Thursday 15 April
While we’ve been away, the house has been getting its redecoration and refurbishment. The work isn’t quite finished (the whole house is still full of tins of paint, planks, unlaid tiles and dust) but by the standards back home they have so far done everything both well and quickly. We won’t be able to use it for meetings or putting up guests for a week or so. We found a lovely red lacquer cupboard for the hall today with beautiful Chinese calligraphy telling the world that books make you happy.
We’re going to have to continue to talk about the wretched airport, our negotiations in Beijing and preparations for my trip to the USA to discuss MFN for China. This will secure more or less tariff-free entry for Chinese exports into the American market. There is a lot of opposition in the American political system and in the media to this because of China’s continuing abuse of human rights, but it’s an important issue for us in Hong Kong. An interruption of US–China trade would be bad for our economy.
Tuesday 20 April
Robin McLaren arrived from Beijing today and sat down with the team from Hong Kong who will accompany him in the talks. We considered the terms of the opening statement and a number of rather more prosaic administrative matters. Most of the younger Sinologists are pretty sceptical about whether we can make very much progress. Robin and Tony Galsworthy are like old war horses – their nostrils are twitching a bit at the scent of battle to come. Tony seems to think that the Chinese may actually be prepared to do business. I hope so, but am not so sure.
Normally I hate making speeches which other people have written for me, but for an American Chamber of Commerce lunch (attended by about 700 people) Stephen Bradley wrote a corker. I was very happy to use his words to put the case for largely unfettered trade between the US and China.
Monday 26 April
We’ve had several round and round the mulberry bush discussions in Exco on all this. C. H. Tung continued to bat for a deal whatever it is. Maybe he would stop just short of the slaughter of the first born. By Saturday the 24th we were able to review the first round of talks. There has been heavy concentration on principles. There was no progress at all on any substantive issue. Tiresomely, the Chinese didn’t want to have the second round for almost a month after the first. We want to get on – if there is too long a lag between rounds, each one will just start off with one exchange after another of the same alleged principles which have been excavated and put on show before. This will inevitably mean heightened acrimony. People will also start to think – the very idea! – that the Chinese are trying to string us along. Eventually Beijing agreed to a second round before the end of the month.
I’ve had a disagreeable time just before our team goes off to Beijing. Tony Galswothy let it drop that Percy Cradock is coming to Hong Kong in late May and then going on to China. Tony has apparently known this for two months and has invited Cradock to dinner. Cradock has now moved from being a critic on the sidelines to working actively to scupper what we are trying to do. His presence in China while talks are going on would be seen by the outside world as though it represented the arrival of a secret emissary or else as a general attempt to undercut us. Certainly, the Chinese – who (I now learn) told William Ehrman at the banquet at the end of the recent round of talks that they were looking forward to Cradock’s arrival – will make the most of it. My suspicion is that Cradock finds out from officials who used to work for him what we are doing and then tells the Chinese. I didn’t quite pound the table but I did make a bit of a scene when I heard this news. I said that I’ve constantly ignored reports that the Foreign Office is working against us in Hong Kong but that this piece of news is pretty intolerable. I really should have been told about this. Tony has made at best a serious error of judgement. William and Peter Ricketts have nothing to reproach themselves for. I phoned Alastair Goodlad to say that Cradock should be asked not to go to China and should certainly not be briefed on what is happening. The Foreign Office have so far taken the view that it’s better to brief him on progress in the hope that he’ll then behave better. Since he behaves badly whatever happens, I see no point in briefing him. When he has dinner with Tony Galsworthy, who used to work for him and who I’m sure has a reasonable professional relationship with his former boss, are they simply going to talk about moths? There is a tendency to treat Cradock as though, like David Wilson, he is an honourable man. David is but I wouldn’t say the same thing about Cradock.
