (I wonder what too far actually means.) She seemed to think that I’ve got it about right and I hope this continues to be her view.
I’ve had a lot of interviews with journalists, including a smart guy from the Guardian called Steve Vines and a group of what I’m told are children for the South China Morning Post. They are charming, bright and very interested in the environment. I asked the first one where she is at school. She is rather aggrieved and tells me she is not in school any more but is about to go to Magdalen College, Oxford, to read law! I told this to Lavender, who was just going off to cut a ribbon at a display ahead of the Hong Kong festival in Canada, in front of Alice. Alice is obviously cross with me for committing such an embarrassing solecism and I get a big thumbs down.
Tuesday 25 August
I saw the Commissioner of Police about Triad activity. The Triads are becoming a real menace as they try to put their roots down just over the border in Shenzhen and surrounding areas. They have a foothold in parts of the New Territories adjoining the border and are well-entrenched in some sectors, for example the film industry. We have to keep harassing them without transgressing the Bill of Rights.
Wednesday 26 August
The most terrifying event of the week, without question, was an afternoon with the CBF, General John Foley,fn45 which begins with me firing a machine gun during a routine military exercise and continuing with my piloting a landing craft rather erratically across Victoria Harbour. I was also flown in a Wessex helicopter around all the main defence sites in Hong Kong. We are haggling over their futures with the Chinese PLA. So I could see the military view rather better, the door of the helicopter was left open. As the helicopter circles the sites and banks sharply, I became more aware of the fact that the only thing between me and a long drop was my seatbelt. I pretended to be made of sterling stuff, but my stomach left me. But when you’re the boss, you can’t let on that you are scared witless.
Thursday 27 August
Peter Woo, who is married to one of the daughters of the late Y. K. Pao (the shipping billionaire), came to see me with the mayor of Wuhan, a city in which he is investing in the expectation that it will become one of the transport hubs of central China. I discover that Wuhan is at least the same size as London and is linked to Manchester. My family came originally from Manchester and I make a few jokes about the city’s weather. Despite heroic attempts at translation, these are plainly not understood by the mayor, but at least are not regarded as discourteous or rude. Message to self – never tell jokes in your own language to people who don’t understand a word of it.
Saturday 29 August
K day – which we’ve all been waiting for. Kate arrived in the evening on Cathay Pacific from her travels in South America. As her plane taxied into the stand, we could see her up on the flight deck with the crew. Hearts leapt. With the help of Felipe, we organized a helicopter to meet her, and she came down the aircraft steps looking blonder and even prettier than I remembered. Once in the helicopter (a great surprise for her) after lots of hugs we took her on a stunning flight over Hong Kong and then up to Fanling, where we landed on the golf course in the lights from two police vehicles. My godson Adam Codrington is also staying with us with a couple of friends from school, so we have a full house. The champagne corks flew. There is a sort of genial serenity about our lovely eldest daughter now she has grown up. So in a funny sort of way it’s both a welcome home and in another sense a goodbye, farewell to the sixth former. I wish Laura was here as well. We miss her.
Wednesday 2 September
For our family the most important event this month was that Alice started at the Island school. It has a good reputation, like all the international schools in Hong Kong and genuinely comprehensive in terms of ability, social class, race and ethnicity. For a couple of days, she had to endure the press and television cameras when she went to school and even when she left in the afternoon. It made her a bit anxious but she seemed to take it all in her formidable little stride. She obviously likes the teachers (who all seem very good) and the other kids. The very sensible Welsh headmaster, David James, did a deal with the press which they stick to: photos and coverage twice a day for two days, and that’s it.
I continued the visits to districts and to different aspects of Hong Kong’s life and the government’s administration of the city. Today, I went to Sham Shui Po, walked round the public housing estates there and up and down streets packed with hawkers. I was presented with bananas, melons, flowers and other assorted objects, and at the end, after a tea reception with the district board members, I had familiar questions from the accompanying press. My visit to the walled city in Kowloon before it was demolished was rather different. I’m glad it’s being knocked down. It’s an awful place and only when you’re at the old courthouse in the middle can you actually get any view of the sky. In the middle of the day we moved in gloom down narrow alleys between high tenement walls. At least the rats seem to have been killed. The sooner it’s blown up the better.
I have had the usual clutch of visitors, including Lord Irvine of Lairg, who will I suppose be Labour’s Lord Chancellor one day. He was full of sense about the legal issues which I’m discussing with the Chief Justice, encouraging him to put in place rather better ways of administering the courts and the legal system as a whole. He also had great advice on purchasing Chinese antiques and demonstrated a good working knowledge of red wine.
Thursday 3 September
I spent the day with the discipline and rescue services – prisons, customs, fire services and the Royal Hong Kong Auxiliary Air Force. In the prison at Stanley even the people working in the factory shops seemed cheerful, energetic and committed. Can it really be the case that the entrepreneurial spirit thrives not just outside the prison walls but inside too? I have visited quite a few prisons in Britain and am aware that problems usually include not only drugs but also sexually transmitted diseases. When I asked the prison governor, who is showing me around, about that, he looks at me askance and says, ‘That isn’t a problem we have in Chinese societies.’ Perhaps he has led a very sheltered life and never been into the showers.
I don’t think that I would have got quite the same answer when I visited the aircraft carrier Invincible, which is paying a visit to Hong Kong. I stayed on the bridge while the captain took the ship out into the middle of the harbour. He was clearly an outstanding seaman who declined any help from tugs and took his vast carrier out into the water at the harbour’s entrance himself. He dashed around on the bridge shouting instructions into a telephone and darkening his smart white shirt with sweat. His officers had that best of all British mixtures of competence, decency and good humour, and were obviously huge fans of their boss.
I got useful insights into China from Steve Tsang, an impressive academic at Oxford. He noted first that an indication of the political incompetence of the Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong is that they’d allowed Martin Lee’s Democrats to whip them so soundly electorally. Sooner or later, either Martin and Co. will be running the city or they’ll all have been put in prison. Secondly, he pointed out that Taiwan provides a good answer to the usual proposition that democracy doesn’t work in Chinese societies. Taiwan’s democratic system actually seems to work rather well.
Sunday 6 September
A potentially awkward visitor was Margaret Thatcher, who came down to us from Beijing with her husband, Denis. We offered them lunch at Fanling and invited a group of their old acquaintances from the days of negotiating the Joint Declaration. Alastair Goodlad was with us, as the minister of state in the Foreign Office responsible for what we do. Edward Llewellyn was charged with getting the lady in and out of Hong Kong without any explosions. He did an excellent job, but that was partly because she knew the colony very well and had good instincts about our job here. Before lunch I had a chat with her and explained what we are trying to do. There was a bit of a frisson when I mentioned the functional constituencies – she thinks they smack of corporatism but seems to have forgotten that they were set up when she was Prime Minister. Anyway, she seemed to be onside. She had some rather strong views on China, which she thinks may break up. I politely disagree. She takes rather the conventional view that economic development is certain to have political consequences. Maybe that is what we all hope; it is rather a Marxist view. We managed to avoid talking about Europe, Maastricht and Yugoslavia for most of lunch. Just occasionally a little barb floated across the table about one of these issues like a paper dart.
Thursday 10 September
There was a drama involving two alleged Chinese dissidents who can’t be kept in Hong Kong but have been denied entry to the UK. This had all the makings of a nasty political incident. I hoped the Canadians might be prepared to take the two women. What was absolutely clear was that we can’t send them back to mainland China. But we seemed to be making progress on the issue of the new terminal, thanks to some very neat footwork by the senior civil servant involved, Anson Chan.fn46 She found an ingenious formula which met some of my requirements about openness and competition while guarding against any lack of competitiveness in the running of the terminal and port as a whole. She has many of the things that I like about civil servants – she’s decisive, smart, talks straight to me and is prepared to take on tough assignments. My team think she is terrific, together with Michael Sze, that she’s the best of the local civil servants – and since most of them are very good that is high praise.
Friday 11–Monday 14 September
The main official discussions continued to revolve around the airport and the contents of my speech to the Legislative Council, particularly on political development. The importance of all this was heightened by the fact that John Major and Douglas Hurd think I should go back to London for a brief meeting of the appropriate Cabinet committee to get their approval for what I am proposing we do. It was important to manage this visit without giving the impression that something had gone wrong. If I can get a thumbs up from the Cabinet it will give me a lot of flexibility as we head into the future.
Tuesday 15 September
I returned to London overnight yesterday for a couple of days and had a good breakfast with the Prime Minister and Stephen Wallfn47 this morning. John was obviously very worried about the position on sterling and the possibility of having to raise interest rates sharply. Even this, of course, may not do much to save sterling, and the economic forecasts still suggest that we have a long slog ahead of us before there is any improvement in the situation. They seemed pretty relaxed about my Hong Kong proposals. John wondered whether we are running too many risks in telling the Chinese much in advance; that we shouldn’t give too extensive an outline of what I’m intending to say. I argued that we have to run some risk since we can’t let the Chinese say that we haven’t told them anything at all before my speech.
After talking to Peter Ricketts and John Morris, I made a presentation to the Cabinet committee. I warned them that I might just annoy everyone, but the proposals seem the best way of improving the government of Hong Kong and meeting at least some of the aspirations of the public for more democracy without disrupting the transition to 1997. After that we can’t be entirely sure what the Chinese will do.
I then set out the plans we’d discussed in Hong Kong and with the Foreign Secretary and the FCO. We want to reduce the voting age from 21 to 18. As happened already in municipal council and district board elections, we will give each voter in the 20 geographical constituencies a single vote for a directly elected representative in a single seat constituency. We have to look at the existing 21 functional constituencies and the nine new ones which need to be created. The present system is indefensible. In the existing functional constituencies I want to see the replacement of corporate voting by election by individual voters. So, for example, all the directors of companies that were members of the General Chamber of Commerce would be able to vote instead of just the companies themselves as was presently the case. The simplest and fairest approach to creating the nine new constituencies would be to define them so that they include the entire working population broken down into the existing classification of our industrial and commercial sectors – from textiles and garments to community, social and personal services. In each of these constituencies every worker would have a vote. These arrangements would extend the franchise of the 30 functional constituencies to a potential 2.7 million. All members of municipal council and district boards should be elected not appointed, and the election committee – which has to be established in 1995 under the BL – should be made up of all the directly elected members from these district boards. This indirectly elected committee would select 10 legislators. In order to ensure fairness, we would establish a boundary and election commission to supervise the new arrangements. The main constraint in the past had been that we felt that we could not increase the number of directly elected members set at 20 after a much disputed consultation in the community. What we are trying to do now is to make the agreed breakdown of the Legislative Council as fair and open as possible, bringing in more voters and making the maximum use of the flexibility that existed under the JD and the BL. We will incorporate these proposals in due course in legislation, and if it was amended or turned down by Legco we would have to accept this as the will of the community and live with the consequences.
No one seemed much disposed to criticize, though Michael Heseltinefn48 wondered whether our last-ditch attempt to add a bit of democracy in Hong Kong was really very wise; it surely ran the risk of scuppering our national commercial interests. This has always been his position. I pointed out that we didn’t seem to have done very well commercially in China while relations had moved forward smoothly on the political front. I suggested that there were other factors which would decide the market share that we got in China. Douglas, while being very happy about the proposals that we were advocating, was bothered – like John – about the amount of detail to give the Chinese in advance. Our discussion took about an hour and ten minutes, and the only real change made was that it was agreed that we should cut back a bit on what we proposed to tell the Chinese beforehand. Trusting them too much was likely to blow up.
Wednesday 16 September
I returned to Hong Kong happy about how things had gone and had to go straight away to dinner with Zhou Nan and his wife with the whole family. We went to the NCNA bunker in Stanley, which was originally designed as a hotel. It now has a rather institutional feel about it. The food was delicious and Zhou Nan’s wife is a sweet woman. I learned beforehand that Zhou learned his excellent English interrogating prisoners of war in Korea – he doesn’t seem to have looked back since then. I wonder how he acquired such a very nice wife. But that probably applies to a lot of us. Zhou told me that I am to treat him as my main contact in Hong Kong. He is authorized to tell me this, he said, though there is obviously quite a bit of tension between him and Lu Ping. While I feasted in Hong Kong, the balloon was going up on the economy in London. Sterling crisis. Run on the pound. Speculators making a fortune betting against us. Interest rates soar. Departure from the exchange rate mechanism imminent. General disaster for the government. And to think, if it hadn’t been for Bath voters, I could have been Chancellor of the Exchequer!
Thursday 17 September
Day after day we go round and round the wretched airport with the Chinese side buggering us about in increasingly imaginative ways. We put forward some new proposals reducing the amount of borrowing that is required and increasing the equity injection by using the money made from the sale of land along the new rail route to invest in the whole project. It’s a perfectly reasonable approach – it builds on China’s own proposals; it cuts the overall cost of the airport; it means that we will not have to channel resources from other public-spending programmes. But it didn’t get a very good public reception, partly because some of the British press suggested that it is a kowtow and the pro-Beijing papers attacked us because it isn’t exactly what the Chinese side have pressed for, whatever they may have been saying this morning. So much for the understanding which Li Peng signed with John Major.
Friday 18 September
I continued to talk to the people I would like to put on Exco. They have all been signing up, with the exception of Victor Fung. He said that he was too busy; we all suspect that he may feel that it would involve exposing himself too much. I also continued to take forward my proposals for the 1995 elections. One of the easier things for me to do is to stand down from the presidency of the council. To have the Governor as in effect the speaker of the legislature – something which apparently has happened for years – appears to me to be exceptionally foolish. How can you talk about the separation of powers if the head of the executive also has – presumably partly for ceremonial reasons – the chief position in the body which is supposed to hold him and his colleagues to account? Remember what happened to Charles I. When I told the existing president of Legco, John Swain, about my intention, he was naturally rather pleased.
Saturday 19 September
We celebrated Lavender’s birthday by going out to dinner – the four of us – at the Italian restaurant Grissini’s in the Grand Hyatt hotel. We had window seats looking out at the night-time harbour. I don’t think I will ever tire of this view.
Sunday 20 September
Alas, today Lavender and Kate went back to London so that Lavender can help Kate go off to Newcastle University. She is going to read Spanish and Portuguese. I was left in charge of Alice and Whisky, and Her Majesty’s colony.
Friday 25 September
There were a lot more meetings all week with party groups and with the four different sets of trade union representatives. They covered most of the waterfront – from Beijing to Taiwan to very democratic and less democratic. Afterwards one of the groups denounced me for having Tory views on labour market issues. This was because I noted in our discussions that with an unemployment rate of about 2%, there didn’t seem to me to be a very strong argument for tough controls on immigrants who wanted to come and work in Hong Kong.