I had a dinner with the American ambassador from Beijing, Stapleton Roy, and America’s consul in Hong Kong, Dick Wilson, to go over some of the most important messages about MFN in Washington, which the ambassador thinks may be difficult. He knows how important a good relationship between the US and China is for the future of Hong Kong.
Tuesday 27 April
Lavender visited International Social Services [ISS], where she met the legendary Anthony Lawrence who used to be the BBC’s Far East correspondent during the Vietnam war. The ISS are providing educational services in the Vietnamese camps which Lavender has visited before. Lavender told me that the ISS staff are concerned because the UN High Commissioner for Refugees is reducing the funds for adult education services in the camps. Like the volunteers there, she thinks this is pretty misguided. The idea seems to be that if the inmates are not being educated they’re more likely to go back to Vietnam. This is just going to make the camps more difficult to run. I’ll see what I can do about it.
The greatest pleasure of the week was a dinner with Simon Murray and his wife, Jennifer, at their beautiful house in Mount Cameron Road looking south through trees towards the sea. It could be an unspoiled part of the south of France. (I wonder if there is one these days.) They are a remarkable couple, brave and funny. Simon told one anecdote after another, some of them (which may even be true) about his days in the French Foreign Legion, on which he has written a very good book. He loves Hong Kong and wants it to stay free under the rule of law.
Less cheerful was another meeting with a jet-lagged Jim Prior, who came to see me with GEC’s principal fixer, John Lippitt, whom I have never much cared for; I suspect that he gives fixers a bad name. Jim is full of foreboding about what will happen to the glittering prospects for GEC if the row over Hong Kong’s political development continues. Both he and Lord Young have recently seen Li Peng, who told them without very much delicacy that if the political row continues British firms won’t do as well as they should in China. It doesn’t seem much like China’s application form for the WTO but I doubt whether they told him this.
Thursday 29 April
The next round of talks in Beijing don’t produce very much progress. Without changing our position fundamentally, we have given Robin McLaren’s team slightly different words on the election committee, the continuing limit on the number of directly elected seats and the functional constituencies. If the Chinese want to do so, they will have an excuse for accepting that we’ve dealt with all the eight original points on principles that they raised at the beginning. They seemed to imply at the close of the last round that the details on four or five of these points were satisfactory: for example, surprise surprise, we still accept the LJD and the BL. But plainly round and round the bush is continuing. The next round is to be over the weekend of 21 to 23 May. This will be after Jiang Enzhou has returned from a visit to Europe. The Chinese have produced a piece of paper which they want to negotiate with us before moving on from the debate about principles. If pressed I am not sure that even so soon after the talks I can remember what these principles are, but they probably can’t either. We think this is the time for Douglas Hurd to send a message to his opposite number saying we should really get on now to talk about detail. We can’t go on forever like this. We’re starting to get more and more questions about whether we will table legislation for the 1994 and 1995 elections in time for it to be considered before the end of July.
Friday 30 April
We’ve reached America, by way of Los Angeles. We have stopped here for a night with our friend Mike Medavoyfn1 and his wife, Patricia. Mike is a political junkie whom we first met at an Aspen conference for alleged would-be future leaders. (There’s a kiss of death if ever there was one.) I was there with Ken Clarke from Europe; the Americans included Gary Hart and Chris Dodds, both then up and coming Senators. We had a lovely dinner in the garden. At my table everyone talked about health reform and medical bills; Lavender tells me that at hers everyone said they have had some experience of being mugged. Health costs and crime: America in 1993.
Saturday 1 May
The Medavoys flew off before us this morning for Washington, where they are doing some political rounds themselves, and we went later in the day to stay with the ambassador, Robin Renwick, and his delightful French wife, Annie. I last saw them when I was Development Minister and Robin was our man in South Africa.