Saturday 26 September
Murray MacLehose came on a visit.fn49 He was the Governor when I first came to Hong Kong as a young backbench MP in 1979. At the time I wrote an article for the Guardian proposing that members of district councils should be directly elected. He was not amused. He is a legendary figure, and was in many respects a great Governor in an interventionist, patriarchal way. At the time he was in Hong Kong, there was wave after wave of refugees from mainland China and MacLehose instigated the huge public-housing programme – partly based on what had happened in Singapore – which certainly made a major contribution to Hong Kong’s stability and success. It is perhaps a pity that he didn’t take the whole plan from Singapore’s playbook and link public housing rentals with down payments on pensions. I don’t think that Murray MacLehose thought much of ministers and indeed took some initiatives which skirted ministerial decision making almost entirely. For example, I am not convinced that he and Percy Cradock had full ministerial approval for the proposals they made in Beijing on a trip in 1979 (at about the same time as a general election in Britain) for handing over sovereignty in Hong Kong while retaining British administration. This idea was rejected out of hand by Deng Xiaoping,fn50 who was surely never likely to sign up to such an obvious wheeze for keeping British control of what actually happened in the colony. We didn’t have a very comfortable dinner together, though he did accept with enthusiasm a couple of dry martinis beforehand. Like many of the great colonial men of yesteryear, of which he is undoubtedly one, I don’t think he much cares for democracy and probably regards it as an unnecessary provocation to China to even talk about it. He is in the House of Lords and I hope he doesn’t cause problems for us from those red benches.
Sunday 27–Monday 28 September
We not only worked on the text of my big speech but also planned the public meetings that I want to have afterwards. What I really want is big question-and-answer sessions for the public. The difficulty is going to be getting a good translation so that all those members of audiences who don’t speak much English can nevertheless follow what I am saying. It would certainly be pretty tiresome if something like this went off at half cock. I am told that my worries about attendance will prove to be groundless.
I have spent the last ten days trying to dispose of an awful plan, part of which has been leaked. The MoD have planned an exercise, Operation ‘Winged Dragon’, about how they could reinforce the garrison in case of trouble with China. There is of course an obvious point about this. Since the People’s Liberation Army is rather large, and the only bunkers in Hong Kong are on golf courses, any military confrontation would be rather one-sided. As soon as I heard about this plan – with the exercise taking part about a fortnight after my visit to Beijing – I started ringing alarm bells. I can’t imagine a more certain way of sending the Hang Seng Index into a nosedive in Hong Kong. I’m told that David Wilson had agreed it on condition that it was cleared with me. The present anticipation is that the airborne brigade will be brought in; Gurkhas are going to be placed on the border; and pretty well every general and brigadier who needs a new suit or shirts will be arriving in Hong Kong as well.
My informed hunch is that when someone in the garrison got wind of my substantial reservations, they leaked more and more details about the exercise, not least to the South China Morning Post, to try to make cancellation impossible.
On Monday, I had a meeting with the CBF British forces, John Foley (a man I much like), along with my political adviser, William Ehrman, and some others. Foley was very honestly shamefaced, apologized and said – which I believe – that it had nothing to do with him. But I don’t want to be bounced into doing something really stupid. I came to the conclusion that we couldn’t stop the exercise now but it must be in as low key a way as possible. What I am determined to do is to limit the tidal wave of generals and brigadiers. It’s a rather typical bit of selfish, politically maladroit defence establishment nest feathering. It’s probably lucky that I didn’t become Minister of Defence myself. In any event scaling the whole thing down will be good for Hong Kong, with the exception, I suppose, of tailors like Mr Sam.
Tuesday 29 September
There was quite a lot of political tidying up to do before my speech to Legco. As well as fulfilling my parental duties looking after Alice, which are a joy, the highlight for me was a birthday dinner which I gave for her along with two of her school friends at a tasty Italian restaurant called Va Bene.
Wednesday 30 September
The evening before I took Alice and her friends out, I went to the China National Day reception at the NCNA. My expectations for the enjoyability of the occasion were not high, so I was not surprised by how it turned out. We attended a large reception hall owned by the mass caterers Maxims, and were conducted through a crowd of photographers, TV teams, journalists, United Front toadies and members of the diplomatic corps up to the stage. Zhou Nan read a speech which I was told afterwards is shorter and livelier than he customarily delivers, and I then made a few remarks myself on Hong Kong/China relations. I noted that what hurts China hurts Hong Kong, and that what is good for Hong Kong is also good for China. We were told subsequently that the NCNA staff were very cheerful that Zhou was upstaged because my speech was better. I bet they didn’t say that to him, and to be honest I did not have to clear a very high bar.
Thursday 1 October
I completed my choice of Exco members. Everyone said yes apart from Victor Fung. I added to the list a very successful young businessman called Raymond Ch’ien, who has a degree from an American business school, and as an official I added Anson Chan. Martin Dinham has done one or two bits of work with her and is hugely impressed. On one quite complicated issue involving the airport and the terminal, she dealt with a mildly off-the-wall idea of his very firmly but courteously. I also had the task of what Richard Hoare calls kitten strangling. I had to say farewell to five former members of Exco whom I am proposing to remove.
Mostly we are still preparing for the big speech. While there is plenty to say about our spending priorities for the next few years, I want to give most attention to the 1994 district council election arrangements and the plans for Legco in 1995. As I told Ambassador Ma, I cannot afford to make the same mistake as was perpetrated over the plans for the Court of Final Appeal (CFA) which were negotiated in secret with the Chinese and then rejected by the Legislature in Hong Kong. I have to tell Hong Kong first what I propose while conceding that it may have to be changed. Having announced the separation of the Exco and Legco membership, I will then go on to set out the proposals for Legislative Council elections agreed by the Cabinet committee.
After my meetings in London, Douglas Hurd went off to the UN General Assembly and in the margins met his Chinese opposite number, Qian Qichen,fn51 who is a sophisticated operator. Douglas set out for him in general terms what we are proposing to do. Qian doesn’t seem too fazed or cross about anything, especially when he learns that we are not proposing to increase the number of directly elected legislators, nor to give any role in the executive to Martin Lee. This may not mean very much. He may not be well sighted on Hong Kong issues and may leave them to other parts of the Beijing machine. There is a bit of a sense of so far so good, but the journey has only just begun.
Friday 2 October
There was a very different reaction when Robin McLaren in Beijing went in to see Lu Ping. The account of the meeting sent by the ambassador was confirmed in private messages passed to us through David Chu, a Hong Kong businessman and friend of Director Lu. The general view of the Foreign Office is that what Lu is saying is at the harder end of the spectrum. He complained that Beijing had not been properly consulted, that he and his colleagues were not being given any face, that we were bouncing them with these proposals, that they were out of step with the Basic Law, that they will be bad for our relations with China, that the Chinese side will attack them vigorously, and that he was planning to give me something when I went to see him (perhaps an agreement on the airport) but that I won’t now receive any gift since I’m such a sinner. Finally, they want me to keep quiet about my ideas for the 1995 elections when I speak to Legco and not to announce anything at all until I have spoken to him and his colleagues and cleared it with them. This was my first experience, though not I suspect my last, of sabre rattling by Beijing.
We constructed a telegram for the ambassador when he goes back to see Lu just before my speech in order to hand it over. We went through the arguments one by one, particularly challenging the proposition that anything we are proposing is against the Basic Law. We also pointed out that the Chinese are always pressing us to be open about our proposals on the airport and it would be ridiculous for us not to be equally open about our proposals on the democratic future of Hong Kong. Nevertheless, we are clearly in for quite a fight, but I would prefer to be fighting Beijing than opinion in Hong Kong.
All the tickets for the first two public meetings to be held after my Legco speech in the City Hall and the Shatin town hall were apparently snapped up within half an hour. That’s pretty well 3000 people. We’ve had to organize two more meetings and I’m also doing quite a lot on the local radio and television, including phone-ins. Several local politicians are getting a bit jumpy about this direct appeal to the public! They had better get used to it.
Wednesday 7 October
We set off at 2.20 for the Legco building with Lavender looking stunning in green. I am paraded through the debating chamber of the council, which is rather like the better sort of municipal auditorium. Lavender thinks it’s more like a law court. Despite having looked through it several times, as I started speaking I realized that it is going to take a lot longer than the hour and a half that I had predicted. I also started to realize how much I have been talking in the last two or three days. I must’ve been nattering away for six, seven or eight hours a day, and my throat is raw despite Strepsils and Polo mints. Anyway, I plough on and eventually sit down after two hours.
I did the constitutional stuff at the end. Before that, I set out our broad proposals for Hong Kong over the coming five years. It has all turned into a sort of manifesto. I note that we are predicting annual growth of 5% a year up to 1997 and will continue to link the Hong Kong dollar’s exchange rate to that of the US dollar. While we won’t allow growth in public spending to exceed growth in the economy, that nevertheless gives us a great deal of scope for increases across the board, for example in retraining and research and development. We are also going to establish an efficiency unit to make certain that the money we spend is used wisely. I noted that recurrent spending on education will increase by 15.5% in real terms between the present and 1997. We will have more teachers, smaller classes, and all-day opening in our new primary schools. We intend to increase recurrent spending on welfare by 26% in real terms over the same period. There will be more nursery places, increases in Social Security and increases as well in health, especially for the elderly and our well women centres. We will also provide more beds for psychiatric patients. There will be a huge increase in housing, with the building of a hundred new flats a day between now and 1997. Home ownership is forecast to increase to just under 60%. We will spend more on water pollution and sewage. Relative to population size, we will have more police than Tokyo or London. Capital spending will increase by over 20% in real terms. In addition to all this we will of course be building the new airport. I added to this a number of ways in which we can be held to the pledges we have made and deal more effectively with complaints about administration.
After explaining my ideas for the relationship between Exco and Legco, I laid out the proposals agreed by the Cabinet committee at our meeting for the elections in 1994 and 1995. I also made the obvious point that while it is imperative to tell people in Hong Kong first what I would like to do, I then have to discuss it with Beijing and there may need to be changes. I said explicitly that I don’t want to be forced into the same sort of calamitous reversal that we had over the Court of Final Appeal, on which we had reached a secret deal with the Chinese that was then rejected by the legislature. The citizens of Hong Kong have a right to know what is being proposed about their future. I think everyone was pretty stunned by the amount I had to say, not least about my social, welfare, education and economic priorities – three cheers for Hamish McLeod – as well as about the future government of the territory.
Then press conferences, broadcasts, phone-ins – the works. Coverage in all the papers was extensive and very positive, with the exception of course of the pro-Beijing press. The criticisms there were fairly predictable. First, can we really afford my social and educational programme, and second, why have I chosen to flout the Basic Law either in the letter or in the spirit? I spent quite a lot of time during the course of the day in interview after interview pointing out that we can afford our programme since we have a windfall this year of additional revenues. I also challenged my critics to say where the proposals on the legislature contravene the Basic Law and to put forward their own.
My first public meeting at the City Hall in the evening was packed. There must have been 1200 or 1300 people there. I made one or two introductory remarks, which were of course translated – very well as usual – about my surprise at the fact that holding public meetings was regarded as controversial. I said that my speech was about the future of the people of Hong Kong and it was right therefore that they should be able to question me about it. We then had an hour and a half with, alas, only 11 questions, because several of those who asked them made speeches or asked several at a time. I also invariably spend too long answering questions. There were a couple of obvious plants from the pro-Beijing lobby who asked almost identical questions about how dishonourably Britain had left its colonies and how important it was that we should get on with China. But, all in all, it was a terrific and cheerful occasion. We had a couple of headbangers, including one chap who asked me an involved question fetching up with a plea for a crackdown on pornographic literature. Afterwards my protection squad officer, Wise, said he had arrested the chap about a year ago for indecently assaulting a 60-year-old lady. Most of the questions were about bread-and-butter issues. The audience seemed to love the occasion, and without being able to deploy my normal rhetorical arts I nevertheless managed to get quite a few laughs and claps. The interpreters did a fantastic job. At the end I gave a little speech saying that when people doubted the ability of Hong Kong to run its own affairs, they should consider how responsibly and maturely the people of Hong Kong behaved on occasions like this one.
There was only one slightly awkward moment during the meeting which embarrasses the interpreters. I got a question from one member of the audience which is apparently – or so I’m told in my earphone – about policy for the deaf. I have to admit that my knowledge about the hard of hearing in Hong Kong is fairly limited, but I embark as politicians are often able to do on a rather rambling talk about disability in general. The audience begin to giggle. At which point the interpreter apologized at length and told me that he misinterpreted and that I was actually asked about agriculture and farming, the word for which in Cantonese apparently sounds like the word for the deaf. I made a joke about the whole thing and the audience genuinely seemed to think it was funny. Afterwards I have to make a fuss of the main interpreter so that he doesn’t lose too much face.
Light relief after a big day:
I was then grilled on a television programme by a panel made up partly of political figures and partly of social welfare lobbyists. The programme overran by quite a bit. The producers told me that it was watched by 2 million people in Hong Kong and 10 million in Guandong. This must endear me even more to Beijing.
Back at Government House, I met Whisky’s companion – called, guess what – Soda. She is a beautiful little ball of fur and is related in some pedigree way to Whisky. She arrived just this afternoon and her cousin (or whatever he is) is obsessed with her, trying to persuade her the whole time to give him a piggyback. Clearly we shall need recourse sooner or later to the vet’s knife.
Friday 9 October
I had breakfast with George Shultz. He was very supportive and thought I was taking the right tack. He told me that when he was Secretary of State under President Reagan he had been told fairly early in his term that he could not do this or that because the Chinese would believe that it undermined the relationship with the US. He’d gone to Reagan and said that when he was a labour lawyer, in his experience firms started to get into difficulties when the management began saying that they couldn’t possibly take a particular course of action because it might damage the relationship with the workforce. He had said to the president that a good relationship was the result of individual decisions that you took and agreements you made with the other partner. The relationship flowed from the decisions you took rather than the other way around. This makes a lot of sense to me. The view generally in the past has been that the UK and China have some great big relationship which we must safeguard at all costs and that Hong Kong is a tiresome aggravation. This agreement risks damaging the beautiful relationship whose contours seem to depend on the judgements made by the middle kingdom. Geoffrey Howefn52 has a ghastly metaphor about the relationship being like a priceless vase – or sometimes that is equated with Hong Kong – which you have to carry very carefully through the years without ever letting it slip. Truth to tell, I’m not sure that after 1997 we will have a terribly close relationship with China at all. We are a medium-sized European country albeit with a seat in the UN Security Council and with other global assets, and I wonder whether that represents for China nearly as much as Hong Kong with getting on for 20% of China’s GDP. It’s much the biggest part of our relationship at the moment and what will compare with it in the future? George Shultz was also very funny about the diplomacy of visits to Beijing. He thinks the Chinese will try to humiliate me and, if I try to stand up to them, will deliver what he calls the post-visit blast. That is, a great attack when I’m on the way to the airport or even in the aeroplane. Be prepared, he said.
Then I gave a lunchtime speech to all the Chambers of Commerce in the convention centre. There are about 1400 of Hong Kong’s business leaders there. I have just named my Advisory Business Council, which seems to go down well. I hope I managed to demolish the criticism that my spending plans are reckless and unaffordable. I also dealt with the political arguments, saying that I want to get these out of the way early. It would have been much more destabilizing if I had been secretive about what I intended to do and much more hazardous still to resist any pressures for greater democracy rather than to accommodate some modest changes. But, of course, for some people the ultimate test is not what I am actually proposing but what China will accept. Who knows how much that will be?
We had another public meeting at Shatin town hall. Again, a very good turnout. There were more questions than last time, most of them on day-to-day issues – housing, education, social welfare and so on. A group of parents of disabled children gave me a very kind reception. I was told later that it’s partly because when they were waiting for me recently outside a sheltered workshop, I went over to talk to them before climbing into my car. It’s a surprise how small and rather straightforward human acts can make big impacts.
Saturday 10 October
Lee Kuan Yew came in to see me. He had just been in China and was interested in how difficult the Chinese find it to understand me. He seemed to have given them a fairly incisive description of what I am up to and my relationship with John Major and the rest of the British government. He then gave me an equally sharp pen picture of the Chinese leadership. He told me that he thinks that Li Peng was slightly distracted when he spoke to him. He suspects that Zhu Rongjifn53 is going to be made an executive Vice Premier, in effect taking away much of Li Peng’s power, especially on economic issues. This would leave Li Peng with the title of Premier in order to save his face. He suggested I should be rather cooler in my public handling of issues, firm but with no trace of impatience. He repeated what he had said to me on my way in, that I should try to find someone important with whom I can be frank. When I spoke after this to the editors and proprietors of some of the main Chinese-language papers – a rather elderly bunch – I found them rather nervous about China’s reaction to my plans. I don’t think any of them believe that we will actually stand up to China even if we think it’s right to do so. They’re very worried about the consequences if they prove to be wrong on this and we really do stand firm.
In the afternoon I interviewed candidates to take over the role of ADC from Felipe. The best candidate, not surprisingly, seems to be his best friend, Mike Ellis.
Sunday 11 October
We went to mass at Tai Po. At the beginning, Peter Barry, our favourite priest at the cathedral, gave a little homily about my speech to the legislature, saying that it showed a political leader implementing Catholic social teaching. I can’t imagine anything similar happening back home. Then we went on to Fanling to give a barbecue lunch for everybody who’s been involved in putting my speech together. They brought partners and children. Alice is very good looking after the younger ones. The house itself is starting to feel more like a home; we’ve already brought here some of the things from our retail therapy expeditions. There is one unfortunate discovery. I bought for not very much a beautiful little Tang court lady a couple of weeks ago from an excellent dealer called Andy Ng, much recommended by Lord Irvine. She still had some of the original paint on her as well as centuries of dust and a bit of dirt. Ah Lam’s jolly wife, Ah Fong, gave her a good clean so she is now sparkling white. I had to bite my lip. I suppose you could say – not that I said anything at all – that the court lady has been returned to her original state. I don’t think that people around the house understand why we love these old things.
Until my departure later in the month for Beijing, my days are filled with talking to local politicians and interest groups, mainly about my political proposals, and also doing loads of interviews with the local and international media. The first meeting with the new Exco proved that we are certainly going to have livelier and more intelligent discussions. I have a third public meeting in Tsuen Wan with an audience of about 500. Similar questions.
Wednesday 14 October
Laura’s birthday. We phoned her up. Her course has started well and she’s enjoyed the first three days, but she’s missing us and had a bit of a cry on the phone.
The barrage of criticism from Beijing and its supportive papers in Hong Kong continues. The abuse is pretty lame – surely they did better than this during the Cultural Revolution? One minute I am a dictator, the next a self-styled God of democracy. Public opinion seems to be holding up reasonably well. When I visited Aberdeen and the southern district, I got cheerfully mobbed on a housing estate. I visited some of the people who are living on boats in Aberdeen harbour. They live in appalling conditions and nothing happens to help them until the boats sink. I wonder whether I’ll be able to do very much about housing while I’m here given the importance of the developers to the health of the Hang Seng Index. We can afford rows about politics but not economic turbulence which would affect people’s everyday standard of living. The best meetings with political parties were once again with Martin Lee and the leaders of the Democrats on the one hand and the pro-Beijing Democratic Alliance for the Betterment of Hong Kong on the other. Martin Lee and his colleagues were enthusiastic about my package but worried that I’ll retreat from it. They were also enthusiastic about holding a referendum. Martin went on to suggest that I should bring forward the 1995 elections by a year or so and then offer China the opportunity of halting the ‘through train’ and starting off with Beijing’s own proposals after June 1997. Imaginative perhaps but far from wise. The pro-Beijing politicians are intellectually sharp (as before) and we had a good, if tough, exchange. They want me to agree to attend a seminar on the Basic Law, organized of course by them. I rejected the idea, arguing that it would be wrong to attend something organized by a political party, but it does give me an opportunity to demonstrate a rather more thorough knowledge of the BL than they seem to possess themselves.
Thursday 15 October
By this evening we have counted over 40 critical articles about me during the last week in the pro-Beijing press. In addition, Lu Ping has sent a private message asking that I should make sure that I respect his face when I go to Beijing and behave properly. Why are they so alarmed, especially when all the evidence suggests that they are preparing to give me as tough a time as they can?
We recover the day with our first concert in the ballroom of GH. It’s given by the Academy for Performing Arts. The room is packed and the concert goes very well.
My natural caution makes me focus on the sort of criticisms that may be made when I get to Beijing. I keep on wondering – as barristers ask about their opponents – what their best point may be. I am all over the Joint Declaration and the Basic Law (I didn’t learn the catechism at school for nothing). I’m also aware of the debates in the House of Commons and public statements by Beijing politicians. Is there anything I have overlooked?
Friday 16 October
I had a long meeting with David Ford, Tony Galsworthy, William Ehrman, Leo Goodstadt, Michael Sze and others to discuss the criticisms. I don’t want all this to get tangled up in endless discussions in the JLG. We can’t talk about the political package until 1997. Sometime there will have to be legislation to put my proposals in place. We also need to clarify once again our position on the airport. After the meeting Edward volunteered to go off and try to see if there anything about which I haven’t been told.
Monday 19 October
I had a call from Edward over the weekend and fixed a meeting with him for early this morning. Looking through the principal telegrams about Hong Kong over the last three or four years, he had found an exchange of seven in 1990 between Douglas Hurd and Qian Qichen about the election arrangements in Hong Kong. A first look at them doesn’t suggest that this is a real smoking gun loaded with any lead, though I should have been told about it. There was clearly an agreement that we wouldn’t increase the number of directly elected legislators in 1995 (alongside a commitment on the Chinese part to increase the number in 2003), but there were also some rather ambiguous exchanges about the composition of the election committee. We suggested several criteria which should be met, though no agreement on what any of the arrangements might finally be. The general tone is that these are matters on which we need to go on talking, though there’s nothing explicit which can be held against me as a breach of faith. Indeed, the criteria that Douglas covered for the election committee included the idea that I have presented. But it is all a little like the secret agreement on the Court of Final Appeal – done behind Hong Kong’s back, the sort of secret diplomacy which always plays to Beijing’s advantage. There is no point in having a witch hunt about why I didn’t know about it. But it is extraordinary that no one mentioned the telegrams to me; nor were they ever included in my voluminous briefing. Douglas had presumably forgotten all about the exchange, and evidently Qian Qichen had as well. All those who must have been responsible for drafting the telegrams, seeing them and agreeing them, from Percy Cradock down, evidently didn’t think that they needed to be mentioned to the new Governor. For very clever people to behave like this is not very clever, but now we had to cope with it. Or to be strictly accurate, I had to cope with it. Sometimes a political boss is responsible for his or her own egregious errors and officials fetch up taking the blame. This is rather the opposite to put it mildly. Anyway, it’s done. The first thing to do now is to make sure that the lawyers are happy that we aren’t in breach of anything explicit in setting out my own proposals; the lawyers in Hong Kong as well as London must have seen the telegrams already because they – or at least their main thrust – were known about apparently by Exco.
Tuesday 20 October
We set off for Beijing and were met at the airport by Robin and Sue McLaren and a low level Chinese official. No sign of Lu Ping. It’s no skin off my nose but this is obviously the first snub to the wicked British Governor. I make a few remarks to the press and head off to the embassy to discuss how we are going to handle the next two or three days of talks. We went over the seven telegrams again with quite a bit of nervous shifting in seats by the diplomats. Sooner or later I suppose that I should have a bloody great row over this, which may make people more careful in the future. I’ve never liked shouting at officials, however.
Wednesday 21 October
We drove off at 8.30 to the state guest house for the first session with Lu Ping and his team. We passed through Tiananmen Square. The last time I was here, as Minister for Overseas Development, it was full of students. Because of my ministerial role, I was acting as vice chairman of the Asian Development Bank for its annual meeting. The meeting was held that year in Beijing just before Mr Gorbachev’s famous visit to China. The Tiananmen ‘incident’ – as it was euphemistically called – started about a week after I left. For the week I was here, the city seemed much happier than it appeared now.
Lu Ping was waiting for me at the entrance of the guest house. Once again the press were there in huge numbers. I was greeted in Lu Ping’s excellent English. He apologized not very believably for not being at the airport. The press will not of course take any notice of that. We then went into the sort of room that you see in the Russian parts of John le Carré films – heavy decor, rather bad paintings of mountains, waterfalls and lotus blossom. Since it’s China there were also covered mugs of tea in front of everyone’s place. The press were allowed in for a few moments. There were so many of them that they fetched up completely circling the table, shoving microphones under our noses. Lu Ping and I offered a few mild introductory comments, Lu dwelling on the friendship to China of my four predecessors while he has been director of the Hong Kong Macau office and of the previous ambassadors in Beijing, with whom he has worked so well. This was China-speak for ‘you had better toe the line just like the rest of them’. It was also a not-so-subtle way of saying that this guy (unlike his predecessors) doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Eventually the press were pushed out but it was such a scrum and we learned afterwards that there had been a punch-up outside and at least one journalist was flattened.
With the room cleared, Lu Ping offered me the chance to take the floor. He had in front of him a written text which he left rather ominously until the end of the day. I set out my thoughts and responsibilities. I don’t have a secret agenda; I want to do the job efficiently and honourably; I believe that making some honest accommodation to peoples’ democratic ambitions is more rather than less likely to promote political stability; my bottom line for the 1995 elections is that they should be fair, open and accessible to the people of Hong Kong. The ambassador said afterwards that no Chinese official would ever have heard anything like this before. I think it’s the style of what I said rather than the content that he is referring to. I don’t think I’ve been remotely rude, at least I hope not. Then we got into exchanges for about an hour and a half on my constitutional proposals. This was all conducted through interpreters, though Lu Ping’s English is good enough for him to understand what I’m saying. There were half a dozen chaps on his side of the table. None of them took any part in the discussions. The same is true on our side; I did all the talking.
At the end of the morning, we had a discussion about the airport. Lu Ping had some prepared remarks which appeared to be based on the assumption that we were going to tear up the memorandum of understanding between the Prime Ministers. The content of what he said was rather threatening; the delivery was both restrained and embarrassed. There were a number of threats about the Chinese blocking entry of Hong Kong aeroplanes into their airspace. It all sounded as though it came from the propaganda department of the politburo rather than from anyone who’s been seriously involved in negotiations about the airport. I did the familiar routine. The airport will be built; it’s of concern to Hong Kong and China; Britain will not depart with it in 1997; the best way forward would be on the basis of comprehensive agreements between China and Britain; but until we get such agreements we will proceed one step at a time in order to carry out the memorandum of understanding to the letter. We broke for lunch about 40 minutes late, just before 1pm. The gang of press and photographers had a sure sign that things are going badly wrong: my official car has developed a puncture. You would need to be a serious conspiracy theorist to believe that this had been deliberately organized by the Chinese propaganda department. But, of course, conspiracies are not unknown …
After a sandwich at the embassy – with comment from the ambassador and others that the tone is better than they’ve experienced at some other meetings – we returned to the state guest house for a private word with fewer officials present with Lu Ping, warned against demonizing Martin Lee and the Democrats. If Chinese officials go on like this, the Democrats will win every election there ever is. I also followed up some remarks I had made in the morning about a civil service training course in Beijing, which seemed to have gone down well. I would like a confidential dialogue with Lu about those civil servants whose careers are likely to span 1997. He appeared receptive to this. However, on the political development, even though his eyes occasionally flickered showing some comprehension of what I was saying, I got a straight ‘down with Martin Lee’ line. The more the talks go on over these two days, the more the Chinese obsession with Martin becomes apparent. How can this decent, mild-mannered daily communicant have become such a devilish hate figure for the Communist Party? In talking about Martin Lee I mentioned the rule of law. Lu said, but we have the rule of law too. No, I replied, you have rule by law. He asked me what I mean. I said that when I was a British minister, for example for the environment, I would very often be challenged legally in court, and sometimes overruled. I didn’t always know whether I would win or not. The law applied to me just like everyone else even though I was a minister. I am not sure that he believed me, or perhaps he just thought, ‘what a crazy system’.
We then go back to a plenary session and a long prepared tirade by Lu claiming that my proposals breach the Joint Declaration, the Basic Law and a secret agreement reached in 1990 by the Chinese Foreign Minister and Douglas Hurd. There were quotes from one or two telegrams. This was the first time that any of this came up. It’s pretty curious to claim that there was an agreement; nothing was written into the Basic Law by the Chinese and they’ve been talking about the possible composition of the election committee to every visiting delegation from Hong Kong in recent months. But this was the first attack from China which came close to scoring any goals and I suspect that I will have to get used to being accused of three breaches.
I responded point by point at some length, and we then had a further exchange during the course of which he became rather emotional. He claimed bad faith. And that was that. No agreement and no very obvious way forward. I went back to the embassy and did a press conference on the steps saying not much more than that there’s been no meeting of minds, which is the understatement of the month. Then we did a quick change and went off to an immensely long banquet at the top of the Swissotel. The mood wasn’t too bad. I imagined that Lu is under immense pressure from above. He’ll be told that he has let this perfidious foreigner out of what was assumed to be a locked cupboard. Since he was responsible for the Basic Law, I suspect that people are now saying to him – why did you get it wrong? The lightest relief of the evening was a visit to a room above our restaurant to place bets on the racing at Happy Valley and at Shatin. I chose a horse called ‘Best of Luck’. I’m going to need it.
Thursday 22 October
We spent the whole morning at another state guest house with Jiang Enzhu, the diplomat at the Chinese Foreign Ministry who has oversight of relations with the UK and policy on Hong Kong. He did little more than smilingly repeat everything that’s already been said by Lu Ping. He’s obviously intelligent but a mouthpiece for others. I did manage to get the conversation onto security and smuggling and also onto Joint Liaison Group issues such as air service agreements, the future use of the defence lands in Hong Kong and right of abode. We had a rather dreary lunch with Jiang and lots more talk about the devil incarnate, Martin Lee, with whom I am clearly soon to share a co-starring role. After lunch we had a jolly meeting with the vice minister of trade which merely underlined that our biggest and most important economic relationship with China is extremely smooth. Finally, it was back to the state guest house for the meeting which represented my snub – at least the biggest snub this week. I was not going to see Li Peng let alone Deng Xiaoping, but the Chinese Foreign Minister, Qian. He had Lu Ping, Zhou Nan and a host of other now familiar apparatchiks with him.