Sunday 2 May
Tonight we met John Newhousefn2 and his wife, Simmie, for a drink at their home in Georgetown. I correspond with John a bit. He is a very good journalist, which I might say in a more qualified way had he not written an extremely nice piece about me in the New Yorker. Lloyd Cutlerfn3 joined us for a bit. He is a Democratic Party elder statesman, brought into the White House to help Jimmy Carter. John thinks that if he had been brought into the White House straight away under Clinton it might have avoided some of the problems which seem to be assailing the new president. Most of the people I’ve talked to clearly want Clinton to do well, but feel that his operation is a bit shambolic.
Monday 3 May
A meeting first thing with our lobbyist and our trade consultants. The most impressive is Stuart Eizenstat, who was the domestic affairs adviser under Carter. Alas we are going to lose him soon since he is tapped to become the US ambassador to Europe. Then it was off to the White House with Robin, Bowen, and the competent Mike Hanson to look after the press. As ever it took an age to get into the White House through the usual security bureaucracy. (‘You’re from where?’) In the White House itself, which is elegant but not particularly grand, Clifton Wharton and Winston Lord were waiting for us along with the deputy to the National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger. Clifford is the Deputy Secretary of State and Winston his senior official dealing with Asia. We waited for a bit in the Cabinet Room for our meeting with the president – people say he is always late – and then were ushered into the Oval Office to meet him, the Vice President, Al Gore, and the communications director, George Stephanopoulos. I’m always surprised that some of the political leaders I meet ever went into politics since they don’t seem to like people very much. Bill Clinton is exactly the opposite. Articulate and very bright, he would obviously be keen to work the room even if there was only one other person in it. Both the president and Al Gore are big chaps and they radiated geniality. (‘So what did you think of them?’ Lavender asked. ‘They were very big’, I said. ‘Well that’s very profound’, she replied.) There was a press call for American journalists, most of whom shouted questions at the president about Bosnia, and then the Hong Kong and British press came in asking questions about my proposals on elections, which Clinton supported with a few elegantly turned sentences. Once they were out of the room we got down to business.
I said there are three background points to what I will be saying all week about MFN. First, a good relationship between China and the US is important to Hong Kong’s prosperity and stability in the long term. Second, it would be bad for the region and the world if China’s economic opening was not carried through successfully. Third, the consequences if China’s economic changes are put in place and locked into the global system will be good for all of us. And, of course, if these things don’t happen the reverse is true. I said that I recognize that the new administration’s policy is unlikely to be the same as its predecessor’s. I know that the new administration and Congress are likely to be looking for a new policy on MFN which will involve some attempt to nudge the Chinese in directions on trade, weapons proliferation and human rights of which we would all approve. But if there is to be conditionality on MFN we would prefer the lead to be taken by the executive rather than the conditions being written into the bill by Congress. Any condition should be as general as possible. I would also hope that the position of Hong Kong could be taken into account, but that it would not be very helpful at the moment to mention political developments in Hong Kong in any list of conditions. We spent about 40 minutes talking through these points. I was quite surprised by the amount of time that President Clinton devoted to weapons proliferation. It’s obviously a real concern to the administration. Both he and the VP were embarrassingly flattering. Al Gore said that I’m an example of the way that individuals can change history – so there! I suppose that cuts both ways. I can think of lots of people who changed history in rather disagreeable ways. Gore knows about my background in environmental issues. It’s all very cheerful and I don’t think it could have gone any better.
I then had a lunch with the Asia Society and after that a meeting with the Secretary of the Treasury, Lloyd Bentsen, a courtly and silvery Southern gentleman who noted that there are a lot of trade issues worrying Americans about China. He would like to resolve them without too much trouble, but China will have to give some ground if this is going to happen. Then we met Wharton and Lord again at the State Department. They said that the administration is looking for a policy which won’t involve them in a fight with Congress but will push the Chinese along the road without provoking them to dig in their heels and react truculently. Winston said that the Chinese are trying to put pressure on the Clinton administration by producing as many orders for American goods and equipment as they possibly can during the coming weeks. He also noted that there is quite often a big difference between what the Chinese say they will order and what eventually they buy.
I gave them a pretty frank account of where we stand so far in our talks with Beijing. The community wants a settlement, though not at any price; Legco will probably back whatever we agree with Beijing; and this really means that we have got to get the best possible deal we can out of the talks. After a meeting with Senator George Mitchell, who has been an advocate of a strong conditionality for MFN, we had a dinner at the embassy with lots of senators, congressmen and journalists. There were four Balliol men in the crowd; I knew two of them a bit: Christopher Hitchens, who is chubbier than I remember but as ever good company (and for the first time I can recall he seemed to agree with what I’m doing), and David Boren, who is now a senator; we overlapped at Balliol and shortly after Oxford he became Governor of Oklahoma. We agreed that he’s fortunate he doesn’t have to give Oklahoma back to China in 1997.
Tuesday 4 May
This morning began with an early meeting with Senator Mitch McConnell, who drafted the US Hong Kong Act which allows the US to treat Hong Kong separately from China in trade and economic matters after 1997. He said all the right things in the meeting and to the press afterwards. Then it was on to the National Press Club for a speech which is being covered by Jonathan Dimbleby and Francis Gerard for their BBC documentary. More difficult was a long session with the editorial board of the Washington Post, tough but not unreasonable questions, then more meetings on the hill with mostly Democrat Senators and Congressmen. I got the impression that while they want to be as helpful as possible to the Clinton presidency – after all they have been in the wilderness for some time – they are worried that it doesn’t seem to be as focused or as professionally run as they would like. A couple of Congressmen told me how hard Nancy Pelosi has been working on her bill to condition MFN. I sat next to her at dinner last night. She is interesting and knows a lot about China. She has a San Francisco congressional district which includes the headquarters of Levi Strauss and quite a large Chinese diaspora community. Whenever she talks to the press about China and Hong Kong – and she was doing it again today – she tells them how persuasive I am but that I haven’t changed her mind about putting conditions like human rights improvements on trade with China. So clearly I haven’t been all that persuasive. Lastly, a dinner for a lot of experts on China given by the Carnegie Endowment. The most difficult question was from an ex-ambassador who asked me exactly what I think I have achieved during the past year. And what do you want on your gravestone, Governor? I’d better think about that.
Wednesday 5 May
After a long press conference early this morning I had a meeting with Speaker Tom Foley. He is tall, handsome, very charming and extremely Irish. Robin tells me that the corpse of the special representative to Ireland is buried under Tom Foley’s carpet. From others whom I met later in the day, including Robert Rubin, the president’s main national economic adviser, and Lee Hamilton, chairman of the House foreign affairs committee, I heard a great deal about Nancy Pelosi’s lobbying skills. Then lunch at Brookings and an afternoon giving evidence to the House and Senate foreign relations committees. At an hour-long meeting with my old friend Bill Bradleyfn4 I got much the same tune, though what seemed to be worrying him most is the possibility of America being sucked into the Bosnia quicksand. He would have been a very cerebral president but (as he would himself recognize) doesn’t have the Clinton charisma.
Thursday 6 May
We went by train to New York, to stay at the Hong Kong-owned Peninsula Hotel with wonderful views from our suite up and down Fifth Avenue. A big lunch at the Waldorf Astoria with well over 600 people, a visit to the New York Stock Exchange, where its incomprehensible operations were explained to me, and an hour with the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal followed by TV interviews. Best of all I had a long talk with Henry Kissinger,fn5 who is just off to China. He agrees with what I am saying about MFN and seemed to support the political package as well – he even said so to the press afterwards. When a journalist asked him what advice he gave me, he replied amusingly, ‘He didn’t ask me for any.’ By the time we got to dinner with the British consul-general, Alistair Hunter, I was completely knackered. Lavender said that my speech was getting slower and slower.