We went through the familiar routines. He said that we have breached the Joint Declaration, the Basic Law and the agreements reached between Britain and China through his telegrams with Douglas Hurd. There was a good deal about my sincerity and the importance of cooperation and consultation. The Chinese had had great hopes of me after the Prime Minister had met Li Peng at a conference in Rio, but if issues couldn’t be resolved with me, they may have to be taken to Foreign Secretary or prime ministerial level. In other words, the Chinese think that they should cut me down to size and bypass the uppity Governor of Hong Kong. It’s all done with a pretence of amicability and a menacing air. Back to the embassy, another press conference, and then we gave a return dinner for Lu Ping. Before the meal we exchanged gifts. I gave him some CDs and he gave me some jade. There was one interesting incident before dinner: frantic telephone calls from London to tell me that the Prime Minister is so incensed by the way I’m being treated that he wants to cancel the visit which is going to be made shortly by Zhu Rongji, the up-and-coming Chinese Vice Premier. I talked to Jonathan Hill, John’s political adviser, and Stephen Wall to tell them that this should not be done under any circumstances. People in Hong Kong (even the Democrats) would think we were crazy. It would lose a lot of middle ground and Zhu is precisely the sort of person we should want to do business with in the future. The exchange was more difficult because it’s the middle of a Cabinet meeting in London and messages were plainly being passed in and out, to and from John and the Foreign Secretary. Anyway, eventually a cancellation of the visit was cancelled. I imagined that since we had to speak on open lines in order to get the decision made in time, some surprised Chinese spooks will have been listening to everything and relaying it to their masters. If there is one advantage to all this, it may be that the Chinese will now understand that I have rather a good relationship with the senior members of the British government.
Lavender meanwhile has been with Sue McLaren to the Great Wall, where she was amused first by the loudspeakers blaring Madonna songs with presumably lyrics which no one Chinese understood, and second by the slightly threatening-looking young men lounging around in mangy old soldiers’ uniforms hoping to get paid for posing for a photograph. Of course, she thought it very impressive, as I did when I saw it during my visit just before the Tiananmen murders.
If I wasn’t aware of the fact already that the Chinese communists didn’t like my proposals, I was soon subjected to what George Shultz rightly called the post-visit blast. While we were in mid-air on the way back to Hong Kong, Lu Ping gave a press conference and delivered more or less the private text that he had read out at Wednesday’s meeting. It was full of threats about changing everything in 1997 and refusals of cooperation if we try to go ahead with the airport on our own. Nothing was surprising but all was done with great verve. When I got back to Hong Kong, David Ford said that people remain pretty resilient but obviously we are in for a battering over the coming weeks. Will Hong Kong’s nerve hold? I had to deliver a speech in the evening to an American Foundation dedicated to freedom of speech. I gave them my threepenny-worth on the subject; it seemed to go down quite well. Thinking about Lu in retrospect I found myself rather puzzled. He’s obviously highly intelligent, sophisticated and charming with some civilized tastes – not least his love of classical music. But maybe because of ill-health and an unhappy family life, he obviously has a very short temper and a highly developed sense of amour propre. I guess one should also make allowance for the fact that he was brought up in Shanghai, subjected like so many other Chinese to overt racism by the dominant Europeans. I probably shouldn’t underestimate either the amount of political pressure that he is under. He is plainly not an obvious communist stooge – unlike Zhou Nan – and this may mean that he has less political armoury than might be desirable in his position. I have dealt with far more dislikeable people in my life, but far more likeable Chinese ones as well, for example Xiao Xiyang, who is now languishing under house arrest somewhere in Beijing.
Saturday 24–Sunday 25 October
This morning I briefed the Executive Council, who were rather gloomy. There will be a lot of cold feet around over the next few weeks. Then I went down to Legco to answer questions and make a statement. I am asked straight away about secret deals. I put up what I hope is regarded as a fairly robust show. It’s important to make people understand that I’m not backing off and that if enough people support me I’ll still be there when it matters. ‘Secret deals’ was not the way I did business.
Much of the weekend is spent getting our lines straight on the seven letters. It helps that we have found an interview on the radio with Lu Ping back in April making it clear that the question of the formation of the election committee is still something on which he wants to hear the views of the people of Hong Kong and on which decisions still have to be made. I spoke to both Douglas and Alastair Goodlad, saying that I’m very keen to publish the letters as soon as possible. We have to be on the front foot on this issue, otherwise people will think we have something to hide. I wish we had known about that radio interview before we went to Beijing; even more I wish that I had known about those bloody telegrams before I left London.
Monday 26–Thursday 29 October
The last days this month bring the usual stream of visitors and interminable interviews with journalists. Alas, Alice and I are to be on our own again. Lavender had a telephone call from South Africa from her nieces and nephew to tell her that her stepsister, Jill, was dying of cancer. She decided to fly to Johannesburg and Cape Town straight away.
The politics is dominated by three issues. First of all, as (I hope not) ever, the airport. We agreed at Exco with good leadership by Lydia that – after giving Beijing due warning – we should try to get backing from the Legislative Council finance committee to provide the money to allow us to go ahead with the contract for site preparation. This would show our intention of implementing the wretched memorandum of understanding.
Second, we have to deal with the fallout from the secret telegrams issue. We got approval from London to publish them. Robin McLaren told them in Beijing that we are going to do it and we get in just ahead of them doing the same thing. The media reaction is wholly manageable, not least because the issue of the election committee on which Lu Ping had publicly opined is so complicated. No one has the wit to ask the killer question as to whether I had actually seen the telegrams myself before I put forward my proposals. I was able to go on repeating that of course my officials knew about the exchanges very well. I guess this will continue to be an issue with which the Chinese will beat us over the head and which they will try to use to peel off support in the civil service and in the business community. They are saying in their newspapers that civil servants are very nervous about what I have proposed and want a quiet life until 1997, when they will start working for a China-appointed administration. There isn’t much sign of this so far.
Third, Beijing will obviously have more success with the business community. There was a meeting of my Business Council on 28 October at which Nigel Rich, the taipan of Jardine’s, very helpfully pointed out all the reasons why business should support what we are doing. But others were flakier. For example, Vincent Lo – a successful youngish businessman who has a certain slightly creepy charm (whom I put on the Business Council to show that I wanted broad-based advice) – objected to Nigel and argued that at its next meeting the Council should talk about relations with China. He is one of Beijing’s favourite sons and is said to be close to Lu Ping. We know that pro-Beijing cadres are really putting the squeeze on businessmen to criticize my proposals. This is a group that will get some comfort and support from a few of the old hands in Hong Kong who have been part of the establishment in the past. Sir David Akers-Jones,fn54 the former Chief Secretary, is one of the leading members of this crew. Mind, he used to think that David Wilson was confrontational. People like this probably encourage Chinese apparatchiks to think that they will win if they press hard enough.
There will also be encouragement for the pro-Beijing lobby from occasional British visitors. David Young is back again. He has had a rather unsatisfactory meeting with Li Peng in Beijing, who didn’t actually mention the Sino-British row. But clearly Young didn’t get what he was hoping for. He wants an inside track for Cable & Wireless in the Chinese telecoms market. He won’t get this if he thinks that the way of accomplishing it is by sucking up to senior leaders in Beijing and rubbishing what we are trying to do in Hong Kong. He will doubtless blame me for failure and will give quiet encouragement – or maybe not so quiet – to the Vincent Lo’s of Hong Kong. He should spend more time improving the management of Hong Kong Telecoms and appointing more local Chinese executives there.
Friday 30 October
I was invited by the Governor of Macaufn55 to go on a weekend visit. Lavender is still in South Africa so I took Alice with me. We flew on the helicopter and were greeted by the amiable Portuguese Governor, a general whose rank went up and down with each tide of revolution or reaction in his country. Macau has a lot of charm – if you can avoid looking at buildings such as the casino – largely reflecting its Portuguese heritage. The Governor himself lives in a handsome colonial building, a pink house on a headland. Alice and I stayed at a little hotel in another smart colonial house, called the Bella Vista, and were invited to a performance of the Barber of Seville in gardens on a hill in the centre of town. Macau made me rather homesick for Europe. I had good conversations with the Governor about dealing with China; I think the Macanese have fewer problems than we do. There’s an interesting Protestant cemetery where the painter Chinnery is buried. Alice is a perfectly charming companion.
Tuesday 3–Wednesday 4 November
Two snippets of information when I get back to Hong Kong. First, in a moment of role reversal, I learned that Beijing is now threatening to pull the plug on Zhu Rongji’s visit to London unless he is guaranteed a meeting with John Major. Clare Hollingworth, who must be the oldest journalist in Hong Kong or perhaps anywhere (she is credited with being the first to report Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939), came in for a fascinating chat. She has lots of contacts in the Chinese military but also it seems in the British armed forces. She tells me that the NCNA were delighted to learn that we had postponed Operation ‘Winged Dragon’. That’s the first I’ve heard about the very welcome postponement – via the NCNA. Another triumph for the MoD. They obviously don’t think it’s worth talking to the Governor.
Thursday 5 November
The Prince of Wales arrived to stay, leaving his wife on the plane, or perhaps it’s more true to say she chose to stay on the plane. They have obviously had a wretched time being hounded by the press in South Korea, their last point port of call.
Friday 6 November
Lavender returned (after the sad death of her stepsister) to find a house full of courtiers. Rather gallantly she came straight from the airport to the house, did a quick change and came out with me to dinner for the Prince of Wales at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank with a lot of businessmen, several of whom are anxious to be presented to the Prince, but are obviously muttering in the background about the Governor.
Saturday 7 November
We have had quite a busy time with HRH in which Lavender had to do most of the work. She went with him to the official opening of the Bradbury Hospice run by some terrific nuns. We had dinners for him and the parade ceremony for Remembrance Sunday at the Cenotaph outside Legco. Lavender was amused that since I am the Queen’s representative in the colony I took precedence at this event. I am, as it were, the Queen of Hong Kong. Prince Charles left for London tonight, by which time the most dramatic event of the week, or indeed of most weeks, had taken place.
From Lavender’s diary:
‘In need of some fresh air I went out with the dogs. At my driver Ronnie’s suggestion we ended up at Aberdeen reservoir. He stayed with the car and I walked down to the water and then around it. It’s very beautiful with all the soaring hills above. I’d walked nearly the whole way round when Soda suddenly bolted. Something or someone had scared her. At first I thought she was just exploring the undergrowth, but gradually I realized she must have gone further afield. By that time she must’ve been out of earshot. There were several paths she could have taken but there were no signs of her. I retraced my steps with Whisky, but after a while the light started to go, so I thought I’d better get back to the car and find help. The trouble was that I wasn’t sure where I was or where the car was. I panicked a bit. I crossed over the dam where I was terrified that Whisky was going to hurl himself off (it has no guardrail at his height), just to complete the disaster. We made it to the other side and luckily I met a man who’d seen the car and could speak English. He very kindly showed me the way. It was a long way and all uphill.’
Tuesday 10 November
For several days search parties involving a large number of the staff at the house have started at the crack of dawn and gone on with torches in the evening. Lavender had to combine these worrying searches with official duties. She went to the Family Law Association and met a number of judges and lawyers and Tom Mulvey, the very competent and decent man who runs it, and then named a large container vessel for P and O. She organized a farewell lunch at the house for Felipe, who is standing down from his role as ADC after doing a terrific job for two governors. I went off to Canada this afternoon feeling miserable about losing our little dog, which was worrying me at least as much as the shells raining down on me from Beijing and the fifth column activity by some members of the business community in Hong Kong. The disappearance of Soda has made her the most famous terrier on the planet, though with a good deal of moderately racist tabloid stuff, particularly from the British press. Kate and Laura back home learnt about Soda’s disappearance from the headlines with stories which suggest that she has probably been eaten. One headline runs, ‘Chinese eat governor’s dog’. The excellent Gareth Evans,fn56 Australia’s highly intelligent Foreign Minister, made a mistake quite common in public life with politicians who are genuinely witty, by telling a joke which he thought was private to a group of journalists in a bar. He said that Deng Xiaoping is well known for liking a couple of small dogs each day for breakfast. Questions are now asked in the Australian Parliament!
Wednesday 11th November
Back to Lavender’s words –
‘At about 7.25am this morning I was about to go out for another search when Elspeth telephoned. ‘Soda’s here, she’s just been brought home.’ I rushed downstairs with Whisky. Alice, unfortunately, had just gone off to school so missed the return of the wanderer. There was Soda in the private office, excited, pleased to see us all and totally fine. Whisky was beside himself with joy. Apparently two joggers were in Aberdeen country park about a mile from the reservoir when they saw Soda trotting along in front of them and called out her name, which they had read about in the newspaper. She stopped, wagged her tail and then ran up the hill away from them. Fortunately, it was rocky and she couldn’t avoid being caught. She seemed perfectly happy when they picked her up. Then they carried her back to Aberdeen, got in a taxi and brought her straight round to Government House.’ As soon as the Prince of Wales saw the news in the papers he sweetly sent Lavender a telegram expressing his delight and relief. She went that evening to see the police beating the retreat with their Chinese pipe band, kilts and all. Perhaps there is a cheerful Chinese reel called the ‘Return of the Terrier’.
I received the good news when I landed in Vancouver where I addressed a large lunch with hundreds of Hong Kong Chinese who now have Canadian passports. They seemed almost as interested in the happily terminated adventures of Soda as they were in the immediate future of Hong Kong.
Thursday 12–Saturday 14 November
I went on from Vancouver to Toronto and Ottawa. Ministers and everyone else were very supportive. While the Canadians have trade interests – and pretty substantial ones – in China, they have been extremely generous and helpful to Hong Kong, not just over passports but over other political issues too. I hope that Britain turns out to be as much on Hong Kong’s side as Canada is. I came here quite often when I was Development Minister. Britain and Canada had some of the most professionally organized aid programmes in the world so talked together quite a lot. I still ask myself the question that I used to pose to my officials then: is there a nasty Canadian? This is probably taking a gamble and I may well discover one or two before my game is up. Now I had to see what the mood was like back home.
Sunday 15 November
I got into London early this morning bleary eyed, and went straight to the flat and then on to mass at noon in the cathedral. Laura was delighted about my brief visit and came with me to Tristan and Catali’s for lunch. Tristan looked grey with fatigue. He has obviously taken a huge battering during the post-Maastricht ructions in the House of Commons. He has also been dragged into the rumpus about the sale of arms to Iraq, having been one of the signatories of an exemption certificate – simply because he was a duty minister that day. Some of the right-wing columnists are suspiciously nosing around what they regard as his ubiquitous insistence on throwing himself on any spears which point at the Prime Minister or Foreign Secretary. Once the Maastricht treaty is out of the way he wants to resign from the government. I hope he’s allowed to do so. Laura cooked a delicious lasagne for supper.
Monday 16–Wednesday 18 November
I’ve had an absolutely crazy week in London. There were meetings with the Foreign Secretary and officials at the Foreign Office; lunch with the executive committee of the Hong Kong Association; a meeting with the Hong Kong parliamentary group; a dinner given by Douglas Hurd for Zhu Rongji, whose visit to London is taking place this week; a meeting with the chairman of the foreign affairs select committee, David Howell; another at the MoD with Malcolm Rifkind; breakfast with Jack Cunningham, the Labour Party’s spokesman on foreign affairs; and a lunch with the Prime Minister. In addition, there were endless interviews, one of which at least annoys me, and is a reminder of what life is like in an open democracy. It’s with Brian Redhead on the Today programme on BBC Radio Four. I was first of all played a package put together by Humphrey Hawksley, the BBC’s man in Hong Kong, which quoted solely pro-Beijing critics, principally Elsie Tu, Vincent Lo and Selina Chow. Any idea that there is support in both Legco and in the community for what I am proposing was completely ignored. Needless to say, if I had adopted a different approach, the BBC would be taking me apart for not supporting democracy. Such is life – don’t I love our public service broadcaster? Probably the most notable event of the week was that Zhu Rongji gave a speech at Chatham House, asked specifically to have a question at the end of his remarks on Hong Kong, and then delivered some fairly wintry arguments, going over all the old ground, which will have quite a bad impact. The Hang Seng Index plummeted as a result and there was a rather tough Exco meeting (without me) on the 16th with Willie Purves and C. H. Tung pretty hostile. Once again the dialogue (such as it is) with China was Kafkaesque. China told us to obey the BL. We pointed out that on the election committee and the functional constituencies for example it is silent. China then repeated that we must obey the Basic Law. And so we go on. Despite this I was not too unhappy about how things felt in London. Lunch at the Hong Kong Association was quite good, especially Jardine’s. Murray MacLehose took me on one side and told me that he is sorry he is being miscast as a public critic of my proposals. He denied this and said he knows from personal experience how difficult the job is. He is an honourable man, probably disagrees with me, but is not going to do a Cradock. Most important, my support in the government and beyond seemed pretty strong. At a meeting of the Cabinet committee on Hong Kong with the Prime Minister in the chair, only Michael Heseltine and Michael Portillofn57 expressed any reservations. Ken Clarkefn58 said very strongly that putting ourselves in the position in which Hong Kong opinion will finally decide how far to go is both sensible and honourable. Douglas Hurd noted that what China really wants is for us to do their dirty work for them – setting up institutions which will guarantee that they and their system are established in Hong Kong by the time we leave rather than allowing us to leave anything decent behind. This I refuse to do.
Thursday 19 November
I flew up to Newcastle to see Kate. She is living in what seems a very jolly hall of residence surrounded by loud and cheerful friends. She is having a wonderful time but I’d forgotten quite how squalid student life can be. The girl next door to her had been coping today with the consequences of a young man throwing up all over her floor the previous night. He sent some flowers but probably not enough! I took Kate out to a restaurant down on the wharf in the centre of Newcastle, Number 21. We had a terrific meal and she’s really good company. I’d forgotten how much I miss her and indomitable Laura.
Friday 20 November
I got up with a huge black dog, not just because of the amount of red wine I drank last night. Seeing Kate has made me really gloomy. I don’t want to leave Newcastle so quickly. I’m also rather fed up about spending the whole winter being rubbished by China, criticized by businessmen and perhaps watching public support drain away. I sometimes don’t know what it is about me that seems to attract controversy. I don’t mean to be anything other than an amiable fellow leading a life full of good intentions and with rather liberal views on things. How do I get into all this sort of thing?
Back in London I had lunch with Laura and my sister Angela and her husband Pete. Afterwards I had meetings with David Wilson and Ted Heath, which didn’t exactly raise morale. David Wilson was politely unhappy about where things stand and worried about derailing the ‘through train’, which he thinks will leave Hong Kong in a terrible mess. Ted told me about a conversation that he had with Zhu Rongji in the car on the way to Oxford. Zhu had told him that China wouldn’t budge in resisting my proposals, so naturally Ted thinks that we should go along with whatever China wants to do. This, from the man who when the Joint Declaration was debated in the House of Commons argued that the government weren’t being sufficiently bold in pushing for greater democracy in Hong Kong. If you really want to find out what Ted Heath thinks these days, you ask what the government is doing and assume that he will want to do the opposite. This is even more so when his undoubted interests in China come into question.
Tuesday 24 November
While our meeting of Exco was on the whole supportive, when I reported my London discussions, there was a lot of hostility from C. H. Tung and expressions of nervousness from Willie Purves. I did some lobbying with Legco members to try to ensure that we get a favourable vote at the end of the week for funding the beginning of the work on the airport. It will be very damaging for our credibility and my political position if this doesn’t happen.
Wednesday 25 November
Almost as soon as I got back I had to set off with Lavender to Tokyo to speak at the Hong Kong/Japan business cooperation committee. It’s been a bit of a relief. Even a couple of days in Hong Kong was enough to raise my gloom level at the moment.
I learn more as time goes on about human behaviour. On the plane to Japan Lydia told me (she was coming to the business cooperation committee meeting) that the previous evening Murray MacLehose had phoned her up full of pessimism about events in Hong Kong and the controversy unleashed by my proposals. He was obviously trying to get me to think again, or get others to make me do so. He said I was behaving with China like a chairman of the Conservative Party dealing with Labour politicians. So much for his private word with me last week that anybody who said that he was trying to be unhelpful was wholly wrong.
The ministers I met in Japan, including the former Prime Minister, Mr Nakasone, gave discreet support. The most impressive political figure was the top official in the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Owada, an immensely sophisticated official who speaks beautiful English. He was at Cambridge; apparently his daughter, who was at Balliol, now a diplomat, is spoken of as a possible bride for the Crown Prince. Our ambassador, John Boyd, and his wife Julia were extremely kind and knowledgeable hosts. Although John is now here, he was originally a China expert and spent some time in Hong Kong so understands very well the issues we are facing and the personalities involved. He managed to get together most of the friends that I have made over the years in Japanese politics for a very jolly dinner.
Friday 27 November
The Legco vote on agreeing funds for starting work on the airport went the right way. But it was close, we won by just two. Martin Barrow,fn59 who had been with us for the meetings in Tokyo, went back specially to vote. David Ford and his team have done a fantastic lobbying job. It would have been a big blow if we had lost.
Saturday 28 November
This morning we went off to Kamakura to the Buddhist shrine there, which has been looked after for years by the grandfather and father of my first close Japanese friend, Yukio Satoh.
Monday 30 November
We have had a really bloody time since being back in Hong Kong. China’s behaviour over the airport is bad enough, but they are also publicly threatening not to validate any contracts which are signed before 1997 but straddle that date. This evening, the Hong Kong Macau Affairs Office issued a statement implying that no new grants, leases or franchises awarded by the British government will be allowed to straddle 1997 unless they’re specifically approved by Beijing. So it immediately looked as though the new container terminal is at risk, among much else. The legal position is perfectly clear. Under the Basic Law, contracts signed before 1997 should be honoured afterwards. We have been talking about franchises and so on with China in the Joint Liaison Group for some time. China’s intention is plainly not to have an argument about the legality of contracts, but to shake confidence in the market, lower morale and spook investors.
Tuesday 1 December
In this at least they succeed for the time being. This morning, the market started to tremble and the Hang Seng Index fell. Tung and Purves were once again rattling the bars in Exco. We should drop our proposals straight away. Willie Purves unhelpfully dragged in comparisons with Britain’s position in the ERM. Back home Percy Cradock, not denying himself the opportunity to put the boot in, wrote to The Times denouncing what we are doing. The tenor of his argument is that it may be unfortunate that China behaves in ways that we don’t like but that’s what happens with China. We all just have to lump it. I guess people used to make similar points during the 1930s about Germany. After questions in Legco I had a meeting with William Ehrman, who had received messages via an intermediary from the Chinese leadership. First of all, it confirmed what we knew already. Deng Xiaoping and other members of the leadership regard what is happening in Hong Kong as part of an international conspiracy against China. They put it together with the sale of F-16 aircraft to Taiwan, the visit of Carla Hills (George Bush’s Trade Representative) to Taipei and the attitude of Germany, France and the Netherlands to Taiwan and to the issue of MFN status for China. It’s all a Western attempt to subvert China and destroy the last great communist power. There are said to be some indications that they would be prepared to tolerate a democratically based election committee and more liberally defined functional constituencies, though not the ones that I have suggested – they’re wondering whether proposals like this might come up from individual Legco members. Indeed they might. It’s a point that William and I discussed with the Chief Secretary and the Financial Secretary. I also talked to Martin and Edward about it. We kept this very tight. The only compromise we could find politically tolerable would be one that came out of the Legislative Council.
Wednesday 2 December
The slide in the Hang Seng Index continued. We know that some of this is being triggered by China-based companies and the Bank of China itself buying and selling forward in the futures market. They are deliberately encouraging a mood of panic. I wonder how long they will keep this up before concluding that they are going to damage themselves – in particular the families of some of the senior leaders who have substantial investments (ill-gotten gains?) in Hong Kong. Do they really want to bring the roof down? When I had breakfast with the Beijing correspondent of the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof, he seemed to think we are being very brave. He reckoned, building on my metaphor, that the roof may indeed fall and that we will have to get out before we are hit by the debris. Kristof is an excellent journalist and knows a lot about China, so we should listen carefully to what he says.
Friday 4 December
So far the Hang Seng has gone down by over 400 points. Leo Goodstadt has written a clever paper showing how there have been much bigger falls in the past. In fact, the market is pretty well back to where it was earlier in the year, but there’s not much comfort in that. There is a growing sense of panic and I’m taking all the blame rather than China. I’m not sleeping very well. That always happens when I’m politically worried.
Chinese officials are becoming increasingly imaginative in the names they call me: sinner for a thousand years, prostitute, triple violator and more. They have clearly been through the Cultural Revolution handbook to find the appropriate language to describe me. This is less unsettling than what is happening to the markets and the steady drip of criticism from members of the business community, invariably I suspect from the ones who have foreign passports. I am having regular meetings with civil servants as well as of course with the Secretaries of departments. Given the efforts that Beijing is making to undermine them it’s important to do everything to keep them onside. So far so good. But at one meeting with David Ford today he passed me a note saying, ‘You sound very low.’ I perked up and tried to provide a bit more positive body language. Back in London Cradock continues to bitch away. I am helped in Exco by Robin McLaren, who comes down from Beijing to give a briefing. He puts on an excellent performance. He is realistically gloomy about attitudes in Beijing but supportive of my proposals. I am told that he has read the riot act to his embassy staff about any criticism of what we are doing.
Wednesday 9 December
My morale was lifted, curiously enough, by a meeting with an organization called the Business Professional Federation led by a pretty ghastly trio – Vincent Lo, David Akers-Jones and a retired taipan from Swire’s called David Gledhill. The highlights of the meeting for me were, first, Akers-Jones admitting that the sort of proposals he would like to see for the elections wouldn’t stand a chance of being passed by Legco. Second, David Gledhill was forced to admit that the Chinese position on the container terminal was quite simply wrong. He began to refer to it by saying that the Chinese had made a statement about the subject ‘rightly or wrongly’. I asked him directly, ‘Well, was it rightly or wrongly?’ Rather sheepishly he admitted the latter. It’s quite comforting that they have nothing really to say and refuse, with a variety of spurious reasons, to put forward alternative proposals.
Saturday 12 December
I had a further sense that we had a very defensible position when at an informal Exco we went through all my proposals one by one. This had been Lydia’s helpful idea. I think people are starting to understand the complexities of the issues. We can of course make adjustments but it would be useful if there was obvious support in Legco for any changes. As Ken Clarke said at the Cabinet committee meeting, we can’t very well be a lot braver than the community is prepared to be. When C. H. Tung talked to me privately about having secret negotiations with China on all this, I pointed out that there isn’t much to be said for trying to agree something with Lu Ping which can’t then be delivered by Legco.
Monday 14 December
Definitely a day to remember. I spoke to the Hong Kong Exporters Association and made my usual pitch that MFN renewal on trade with the USA should be kept separate from the debate on Hong Kong’s political development. After lunch Lydia Dunn told me that Allen Lee has been talking to the press assuring them that within three or four months I shall be on my knees to China. Then I saw three very sane Americans – Winston Lord, who used to be the US ambassador in Beijing, Morton Abramowitz, who was an ambassador and Asian expert, and Stephen Bosworth, an American academic and diplomat. They are all members of the Asia Society. Winston Lord has already said in public that it is astonishing that the Chinese are making so much fuss over so little. He believes they have really overreacted. The excellent Canadian consul in Hong Kong, John Higginbotham, has said much the same. They all think that what is really annoying China is that we are attempting to give substance to what is actually written in the JD and the BL.
Then came the big event of the day. Lee Kuan Yew was giving a lecture at Hong Kong University in the main hall and as Chancellor I agreed to preside. The hall was full and he delivered a rather dull speech – read word for word – comparing Singapore and Hong Kong as great Asian cities. As the audience were warming up to questions, I asked him one about the process of decolonization, which he uses to attack democracy in general and Britain in particular. He then received a question from a professor in the audience about the irony of the most autocratic leader in Asia sitting next to the most democratic Governor, and who went on to ask whether the prosperity of Hong Kong means that it now deserves democracy. Lee Kuan Yew had obviously prepared himself for a question like this and he delivered a real blast – his answer was longer than the lecture. He spoke for nearly 40 minutes with a wealth of cuttings, extracts from speeches in the House of Lords (rather rarely quoted in my experience) and transcripts of television interviews. He comprehensively rubbished the proposals I have put forward, and this from the man who not long ago was advising me to try to fill in the grey areas in the Joint Declaration and the Basic Law. Most damagingly, he asserted that the proposals were part of the plot directed at China to create havoc through democratization. Apparently we have planned all this with the Americans. This is exactly the sort of conspiracy theory which they believe in Beijing. There was also a lot of selective quotation from commentators as well as from Percy Cradock and Murray MacLehose.
Altogether, it was a seriously tiresome performance. At the end of it restraining myself from saying what I would like to have offered up, I thanked him and noted that I looked forward to the right of reply in Singapore after 1997. I got a burst of applause from the audience.
Tuesday 15 December
Lee cancelled his engagements today on the excuse that he was not feeling well – but well enough to fill his diary with interviews with television channels and newspapers in which he covered all this stuff once again. I guess part of his purpose was to damage Hong Kong while trying to improve Singapore’s relationship with China. It is of course ironic that he used the freedom of speech in Hong Kong which is denied to critics of the government in Singapore. There is no doubt that he is clever, no question that he is interesting, nor that he has created in Singapore a considerable success story for a certain kind of social engineering in a fairly small community. As for the other qualities usually thought desirable in an amiable and courteous human being, it’s a matter of taste, I suppose.
Saturday 19 December
There are a lot of other things which should keep me happy. I still get enthusiastic welcomes on all my district visits and even after the pounding we have taken. Mike Hanson showed me an opinion poll on the 13th that gives us a 2 to 1 lead for what we are trying to do and the way we are doing it. I was also greatly cheered by a dinner with a wonderful Italian priest, Father Lambertoni from the Pontifical Institute for Missions Overseas (PIME in the Italian). He had to leave Hong Kong a few years ago when he was campaigning against the Triads in his parish. The parish priest had been murdered, having been mistaken for Lambertoni himself. He had to be got out of the city, but after working for a bit in refugee camps in Thailand, he came back to Hong Kong. He rides a Harley-Davidson and has a very active parish in Kowloon. He is the best possible example of the social teaching of the Catholic Church in practice. He told me to ‘Hang on in there’ as a lot of churches have started petitions so that people can sign up to support what I’ve been trying to do. That is more or less what Peter Barry said in his homily in the cathedral last Sunday.
On top of all this I have Lavender and Alice, and Christmas, to look forward to. But alas I am losing my private secretary, Richard Hoare, who is moving on to another civil service post; Richard has been hugely supportive and he has got on very well with Martin and Edward. We gave him a farewell lunch and welcomed his Chinese successor, Bowen Leung. While the artillery fire has been raining down on us, I have a pretty comfortable bunker to go home to. I suppose that this might be a good time to describe Government House in a little more detail.
It truly does matter to have somewhere you love to live in when the going gets rough. It’s probably best to describe it briefly in Lavender’s own words from her own diary. She after all has to run it with a wonderful staff led by our housekeeper, Elspeth.