Friday 7 May
I started the morning with David Hannay, our ambassador to the UN, with whom I used to work a lot when he was ambassador to the European Community. He is wonderfully sharp and tells me lots of stories about the UN which are not dripping with charitable assessments about his colleagues there. I have never had a conversation with him from which I haven’t learned a lot. He is pretty withering about policy everywhere on the Balkans. He was accompanied for part of the time by Bob Peirce, who is going to be my new political adviser now that William Ehrman is off. I think I’m going to get on well with him – very smart, funny, direct and constructively cynical. Afterwards, meetings with the Council on Foreign Relations chaired by Dick Holbrooke, and the editorial board of the New York Times, and then a press conference and an interview with CNN. In the evening Lavender and I had a drink and dinner with my old mentor Sherwin Goldman. When I was in New York on a travelling scholarship from Balliol back in 1965, I worked on the mayoral campaign for John Lindsay, and Sherwin (a bit older than me, a Texan from Yale and Balliol) was my boss. He taught me a great deal about politics as well as about America. I think he was as responsible as anyone for the most important career choices that I have made. He was also someone with wide cultural interests and for a time even made me interested in ballet, not actually difficult when the American Theatre Ballet was at its peak.
Sunday 9 May
We got back to Hong Kong on Saturday evening after a very long flight and a 2½ hour changeover in Tokyo. The work on the house has been finished and it looks terrific, more cheerful and elegant. Alice was happy to see us, and Whisky and Soda too, though the staff, particularly Ah Chak, spoil them rotten.
Tuesday 11 May
It’s straight back for more discussions about the talks with Beijing. Do we simply accept endless arguments about principles and do we think it would be a good idea to move the talks into the JLG? Some Exco members are being a bit tricky. They want more information (as though they haven’t already had it) on fallback positions. A lot of the grumpiness is driven by Willie Purves. The truth is that we’ve talked about all this a lot before, that the position we are now in is one which Exco explicitly approved, and that if we start talking about fallback positions, they will all be leaked. Lydia told me that Exco does not want to be regarded as being there just to give me political cover. I should be so lucky. They tend to keep their heads down when it comes to saying anything supportive about decisions in which they have shared. One of my new political advisers, who will be the main deputy to Bob Peirce, John Ashton, has until recently been the principal Mafia expert at our embassy in Rome, which is an excellent background for his work on China and the United Front in Hong Kong. He is completely charming with (rather surprisingly for a diplomat) a good science education.
We are having a bit of difficulty explaining to Legco about the new British National Overseas passport which they regard, not unreasonably, as a second-class cousin to a real British passport. They are particularly concerned about how you get one of these passports and the entitlements under it. I am not able to give very precise answers, only to offer general assurances. I’m sure that I’m going to get much more about citizenship rights the closer we get to 1997. It’s a long time since living in a British colony made you a British citizen. The Romans were rather clearer about these things.
Wednesday 12 May
We’re starting to make some progress on economic issues with Beijing. They are being a little more positive about the airport though rather noisy about the defence estate, at least in private. Obviously, the PLA don’t want to be cut out of any share of the spoils after 1997. Rather more serious discussions are also starting on the rundown of the present garrison, which in due course should help in dealing with the legislature about funding defence costs.
Lord Callaghan (Jim, as was) had a brief stay on his way into China as, I imagine, an old friend of the communist regime who will get a red carpet and the sort of treatment he would have had when Prime Minister. In other words, the usual lushing up. He has a lot of bluff charm but he doesn’t really believe that we should do anything at all about democracy or the rule of law before 1997. He says that I mustn’t think that I have to martyr myself for the future of Hong Kong and the British interest is to make sure that our businessmen can do a lot of trade with China. Since we can’t do anything to affect what the Chinese do to Hong Kong after the handover, there’s not much point in making a fuss before. In effect I should keep my head down and get out in due course without any controversy. At least he said all this to my face rather than like some businessmen, including former Conservative politicians, behind my back. It’s difficult to dislike him, but as Edward reminds me, when he was in British politics he usually ducked the big issues like trade union reform. He was a suitable political leader for a time of national decline and makes one see the value of Margaret Thatcher. To borrow Al Gore’s remark, politicians can make a difference to history. Anyway, it’s clearly his view that the Joint Declaration was flimflam and – while speaking as a former leader of the Labour Party – any guff about human rights should be composted and put in the wastepaper basket.