‘GH – our home! – is amazing. It’s up the hill from the central district, opposite the Botanical Gardens, and has been the residence of governors since it was built in 1855. It’s huge – especially to someone used to a four-bedroomed flat in central London. From the outside the house doesn’t really look like a typical British colonial building at all. It’s much more oriental looking, and of course now it’s dwarfed by all the skyscrapers and new building projects going up on all sides. Inside it’s a handsome building, cool, light and spacious with beautiful rooms and balconies. But the decoration is all rather dreary …
‘… The wallpaper and furnishings are faded and will need smartening up when we can get round to it. Our private rooms are on the first floor. We have a large sitting room and bedroom … We each have a bathroom and dressing room, though his is much more of a proper room than mine. The girls each have a room in the tower; Alice’s has a kitchen. The tower is a Japanese addition to the house, which was rebuilt during the war when the Japanese occupied Hong Kong and the Japanese commander appropriated the house as his official residence. I think the housekeeper used to live up there before a bungalow was built for her in the grounds …
‘There’s plenty of space for visitors – and I envisage a steady stream – official guests and, I hope, friends too. There are three guest suites on the first floor consisting of a double and a single bedroom and a sitting room each.’
Back to me –
The house was surrounded by a sweeping garden falling away down the hill behind the house towards a wooded area at the bottom. There was a large lawn at the top of the hill and a swimming pool tucked in next to the house surrounded by shrubs and trees. There were also two tennis courts which in the past had been used frequently for car parking. Not any longer! We used the tennis courts a lot and allowed Hong Kong’s junior tennis squad to train there too.
We were keen to cheer up the house, not least since we were intending to open it a lot more to the public for concerts and charity events. It needed a lot of repainting; the bathrooms needed redoing; the curtains and fabrics had to be cleaned or replaced; and in doing all this we wanted to try to ensure that the house showed off the best of Hong Kong design with both new and antique furniture. We also wanted to include some of our own things. We were told very firmly that before we began work, we should consult the feng shui master. I have a modest sympathy for geomancy; in building or decorating a home there is much to be said for taking account of the environment. But I find it difficult to believe that this is real science, let alone a set of almost spiritual beliefs, which should determine the decisions you take and the way you live. When our expert came to look around the house, presumably for a good fee, he told us that the house was oppressed by surrounding skyscrapers. He was particularly concerned that the sharp corner of the Bank of China pointed menacingly at the house. Before doing anything else he insisted on moving some of our furniture around, often almost imperceptibly. Having consulted his charts, he told us that we must not do any major works until next year.
Lavender talked to Thomas Chow, one of my assistant private secretaries, about all this. He is a Christian and told Lavender that as Christians we should have nothing to do with all this nonsense. Lavender was told that, when the feng shui man was leaving the house, he heard that we were disappointed about the delay in starting the work. He told Elspeth that he was sorry that he hadn’t known this in advance. He could have fixed a date that suited us had he known we wanted to get on with things. This made Lavender very sympathetic to Thomas’s point of view!
But the truth is that a large number of the staff actually believed in all this malarkey, as did a lot of senior Chinese business leaders, including C. H. Tung. When my predecessor but one, Sir Edward Youde, redesigned the garden with a trickle of water flowing down the steps from the pond away from the house, his subsequent visit to Beijing was thought to be doomed in advance. And indeed, when poor Youde – a really excellent man who stood up for Hong Kong – made this official visit north, he died of a heart attack and came back in a coffin. The critics of his redesign of the garden responded by making the point that this calamity was only to be expected since he had arranged for water to run away from his house, and life had followed water. So Thomas was right, but so was Lavender. We had to go through all this to get the staff to buy in to what we were proposing.
The staff rapidly became friends. They loved having Alice and our dogs around; daughter and terriers were all horribly spoiled. Inevitably, the dogs spent quite a lot of their time hovering around the kitchen hoping for scraps or sitting with the team responsible for telegram traffic in a basement room being fed too many biscuits. Lavender got on extremely well with all the staff – they worked very hard, were cheerful and conscientious. Our terrific chefs made sure that whatever was being said about me by Beijing, my morale was not entirely blown away. Inevitably I started to put on weight.
Thursday 24 December
The past 10 days have brought some further economic terrorism from Beijing. First of all, came a warning on 16 December from Ambassador Ma in London to ICI that they should lobby against my proposals if they wanted to benefit their business. To their credit they told him that there was a difference between economics and politics and that if the Chinese government did not like what we were doing in Hong Kong it was up to them to lobby against it. Second, far worse than this, as the Hang Seng Index continued to fall, was a blistering attack on 17 December by the New China News Agency on Jardine’s, presumably because the firm has been quite supportive about what we have been doing. Peter Ricketts had a brief visit on the 17th to see what is going on in Hong Kong and noted not very surprisingly that things have got a lot more jittery, although he certainly hasn’t.
I continued to get out and about as much as possible. There were large cheering crowds on a visit to the Kwai Tsing district. I’m still not sure whether this is the celebrity factor – that is, people turning out to see me because I’m well-known – or whether it represents something more political. I can hope. I had an afternoon on the 17th looking at so-called ‘black spots’ with the Chief Secretary and a small team. We looked at unsafe structures which have been added onto buildings without planning consent, the building of commercial extensions in back alleys, the prostitutes in Sham Shui Po and so on. The nastiest thing we saw were the hostels for caged men. These are little bunks with cages round them which the most impoverished poor people in the community rent for tiny sums. They really are shockingly squalid in a city where there are so many very rich people.
The Jardine’s affair rumbled on, but most of the press are very critical of what China has done. Then suddenly on the 22nd – the day when we were told we would get some sort of ultimatum – the noises out of China appeared to change, as our excellent spooks had predicted they would. Lu Ping gave all sorts of assurances at a meeting with a delegation of the principal United Front political party in Hong Kong – the DAB HK. He said that China doesn’t want to appoint some kind of alternative government, that it’s committed to the airport and the Joint Declaration, and it’s certainly not going to walk away from that or the Basic Law. In addition, Foreign Minister Qian Qichen has made optimistic noises and said that Sino-UK relations will improve after he has seen Douglas Hurd in March. Whatever game Beijing is playing, I prefer this one to the last.
And then we were into Christmas. Kate and Laura arrived from London, as did my sister Angela and brother-in-law Pete and their daughter Lucy. We had a carol concert on the 22nd in the house with the choir from the Anglican cathedral and all went to the races at Happy Valley to the Governor’s box yesterday. I know nothing at all about horses, got some tips from the stewards at the house and didn’t win a penny. Kate looked wonderful when she handed over the prizes for the Ladies’ Purse horse race.
Sunday 27 December
We spent Christmas Day and a short period afterwards at Fanling, went for terrific walks and ate lots of goose – apart from poor Lavender, who was ill on Christmas Day. Today we all went to mass at Father Lambertoni’s parish in Kwai Chung. It’s a working-class parish where we got a tremendous welcome. We had another walk in the afternoon in pouring rain, though I started to get out of breath a bit.
Friday 1 January 1993
The Needhams were all with us over the New Year, but New Year’s Eve itself is awful. While we were all at a party I heard that there’s been a terrible accident in Lan Kwai Fong, a very lively area just down the hill full of clubs, restaurants and bars. 20 youngsters were killed in the crush of a crowd celebrating the New Year. Lavender and I went back to Government House and changed out of black tie. Then we went to the police headquarters and the two hospitals that have been dealing with the victims and finally to the scene of the tragedy itself, not far from Government House. It was very grim indeed. Sleeping parents were woken in the middle of the night and brought into hospital to identify the bodies of their children. If we had not been at parties ourselves, Kate and Laura were planning to visit this area with some young friends. This is the sort of disaster which happens in life and I’m not sure that you can ever take precautions which make such horrible accidents absolutely impossible. However, this morning I set up an enquiry and asked for interim findings before the Chinese New Year. I have a strong feeling that if you’re at the top when things like this happen you have to show your face. It may not do very much good but you have to try, and to show that you care which – unless you’re made out of stone – you of course do.
Friday 8 January
We spent quite a bit of time after New Year trying to work out whether the Chinese line had really changed and if so why. The truth is we just didn’t know what had happened. Anyway, it looked as though the Hong Kong Macau office was back in charge and that the NCNA bruisers were being pushed to the side. The press back in London still lean in the direction of reporting on the beleaguered Governor, exhausted by the battering he has taken, who is about to be eaten for breakfast by Deng Xiaoping as Hong Kong trembles. And so on. This is pretty much what Ann Leslie writes in the Mail. She’s too good and intelligent to be churning out this sort of stuff by the yard. When I said in one interview with the London Standard that it is always possible there may be a compromise on political development, it’s taken as a sure sign that we are in retreat.
Lydia Dunn says the rumour about town is that we are searching for an intermediary. I keep on saying to whoever is prepared to listen that we can’t go any further than Legco wants, and that if there are going to be any changes they are most likely to come as a result of legislators making them. But wannabe intermediaries keep on popping up offering their services or claiming that we’ve already asked for help. It drives us all to distraction.
Sunday 10 January
Malcolm Rifkindfn60 and his nice and articulate wife, Edith, came briefly to stay this weekend for discussions with the garrison. He sympathized about the intermediaries problem. Apparently, he used to get quite a bit of this when as a minister he was dealing with Eastern Europe. While he was with us he made a point of trying to talk to all shades of opinion. At a dinner I gave for the Rifkinds, Malcolm said to me that, whatever else happens, we should at least be able to leave Hong Kong with our heads held high. Let’s hope so. He told Lavender that once he’s made a decision on a big issue he doesn’t spend a lot of time worrying about it afterwards. Fortunate and sensible chap! When he was talking as he does to a number of pro-democracy guests at a reception he was torn away from them by Willie Purves, who wanted him to know that the business community are very unhappy with me. Willie, who is not perhaps best known for his sense of humour, has just told Edward that he must stop me telling jokes. He says that the Chinese don’t like it. I wonder how he explains all those Cantonese puns.
Saturday 16 January
This past week, the main questions about my political package have been when we should put it to the legislature, whether we should change it before we table it, what changes should we be prepared to accept, and how we should deal with China both about what is proposed and what is actually happening in the legislature. All these discussions took place against a background of suspicion on the part of the pro-democracy camp that we were trying to wriggle out of our original proposals. We had several extremely lengthy discussions in January in Exco accompanied by leaks and orchestrated lobbying from outside. Rightly or wrongly Swire’s, for whom Lydia works, are thought to have a hand in some of this. Larry Yung, who is the head of the China mainland company Citic and who is believed to be not only influential but pretty moderate, has been talking to Adrian Swire in London. He told him and others that China expects my proposals to be knocked about a good deal in the Legislative Council, and that China’s concessions to unblock things at the end will include amended but reasonably democratic proposals on the election committee. With, I suspect, some elbow nudging, several members of Exco wanted to go in detail through all the different ways of organizing the election committee, but no one came up with a better or more coherent idea than the one we have already proposed. Robin McLaren made efforts to see Lu Ping to clarify what we are doing and to try to disentangle us from intermediaries, the most recent of whom is Jeffrey Sterling, the boss of P and O, whose credentials for getting up to whatever he’s getting up to remain unclear.
More agreeably we had interesting discussions with Hamish MacLeod about how to deal with our budgetary surplus – this is one of the problems of success to which I’m not terribly accustomed back home at Westminster.
I have also begun discussions with David Ford about how we can replace the expatriate heads of civil service departments with local Chinese appointments, so that by 1997 the entire team, with the exception of myself and the Attorney General, is local.
We got one piece of amusing gossip about the egregious Cradock. He was giving an interview to a journalist who works for a magazine owned and run by T. S. Lo, a local lawyer and bridge-playing politician who has become very close to Beijing. Cradock told the journalist that John Major was doing perfectly all right in relation to China, and doing what he was told, until suddenly he rejected a note that Cradock had passed to him during the course of a meeting in the summer with Martin Lee. In Cradock’s view that is when all the problems seemed to start. He really can’t understand what all this fuss is about since the Prime Minister – he claimed – was delighted with his trip to Beijing and had told him so. Now the Prime Minister is off the leash and there are problems all over the place. It is all absurd enough to be a true account of the Cradock view. I guess that Percy has spent too long working with and on the Chinese Communist Party to avoid being affected by their endless hunt for, and purported discovery of, conspiracies.
Thursday 21 January
We had lunch with John Foley and his wife on the 17th. I had two helpings of a delicious boeuf stroganoff and then we went out on a very cold afternoon to play tennis. We had barely begun when I started getting chest pains, which I assumed were the result of acute indigestion from which I used to suffer until I gave up smoking. When we got back to the house, Lavender sent for a doctor, who arrived with an ECG machine. This began days of discussions with, and examinations by, doctors, ECGs on treadmills, and all sorts of other tests for my blood pressure and much more. There was some dispute about whether I had actually had a heart attack; one of my tests showed large numbers of enzymes in the blood, which was apparently a bad sign. What there is no doubt about is that I am and have been suffering from fibrillation. Lavender supported my refusal to go straight into hospital but part of the price was that we had a permanent medical presence in the house for a few days. What I didn’t want was headlines saying that I was about to conk out. One of the last things that Hong Kong needs is another Governor dead from a heart attack. All the doctors I saw, particularly three clever young cardiologists who looked as though they were barely out of school, were kind and plainly knew exactly what they were doing. Dr Yeoh, who runs the Hospital Authority, made sure that everything was well coordinated without any discernible sense of panic. This helped avoid media speculation about how ill I am.
One thing that cheered me up while this was going on was William Ehrman’s account of a banquet which had been given for him after cross-border liaison talks in Guangdong. The authorities there seemed to go out of their way to tell him how sympathetic they are towards all of us in Hong Kong. Without too much subtlety they wanted to make it clear that they thought Beijing was behaving ridiculously in relation to political developments in the city. In return for this, William had to chomp his way through a great feast. He ate for Britain – peacock, half a dog (which he said looked exactly like what it was), a whole snake and a bowl of cockerel’s testicles. ‘Which was the nastiest of all these dishes?’ I asked, ‘The cocks’ balls’, he said with some feeling.
Friday 22 January
With a suitcase full of medicines and a promise to have an angiogram when I get home, we are heading off for a lovely week’s holiday in Bali tomorrow, staying in a hotel on the beach. I plan to read more Hilary Mantel and John King Fairbanks’ history of China.
Sunday 31 January
As soon as I got home, rather sunburned but much rested, I had another ECG and then a discussion with another young group of cardiologists, led by a doctor called Stephen Lee who was a bit more forceful than the others and didn’t hesitate to tell me what he really thought. He wanted me to have an angiogram as soon as possible, so I went along to Queen Mary’s Hospital today. It wasn’t much fun. A catheter was inserted in my groin and ran up into the arteries around my heart. Then some sort of substance was injected and they started taking pictures. I watched all this on a screen in a state of controlled horror. But I should feel more sympathy for the young cardiologists, who had to do all this with a large team of the great and good in the Hong Kong medical profession watching them through the window. One reason why I like Stephen so much is his blunt honesty. He insists on giving me a real indication of the risks and shot down everybody who said that what was happening to me was ‘a piece of cake’. The conclusion was that I have a badly blocked circumflex artery at the back of my heart and problems with another artery on the other side. Two out of three isn’t good. They also concluded that the next stage should be angioplasty rather than a bypass, which pleased me a lot as I understand that with a bypass you sometimes have to face up to another one after 10 years.
Monday 1 February
Both John Major and Douglas Hurd phone up after they’ve heard about my problems. John wondered whether I’d like to come home to continue the procedure. I made the obvious point that it would be a terrible gesture of lack of confidence in the Hong Kong medical system if I were to do this, and that anyway I’m very pleased about the way that I’m being looked after by Stephen Lee and the others.
I have come back to a continuing dispute by Cathay Pacific stewardesses in which I am reluctant to intervene. Industrial relations are not really a problem in Hong Kong. We certainly don’t need (as some legislators are suggesting) a change in the law. We have a good labour relations department and I don’t want to interfere politically with how they are dealing with the dispute. Moreover the department is part of Anson Chan’s economic affairs secretariat and she has plainly got a grip on what is happening. Indeed, the more I see of her, the more she seems very good at getting a grip on any problem which comes her way. As Martin says, she runs towards problems not away from them.
Tuesday 2 February
We had an pretty intelligent discussion in Exco about what to do with the election proposals. The line-up was fairly predictable. C. H. Tung was against doing anything that China doesn’t like, though he expressed himself as usual both genially and with great courtesy. One issue that came up was whether Britain has simply changed its policy on China. In summing up I said that I wasn’t sent out to alter British policy but that giving in to China self-evidently hasn’t been in the interest of Hong Kong or Britain; that we are determined to take the Joint Declaration seriously; that China has greatly overreacted to our proposals; that we tried to satisfy them on direct elections and the composition of Exco; and that if there is a change the British government is proposing, it is to make absolutely clear (as I have said on several previous occasions) that it will only go as far as Hong Kong wishes. We agreed to go forward on the basis of the present plans and publish a first-stage set of proposals (covering issues such as the voting age and election to the municipal council and district boards) followed by a debate in the Legislative Council in a couple of weeks’ time. We can continue with the rest later if we don’t want to do everything together. We will ask our embassy in Beijing, and perhaps the Foreign Secretary as well, to tell Beijing what we are proposing to do, particularly laying out what gazetting of our proposals actually means – literally telling the legislature in broad terms what we are proposing to do in a bill. I don’t want them to start banging on again about us not letting them know how we intend to proceed. (As though they would tell us what they are planning to do!)
I had dinner this evening with senior police officers in their mess. I made a little Eve-of-Waterloo-ball sort of speech, noting that one benefit of my illness is that the Chinese will no longer be able to argue that I don’t have a heart. I got a standing ovation, which was good for morale, especially as I was not able to drink very much wine to cheer me up in a more traditional way.
Wednesday 3 February
Back to hospital and the catheter once again like last week. Stephen Lee was there with his hand-picked team; there is also apparently a standby team in case anything goes wrong and I need an urgent bypass. They started work just before 9 and went on till just after 12. It seemed a very long time indeed. They passed balloons up my arteries and inflated them for as long as I could bear the pain, which is a bit like having a heart attack. For the patient there is an obvious problem. You want them to inflate the balloons as much as possible to have the best effect, but on the other hand you don’t want to be in pain for too long. I was delighted when the catheter was eventually removed and I have been sent off to Fanling for a few days’ rest.
Friday 5–Sunday 14 February
I can put my feet up and David Ford can govern Hong Kong for a bit. Lydia Dunn and her husband, Michael Thomas (formerly the Attorney General and a distinguished barrister), have sent me a little CD player, so I’ve had a rather musical time, mostly listening to Mozart piano sonatas and Puccini in the garden. The heroes of all this are of course Stephen and his colleagues. Apparently, having saved the Governor, they are going to be in great demand even on the mainland. I suppose the villain is me for not taking enough exercise and having too much to eat.
There was one major political development during my week off. At the 11th hour Beijing suddenly warmed to the idea of talks. This came after Exco had agreed that we should go ahead and gazette the bill incorporating our constitutional proposals, with the idea of early debates in Legco. Have they just blinked? During the last week our ambassador in Beijing went to the Chinese explaining the proposals, handing them a copy of the bill and a letter from me saying how things will now proceed, with an additional letter from Douglas Hurd. This was couched in the usual terms, saying that we remained happy for a discussion at any stage. They then told Robin McLaren when he handed over the letters that they would like some time to consider them. So we agreed to delay gazetting our bill from 12 to 19 February. Today, Robin McLaren was summoned and given a reply from Qian Qichen to Douglas Hurd’s letter proposing talks. There was a lot of noise and bluster in Qian’s letter but no suggestion that we needed to drop my proposals formally before talks could take place. In other words, at the very last moment they have backed down, though this is not something we can say.
Tuesday 16 February
We do now face real difficulties. Previously, the position was absolutely straightforward. We withstood a barrage of abuse and attacks from China but proposed that Legco should take things forward. It’s been a reasonably satisfactory few months (though it didn’t feel like it at the time) because we haven’t dropped anything; we’ve stood up to bullying; and the Chinese want to talk. The Hang Seng Index is higher now than it was when I made my Legco speech; the economy is in good shape; Hong Kong hasn’t fallen; and Legco have started to behave in a rather more mature way. While the community will be greatly cheered and doubtless the Hang Seng will soar, actually handling the discussions with China will be enormously complicated. All the pressure will be on us to make concessions. We are already starting to see this a bit in some of the telegrams that we get from the Beijing embassy. The most pusillanimous members of the business and political community will claim credit for the talks, whereas in fact talks are a result of standing firm.
In my first discussions today about these developments I behaved in a rather Thatcher-like way and asked what you could euphemistically call challenging questions. I pressed very hard on William Ehrman and Tony Galsworthy about where the talks will actually get us. I’m very keen that we shouldn’t drift into the usual Sinophile ‘surrender and reparations’ frame of mind. We agreed that there must be a strong Hong Kong presence on the negotiating team. I want Michael Sze, Peter Lai (an able Chinese official who is Michael’s deputy) and William Ehrman perhaps, as well as Peter Ricketts from London, to join the ambassador. We want to start as soon as possible and there must also be an early announcement that talks are going to take place. This is imperative because the Chinese have started leaking already. I would like us to have a negotiating strategy which puts pressure on China to make its own proposals and an agenda of concessions on which we can press China. We can’t just play the game on Chinese terms during the first round of talks and then cave in during the second and subsequent rounds. It was a spirited meeting and we fired off telegrams in all directions. Lydia Dunn is very pleased about the latest turn of events but concerned that we shouldn’t allow the Chinese to drag the talks out. I think this is exactly what they will do. I talked to Martin Lee on what in Westminster one would call Privy Council terms. I don’t want him to think that we are suddenly going to go weak at the knees. I think he trusts me on this but obviously his colleagues will not want to see any evidence of retreat.
There is one sign of disagreement in what we are hearing from China. The NCNA in Hong Kong is saying that I must withdraw my proposals before there are any talks. The Hong Kong Macau Office in Beijing is saying simply that I must withdraw my proposals. The significance of this distinction would not be clear to anybody who wasn’t already well-versed in the arcana of Sino-British Hong Kong politics.
Wednesday 17 February
I’ve started playing tennis again and did so before a meeting with Rupert Murdoch and the chairman of the South China Morning Post. They have just changed the editor, Phillip Crawley, whom they don’t appear to think is sufficiently pro-Beijing at a time when Murdoch himself is trying to get more deeply into China. It’s sad for Crawley. He’s a fine journalist and a very competent editor. The Post has not been mindlessly supportive of me. Indeed, it has sometimes been quite critical. If I was the proprietor I would think it had struck rather a good balance. I found Murdoch himself slightly more charming than I had expected but I’m not sure that you would take much notice of him in a crowd. This evening, I had dinner with Jim Prior,fn61 now the chairman of GEC, who is with some of the company’s fixers and would-be customers. Jim had recently seen Zhou Nan, who tried to put the frighteners on him saying that in the light of my disgraceful behaviour China would not be buying anything from Britain. Mafia tactics again. We also hear several rumours that the NCNA is pushing companies for kickbacks in return for not having projects or commercial sales blocked.
Thursday 18 February
We had a telegram late last night from Douglas asking us to set out our bottom line so that he can let the Prime Minister know what it is. I dictated a telegram first thing this morning, saying we would be prepared to give a bit on the election committee and functional constituencies, but would need something in return to make a reality of convergence (between the political system before and after the handover) and the through train. For example, if we make any concessions, those who were elected in 1995 should be allowed to travel right through to 1999 provided they accept the BL. If we are going to find ourselves making concessions during the talks, we will want something in exchange. At a stand-up with the press after I opened an expo on education and careers, I was asked whether the reason that I can’t say anything about talks is because nobody has told me about them. There are rumours around that I am being cut out. I guess that this will be a story that I will have to deal with a lot over the coming weeks. ‘Patten being bypassed’.
Thursday 25 February
This past week has been filled with ‘will they, won’t they’ talk. This is pretty tiresome and part of me wants simply to get on with things, to let Legco start to debate the election plans. This would clearly put us in a position where we could say that the community, or to be strictly accurate its representatives, was determining where to draw the line. For a time Exco, or at least a majority, seems to have come to this view itself. We’ve had some good meetings, including an unofficial one today, at which Exco eventually came down on the side of not putting the bill into the legislature in the next few days. The two barristers on Exco continue to be both eloquent and sensible. Andrew Li usually leans in a slightly more cautious direction; Denis Chang pushes for us to be more open, robust and democratic. He is a spirited Catholic with pronounced liberal values. He can be very funny and is both very likeable and clever. Even C. H. Tung seems to accept that if Beijing doesn’t commit itself to talks soon, we will have to press on. But for the time being, I was persuaded (against my instincts) that we should ‘go the extra mile’. As Edward reminded me, in the past this has come second in my lexicon of how not to conduct decision making only to ‘the doctrine of unripe time’. I suppose that if we simply pushed ahead the moderate centre in Hong Kong would think we were being unnecessarily bold or rash, and the business community would have yet another grenade to toss over our fence.
Senior officials representing the Chinese government seem rather reluctant to see anyone from London or Hong Kong who is asking for a decision about whether we talk or don’t talk. Maybe they just don’t know. In London, Alastair Goodlad summoned Ambassador Ma to ask what is going on. But the ambassador was not ‘available’ and sent along an underling from the embassy. To his credit the person to come closest to getting some action out of Beijing is Willie Purves. He has been there on Hong Kong Bank business, but spent most of an hour-long meeting with Lu Ping arguing the importance of coming to an early decision about talks, unless, that is, the Chinese side is really happy to give the initiative to the legislature in Hong Kong. He seems to have spoken very well for Hong Kong, and C. H. Tung tells me that he has said the same sort of thing in a telephone call with Lu. There is obviously a struggle in Beijing and people are waiting to get a decision from higher up about what to do. The Foreign Ministry and the Hong Kong Macau Office seem to be briefing along a moderate line, explaining how if talks take place it won’t really represent any backing down by China, since when they use the word ‘withdraw’ all that they mean is that my proposals should not be the basis for the talks; they don’t mean that we have to withdraw the proposals in order to have talks in the first place. On the other hand, the NCNA is briefing fiercely that there will be tough conditions for any talks. These appear to include cutting the legislature out of any part in deciding the future of political development in Hong Kong. We sent some ideas to London today about how we should respond if we are offered ridiculous conditions by the Chinese, and I don’t want to be caught off balance.
Friday 26 February
We are getting into difficulties about the defence costs agreement under which the Hong Kong government, that is the Hong Kong taxpayer, pays for 70% of the costs of the garrison in the territory. Some sort of garrison is plainly required, though not to deter Chinese aggression. What on earth would we be expected to do if the Chinese army came over the border? What I suspect has been happening is that the scale of the garrison costs has in practice enabled MOD to postpone taking tough decisions about the future of the Gurkhas, who are present in the territory in quite large numbers. They are very welcome but Hong Kong taxpayers can’t be expected to fork out so that London doesn’t have to decide on their future. About 50% of the garrison costs are what is called ‘tail’. Moreover, we have paid for 700 MOD visits to Hong Kong in the last year (what a lot of suits and shirts) and have just been required to purchase 117 new cars. When Sir Christopher France, the chief civil servant at Defence, came to Hong Kong on 23 February, I pointed out that this problem is an indication of how we are trapped these days between old-fashioned colonial government and the beginnings of democracy. As Governor I have very few reserve powers over a matter like this. It is surprising that some of my predecessors who weren’t so keen on democracy still managed to give away many of the reserve powers which governors had previously had in the locker. This is a particular bore when it comes to expenditure issues. You can’t expect Hong Kong politicians to behave responsibly or sensibly about paying for the costs of the Ministry of Defence.
I have continued to get warm receptions from large crowds. There is not much sign of mute apathy, let alone antipathy, which I suppose counts for something. The most difficult point about these visits tends to be the press call at the end. After a visit to Shatin on 24 February – it’s a wonderful new city with a population of over half a million – where the reception was particularly enthusiastic, I faced the press, who had lots of questions about talks. I can’t say, which would probably be the only honest response, that there are not even talks about talks, just talks about talks about talks. When pressed to say what Michael Sze meant when, asked by legislators when we would make a statement on this subject, replied, ‘imminently’, I replied that ‘imminently’ was an adverb which meant ‘fairly soon’. We can’t go on much longer like this.
Saturday 27 February
The Hang Seng Index continues to rise and there’s lots of suspicion about insider trading by Chinese mainland companies, who are clearly betting on the start of talks leading to a consequent spike in the market. Hamish Macleod is making good progress constructing a budget which will be full of the sort of goodies made perfectly respectable by the size of our burgeoning surplus.
There has also been lots of coming and going about Washington and MFN. John Major saw the recently elected President Clinton earlier this week and it has been agreed that I should visit him in the spring. We are working on a date in early May. I can do a lot of other lobbying in the Senate and House of Representatives at the same time.
The most difficult afternoon I have spent for ages involved a group of parents of haemophiliac children who are now suffering from AIDS because of pre-1985 blood transfusions. They want government help, perfectly reasonably, and we have agreed to provide some assistance in Hamish’s budget. But it was a pretty harrowing meeting. A couple of the mothers are sisters and between them have three haemophiliac sons. Two of them are already suffering from AIDS and the other is HIV positive. There were a lot of tears and much anguish. The sort of heroism that people like this show day by day puts the rest of us to shame. In my position you can offer financial support and you can offer sympathy but you can’t really do much more to help people who have to live in such dark places.
Monday 1 March
We have heard from China at last. They want the basis of the talks to be the JD, convergence with the BL and the relevant agreements and understandings between Britain and China. There was also a lot of nonsense about keeping the talks secret and cutting Hong Kong representatives out of them. But at least it has given Robin McLaren something to get his teeth into and it may enable us to announce a date for talks reasonably soon. In telegrams to London and Beijing on what to do next, I said that we don’t mind about the proposed basis for the talks but can’t accept China’s position on secrecy or keeping Hong Kong away from them. I feel passionately about both these points, particularly the latter. Lu Ping has made clear to a delegation led by Allen Lee and also to a group from the General Chamber of Commerce that what happens next must have nothing to do with the legislature or Hong Kong civil servants. The Chinese clearly want the talks to be seen to be between the sovereign powers and don’t want Hong Kong to have a look in. They have a metaphor to cover this point which is either meaningless or daft – they talk about not having a three-legged stool. But I wonder whether whoever thought of this ridiculous metaphor has ever tried to sit on a two-legged stool. Of course, for Hong Kong to be cut out of any say on its own future by the present and future sovereign powers would lead to considerable instability – and for the British government, around the world, a good deal of obloquy.