Callaghan headed for Beijing today, my birthday. 49 today. As he departed, Margaret Thatcher arrived. She has been addressing a conference on international tourism in Hawaii, which she pronounces – ‘High Wye’. She is clearly in fighting form. We had a very jolly birthday dinner with most of my private office plus Jonathan Dimbleby, who is here to interview me again. Margaret joined us for a drink after supper. Jonathan got her going on Bosnia. She hasn’t lost any of her pizzazz.
Thursday 13 May
We gave a dinner for Margaret with some of the livelier younger business leaders, including Dickson Poon (who owns – among other things – Harvey Nichols), Simon Murray and Martin Barrow. She emphasized how she had always stood up against aggression from the Gulf to the Falklands. During her stay with us, she’s received a lot of lobbying from the business community to rein me in.
Friday 14 May
C. H. Tung organized a dinner this evening at which Margaret handed out vigorous lectures on the rule of law and the relationship between political and economic freedom. She can’t have done any more to support me, in public and in private.
Saturday 15 May
Today I invited her to accompany me on a visit to Eastern district. There were huge cheering crowds, a scrum of photographers and cameramen and a trip on an open-top tram through packed streets. She obviously gets the point and compared what she has seen for herself with the stuff she gets from some of the business leaders. She said slightly acidly that she assumes that most of the people who have been getting at her have foreign passports.
Monday 17 May
John Coles is here from London and was told by Willie Purves that there is a danger of a crisis of confidence in Exco. And Lydia obviously thinks there is some British conspiracy afoot, that we are not keeping Exco sufficiently informed about what is happening in the talks. I wish there was something to be secretive about. I’m afraid that years of intrigue and secret diplomacy have left their mark on even the sanest people in Hong Kong. When we checked around, we find that at their private meeting to prepare for the official one the members of Exco didn’t even talk about our negotiations with Beijing.
At the Hong Kong Journalists Association ball, Lavender drew the prizes for the lottery and I won the first, which is worth HK$20,000. Naturally, I had to give it back. This is the prelude to two pieces of embarrassment. First, to raise money Lavender and I agreed to dance a tango. This relates to a local joke. When asked on one occasion about when talks with Beijing would begin, I said that it took two to tango. So now, I am not only a whore (a recent insult) but widely described in the pro-Beijing papers as a tango dancer. And I’ve only been to Argentina once. I soon demonstrated on the dance floor that I certainly could not earn my living doing this particular shuffle. The second embarrassment was when a pro-China delegate to one of the communist consultative committees in Beijing got up to do a karaoke turn and instead made a speech in Cantonese which was apparently very rude about me. Everybody seemed rather ashamed of this and the poor woman was booed off the stage. To complete the evening another guest who got up to do a karaoke turn had a heart attack and died. So a strange and rather grim evening.
Thursday 20 May
Robin McLaren has come back to Hong Kong to discuss our preparations for the next round of talks. At a very calm Exco meeting today, I made it clear that as we move from principles to detail – if that is we do! – we will need to get a broad steer from them, and eventually precise agreement on the bottom lines which we can then get endorsed by London. This approach seems to satisfy the council, even Purves.
Saturday 22 May
I’ve just been told by Charles Powellfn6 that Willie Purves is telling anyone who will listen that I am the worst Governor there has ever been. Anyway, he is off before long to some grander job back in London with the bank. It is seeking to base itself there, which may be thought in Beijing to be a less than helpful sign of confidence in the future.
Willie talked to me yesterday about his successor on Exco. I rather like his number two at the bank, John Gray, and will be happy to appoint him. There is obviously some row going on between the bank and Jardine’s about whether their taipan in Hong Kong can remain on the Hong Kong Bank board now that Jardine Fleming has been accepted as a bank in the colony.
We have had several meetings this week about the future of the defence estate over which we have been wrangling for years. How much of it should go to the People’s Liberation Army? How much should we be able to develop now in the interests of the citizens and taxpayers of Hong Kong? Should the defence estate which is picked up by the PLA remain in the ownership of Hong Kong or will the PLA be able to develop it, doubtless with multiple opportunities for rake-offs? There is also the incidental question of whether the public will be worried about the prospect of a Chinese garrison in downtown Hong Kong. On this last point, I don’t myself believe – Martin makes this point strongly to me – that this is as neuralgic an issue as it would have been at one time. The other day there was a report that 10,000 PLA troops were going to come into Hong Kong rather than the original 4000 proposed by Deng Xiaoping years ago. In the event this bit of news went off perfectly quietly. Anyway, it doesn’t seem to me that our hand on these matters is going to get any stronger the longer we leave them. Unless we reach an agreement with the Chinese soon, they will block any development on the land that we want to carry out and will get the whole lot in 1997 without the question of title being resolved. I therefore proposed a new push on this subject based on us offering the Chinese the Tamar site (the main defence plot in the middle of downtown Hong Kong) as a step forward from our previous rather negative position.
Monday 24 May
Robin and the Hong Kong team returned from their latest round in Beijing, saying that the body language of the Chinese delegation was rather better than their verbal assaults might have suggested. We appear to have got them to agree to discuss district boards and municipal councils at the next meeting. But this may not be the breakthrough into detail which we need. First of all, they obviously want to salami slice the political proposals and will only agree on movement each time they get a change from us on a particular agenda item. Secondly, they will doubtless return to their bloody ‘principles’ whenever they find themselves under too much pressure on detail. We have started to consider fall-backs on both the election committee and the functional constituencies. We are not going to float anything yet, but we need to know where we should go if we do find ourselves obliged to move.
Tuesday 25 May
Today’s Exco meeting went pretty smoothly. Indeed, when I asked for views on how things should be taken forward, there was initially complete silence. But we got the outcome we want. There was an endorsement of our approach in the next round of talks and agreement on the line I have proposed on defence lands involving offering Tamar to China. Now we are starting to look at alternatives to the original proposals, Exco seemed to be starting to realize why we came to the conclusions we did about both the election committee and the functional constituencies all those months ago. Any other options are difficult. I suppose this is one reason why some members of Exco find it easier to grumble about not being consulted rather than offering coherent adjustments to what is already on the table. Given that we have had to make as much as we could out of a tricky starting point – not being able to increase the number of directly elected Legco members – any backing away from our 1992 plans is inevitably going to be less obviously fair and democratic. Moreover, I’m not sure whether a watered-down version could actually get through Legco. It would be very difficult to make a case for it that had any intellectual or political integrity. When I game-played all this with Edward and Martin, we found it very difficult to convince one another.
Wednesday 26 May
We had another of our public concerts in the ballroom at GH, given by the Academy of Performing Arts. Everyone was very complimentary about how much better the house looks. Three cheers for Lavender and Elspeth, and for the fact that all the spending decisions on this (which are not very great) were made by the Hong Kong government and not back in London. I don’t think that anyone in Legco has raised a single question about the refurbishment, not least because we’ve taken the opportunity to show off the best of what can be made in Hong Kong.
Friday 28 May
The fourth round of talks, which opened today, seems to have been a no score draw. Robin McLaren told me on the secure line that he thinks the Chinese are getting a bit grumpy at our insistence that they should put forward proposals of their own. They have now started to take a tough line about our proceeding with legislation to establish the boundary and election commission. They have had a copy of this bill since January and it doesn’t seem to be unreasonable to think that they might have said something about it over the last four months. Leaving their squeaks of rage until we are about to complete all its legislative council stages is plainly daft.