Wednesday 3 March
We’ve had some very jolly visitors recently – first Jossie Dimbleby, the famous food writer, and later Caroline Waldegrave, who runs Leith’s cookery school, where Laura is studying. To the great delight of our cooks, they both spent some time in the kitchen teaching them dishes which they don’t normally tackle, including bread, curries and some pasta dishes. Jung Chang and her husband, Jon Halliday, came to lunch yesterday. They were travelling through Hong Kong before going on to China. After writing the wonderful Wild Swans she is now tackling a biography of Mao and is going to interview some of his surviving colleagues. I was surprised that they are letting her into the country when Wild Swans demonstrated among other things the terrible inhumanity of Chinese communism. I think it’s fair to say that Mao got worse and more wicked as he got older. Jung Chang reminded me that he coped with the news of mass starvation during the great famine by going on a diet. On the same day, Mother Teresa came to call with a group of her nuns. She radiated holiness, laughed a lot and asked for quite a bit of help (mostly a land grant for building a new hostel). She noted rather charmingly that she always gets what she asks the Almighty to give her. So what can I say!? As she left, she scattered holy medals and prayer cards around the office and asked me to pray for her. In response, I said, ‘But you are supposed to pray for me.’ She headed off with her giggling colleagues in the general direction of Macau. Of course, we handed over the land. It shows the power of prayer.
Friday 5–Saturday 6 March
I had a brief weekend visit to Japan for the UK–Japan 2000 conference, which I have regularly attended since I first went to Japan as a young backbencher to meet other young politicians, civil servants and business leaders. Their idea of who is young made me better understand one of the differences between our countries. Our meetings took place in a hotel with lovely views over a bay to Mount Fuji. I had to talk quite a lot about Hong Kong and China. I made one rather obvious point, that the rest of the world will regard China’s treatment of Hong Kong as one of the touchstones in determining the sort of relationship it is going to have with the international community in the century ahead. In responding to one crackpot businessman who compared what I am doing with Tiananmen Square, our ambassador, John Boyd, said that you cannot put the values that are increasingly being applied elsewhere in the region into the moral refrigerator when it comes to Hong Kong.
I got a pretty good reception in the Japanese media, and though in Hong Kong the papers are more mixed, they have been largely supportive back in London. There was a hefty leader in The Times urging everyone to rally behind me and stand up to the FCO. At the same time the Guardian is arguing that the backsliding has begun and that the Foreign Office is trying to get me to dilute my democratic proposals. It even suggested that I have threatened to resign if this happens. I have been telling everyone who wants to listen for some time that while there may be some pockets of Cradockian resistance around the place, and though there is a growing amount of criticism from business lobbies, overall I couldn’t look for stronger support where it really matters – No. 10, Douglas Hurd and the Cabinet, Ricketts and McLaren. In addition, the support seems to be cross-party.
Wednesday 10 March
We went out for a meal with Alice’s excellent headmaster (David James) and her history teachers with their spouses. They asked me how I’m enjoying Hong Kong and I said that I like everything about it except dealing with China. (But, of course, I couldn’t be here if I wasn’t dealing with China.) I’ve also just had a letter from John Major’s Foreign Office private secretary, Stephen Wall, who is off to Lisbon as ambassador. He describes negotiating with China by referring to the Catholic priest – I think it was Ronald Knox– who retired as chaplain to a convent. He was asked what it was like hearing nuns’ confessions and replied that it was like being pecked to death by ducks.
Friday 12 March
I had to tell Legco today what we were intending to do and I cannot go on saying ‘imminently’ (or various formulations more or less equivalent to ‘watch this space’) until the crack of doom. In my statement I said that we have been talking since early February, that our position on the basis of the talks and on the representation at them is perfectly reasonable, that even after all this time we don’t have a date for talks or even when we can announce them, and that the Chinese are trying to establish second-class status for Hong Kong at any talks as a deliberate attempt to humiliate and sideline Hong Kong officials. One indication of the absurdity of the Chinese position is that at one time Qian suggested that the talks could take place in the Joint Liaison Group, where of course several Hong Kong officials are part of our team.
The resulting rhetorical bombardment was more limited than I had expected. There is a clear distinction between what China’s Foreign Ministry says – it issues a careful statement which doesn’t completely pull the plug on talks – and the remarks of the NCNA, which revert to the language of the Cultural Revolution. I reckon this will be quite useful for us in future political arguments.
Sunday 14 March
We had drinks and a meal for among others Henry Keswick,fn62 who said that it was the first time he had been to dinner in GH for a decade. He is still in favour of what we are doing.
Saturday 20 March
Elton John came to town for a concert. Alice got to sit next to him at lunch. He was great company and is grateful to us because he and one of his travelling companions, who just happens to be his tennis coach, played on our courts. His concert was fantastic, every number a knockout.
Friday 26 March
Lavender’s old law tutor from Oxford, Lenny Hoffmann, and his wife arrived for a meal. He is now a Lord Justice of Appeal, has admirably liberal views and is about as clever as it’s possible to get.
These weeks have been dominated by arguments with Beijing about the nature of talks, the basis for them, the starting date and the participants. For much of the time it wasn’t clear who was actually making policy on the Chinese side. By the end it seemed relatively clear that something positive was more likely to happen when Foreign Minister Qian was around to give political cover to officials at the level below him. Most of the talks, undertaken in Beijing by Robin McLaren and the Vice Foreign Minister, Jiang Enzhu, turned into what seems like an unending game of pass the parcel – every time we thought that the last piece of wrapping paper had been removed, another piece was whipped from under the table by Jiang. Meanwhile I’ve had to cope with restless media, rumblings in Legco and a slightly febrile atmosphere in Exco, with one group wanting me to gazette proposals sooner rather than later, another (rather smaller) group wanting to find out exactly what Beijing wants and then to do it. Everyone is anxious to know more, from us and from Beijing, about exactly what is happening. As though we really knew …
The exact nature of China’s demands changes with some regularity. In the beginning, they pressed for the discussions to be based on ‘convergence with’ the Basic Law rather than just on the basis of the Basic Law. Some in our embassy in Beijing and in the Foreign Office as a whole seemed to think that this matters. It didn’t seem to me to be a very substantive point, and I was happy to concede it in order to make progress on what I thought was the more important issue, that is the nature of the delegation at the talks. China is still determined to keep out anyone from Hong Kong, or at least any Hong Kong officials that are simply advisers in the delegation to us, the sovereign power. Beijing plainly wants to humiliate Hong Kong and sideline the territory by distinguishing between British and Chinese officials, and they have tried umpteen different ways of varying complexity to do this. As we wandered round and round this point, telegrams whizzing backwards and forwards to the eternally patient Robin McLaren, there were occasions when one started to lose the will to live. The question of secrecy is no longer being raised.
Hamish Macleod has produced an excellent budget, smart and balanced, in which he announced more spending, particularly on housing and welfare, lower taxes and larger reserves. In Britain this would be the moment to call an election. I have continued to explore with David Ford and Hamish the departure of expatriate senior officials and their replacement by locals. I am pretty clear in my own mind that David should be followed by Anson Chan, with Michael Sze as proxime accessit. In my experience it’s far easier to delegate when you have civil servants like her. But I am warned by both David and Hamish that the fact of her gender will not be well received by some of her senior male colleagues. There is not much she can do about that! On the British side the Foreign Office have managed a real cock-up. They wanted to move my three senior diplomatic advisers – Tony Galsworthy, William Ehrman and Stephen Bradley – all at the same time; they apparently arrived together and should leave the same way. Excellent personnel management, which does not suggest giving Hong Kong policy the priority it deserves.
We have seen more of Simon Murray and his wife, Jennifer; he was once in the Foreign Legion, is a very successful member of Li Ka-shing’s team, and is publicly very supportive of our stance. He is obviously well paid but I’m told that he pays more tax than anyone else in Hong Kong – not because he is the richest guy in town but one of the most honourable and honest. It’s probably true. It is extraordinary how in almost every society the very rich spend a lot of money finding ways of avoiding paying tax for the services on which they like their community depend. Recently, we had an enjoyable evening with Peter and Nancy Thompson. He provided much of the funding for the Hong Kong jazz club and has a terrific collection of Chinnery paintings. On top of everything we also had the Hong Kong rugby sevens at the end of the month, an annual sporting pleasure, which is not meant for teetotallers. We gave a big reception at GH for many of those involved. It’s lucky that we refreshed the drinks cellar. This is not an atypical list of guests and events; even though we are not having a very pleasant few months in political terms, life continues to be fun for a lot of the time.
But the onslaught from the north continued partly because the National People’s Congress, China’s sham Parliament, was meeting in Beijing. Lu Ping gave a press conference and several interviews to the media during the course of which no cliché of vitriolic abuse goes unused. The markets weren’t particularly unsettled and appeared to take the view that they were expecting things to be worse. Whether or not British business leaders will be quite as relaxed is another matter. Exco wasn’t too bad; predictably one or two members don’t really seem to know what we should do except avoid a row with China. C. H. Tung wrung his hands but continued to speak with great courtesy. We are rather confused about where China’s bottom line may actually be; it wanders about like the border in Northern Ireland. We thought that Beijing would be happy on the point of representation if Robin McLaren led our team, whose membership would be a matter for him in consultation with us. This would enable us to get round the point about whether Hong Kong should be anywhere near the table. Sometimes Chinese officials seem to get themselves on hooks, aren’t sure whether they should be hanging there at all, and then want us to help them get down.
Tuesday 30 March
I travelled with my new private secretary, Bowen Leung, my spokesman, Mike Hanson, and Edward Llewellyn to Brussels. One of my tests of whether or not I want someone as a personal secretary or close adviser is whether or not I think it would be agreeable to spend a lot of time with them in international airports, waiting for flights, or travelling long distance on planes. Bowen, Mike and Edward pass this test with flying colours. I stayed for two days in Brussels with our ambassador to the EU, John Kerr. From having sat next to him in council meetings when I was a minister, I already knew just how clever and smart he is. He is also very wise about the way that the EU works and the way that the British government works (or sort of works). He pointed out that widening the European Union isn’t an alternative to deepening. Every time the bounds of the community have been broadened there’s also been institutional change in order to make decision making at the centre easier when there are more members. This is inevitable. On the working habits of Number 10, he argued that while Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister, the staff in Downing Street assumed many of the powers that had previously been exercised by the Cabinet Office. Among other things this destroyed the traditional relationship between the Cabinet Secretary and the Prime Minister, so the Prime Minister no longer had a senior mandarin to look after his or her interests around Whitehall. Today, John Major finds himself without, as it were, either a Willie Whitelaw or a Burke Trend. He thought that the institutionally avuncular role of the Cabinet Secretary should be reinvented.
I met all the top dogs in Brussels, including Jacques Delors, an extremely engaging interlocutor, and Leon Brittan, who was probably the second most significant figure in the commission after Delors, largely as a result of his sheer hard work and intellectual grasp. Leon looks after the community’s external economic relations and obviously enjoys the job hugely. I guess that the timing of my governorship will rule out me ever getting to Brussels to work. I addressed a big meeting of Belgium’s equivalent of Chatham House and met several figures from the Parliament. Politically we had a thumbs up all round.
Thursday 1 April
Bowen, Mike, Edward and I arrived in London, where I met up with Lavender and Alice. It’s great to see Laura and Kate, fresh back from a skiing holiday. I had a dinner for some of my journalist friends at our favourite local Italian in Pimlico, the Gran Paradiso, where I was greeted with much kissing and hugging. I think it is only because of their politeness that they refer to Hong Kong. It clearly doesn’t register very much on their radar screens in comparison with (say) Yugoslavia or the turbulence in British politics. When asked about what’s happening in London, I didn’t feel that I had anything particularly interesting to say.
Friday 2 April
I saw John Major for lunch. He’s clearly having a pretty cheerless time. He’s working very hard and is immensely resilient, but if you get to the top you should surely enjoy it more than he is able to, mostly because the Conservative Party seems to be developing a nervous breakdown over Europe. He worries that even as we start to get the economy right, we won’t get much credit for it. I hope he understands that without him the Conservative Party really could fall apart.
Foreign Office officials are mostly on the same page as the Prime Minister and Douglas as far as Hong Kong is concerned, which is of course as it should be. Peter Ricketts is terrific but I get a slight sense that the undersecretary responsible for Asia, Christopher Hum, is the card-carrying representative of the Cradock faction. He subjected me at one of our meetings to a long and sceptical series of questions about where we are going.
Friday 9 April
I have done lots of media in London, including Newsnight, The Frost Programme and a Good Friday Any Questions? with Gerald Kaufman, Roy Jenkins and Ann Leslie. I had a courteous argument with Roy Jenkins about Hong Kong, which appears to have been well received. He is sceptical about the wisdom of standing up to China so late in the day. I wonder what he would have done if he had become Governor, a job which he has said publicly he once turned down in a Paris lavatory. The highlights of the visit were of course seeing all our friends and above all Kate and Laura. Long-range parenting can be a hazardous business but so far so good.
Sunday 11 April
We have had a glorious weekend over the Easter holiday in Dorset with my former colleague in the House of Commons Robert Cecil and his wife, Hannah. And then Easter Saturday – we are going to have talks! Douglas Hurd had sent a message to his opposite number confirming that we were happy to engage on the basis that we had almost agreed in March (choosing our own team from the foreign office and the Hong Kong civil service under the British ambassador), with the addition of a sentence saying that the British government representative in talks would be our ambassador in Beijing, who would deal principally with Jiang Enzhu. This is what the vice minister had himself suggested at a much earlier meeting; it then appeared to be an abandoned position. The Chinese have now said yes, suggested that talks should start on the 22 April and merely enquired rather plaintively whether we were intending to say anything more about Hong Kong government representation. They obviously don’t want us dancing up and down saying that they have backed down. Fair enough, but they have. Heaven knows exactly why.
Tuesday 13 April
We announced the start of the talks yesterday, noting that, as far as we were concerned, the position of Hong Kong representatives was the same as ever; we didn’t crow about the Chinese having backed away from one of their preconditions. Some in the press assumed of course that it must be the British who have backed down. But overall we came out of things pretty well. It rather confirmed my existing view that things are always rather better when Qian is in Beijing and is able to overrule hardliners. I guess it’s also true that the Chinese obviously didn’t believe that we actually had a bottom line. They now seem to have recognized that we are serious. Qian had replied so quickly to Douglas Hurd that I rather wonder whether the NCNA in Hong Kong even knew what was happening at the end. Wrapping up all this, we had a long meeting with Douglas at which we agreed our negotiating position and opening statement. Douglas is as robust as anyone in the Foreign Office about where we stand. He doesn’t think the Chinese position is as strong as others appear to believe. The Chinese can’t behave too badly in the eyes of the rest of the world. I sometimes think he is one of the few people who has served as a diplomat in China who hasn’t become rather overwhelmed by its size, strength and the aesthetic charms of its irrationality. As a man, a minister and a politician, I find him hugely impressive – calm, unflappable and authoritative. Wally Hammond on a good day.
It is just about a year since I was defeated in Bath. It has been a great adventure, and one that matters, working with and for people about whom I have come to care inordinately.