Sunday 30 May
At the end of getting nowhere for a couple of days, the Chinese side said that the next round can’t take place before the middle of June or thereabouts. We don’t think there’s anything sinister about this, it appears to be because Qian Qichen is going to be out of Beijing, but since we are getting nowhere it’s pretty frustrating. We have no choice for the time being except to plod on with as much patience and firmness as we can muster. We can’t be pushed into precipitate action merely because the Chinese are not prepared to say anything substantive. There will of course be some in the community who will press us to do exactly this, which I assume is what the Chinese are counting on. I wish we had a fifth column in Beijing working for us.
The wretched Cradock is now in town, having arrived allegedly on Kleinwort’s business; he apparently has a job with them. In an interview for television he is asked the perfectly reasonable question, ‘If you’re in Hong Kong and China as a private person on a private visit, why are you giving this television interview?’ He asked for the cameras to be switched off while he thought of an answer.
Monday 31 May
Best bit of the day on the last day of the month was that Lavender gave a superb speech to the Rotary Club. She let me suggest one or two jokes and told me that they went down well. I don’t suppose she would tell me if they didn’t.
We have so many guests staying with us, including Alastair Goodlad and his officials, that Lavender tells me every bed in the house bar one is occupied. I wish that included Kate, who phoned up this morning to tell us she’s had a car crash on the A1 near Darlington. Thank heavens she’s fine, but clearly very shaken. We are pretty shaken ourselves. She took my 32-year-old classic Morris Minor to Newcastle and driving back with three friends to the city in terrible rain crashed into the barrier when the car in front braked suddenly. They were then hit from behind by another car. She reckons that the Morris is a write-off but mercifully she and her friends are unharmed. This is the sort of occasion when separation is painful. She is a brave and resourceful girl and a good driver. She will be mortified about the fate of my lovely old car but what the hell. It was quite a famous old thing in Bath. So this really does seem like the end of part of my life. 424 MAE RIP.
Tuesday 1 June
At a working breakfast with my principal China experts, including most of the team who have been in Beijing and Alastair Goodlad, who arrived on 29 May, we agreed that it may be time for another letter from Douglas Hurd to Qian Qichen proposing that some of the secondary matters should be cut back at their meeting in June in order to prepare the way for a meeting between Foreign Secretaries in July. We have got to try to do something to give the talks some impetus. We also talked about our line at the next meeting on airport construction and funding. We are getting hints that the Chinese are likely to propose a ludicrously large injection of new capital into the project. Frankly, if we can restrict the argument to talking about cash it will be quite a move forward. Afterwards, at Exco with Alastair in attendance, nobody seemed too upset by the need for patience in the Beijing discussions. There was general agreement that we should hang on and get the Chinese to make a first move, though Willie Purves is starting to press for us to shift our ground.
Wednesday 2 June
We had a supper yesterday evening with Legco members and there was the usual problem with leaks afterwards about what was allegedly said by the visiting minister in private conversations. None of this is Alastair’s fault. One story suggested that we intend to put what we agree with China into a memorandum of understanding which will then be debated and amended by Legco. The result of that process would then be taken back to Beijing for approval. This is exactly the sort of thing which will make our friends in the north rather cross.
Lavender found herself at dinner sitting next to Elsie Tu. They had a perfectly civil conversation, but, as Lavender said, she is a seasoned campaigner whose political interests began with reasonable attacks on police corruption in Hong Kong. She is now basically a real old-style lefty, anti-American and anti-British, who reads political tracts in her spare time. When Britain was resisting proposals for democracy, she opposed the colonial establishment; now we are meeting our promises on democracy, or at least trying to do so, she is against that as well. Her motivation seems to be to oppose the colonial government rather than to support democracy. She is about 80, in terrific fighting form, and is in many respects a rather admirable creation of the British Empire. We have left a scattering of Elsie Tus all around the world. If the Chinese Communist Party had been in our shoes, she would have been in prison or shot years ago.
Thursday 3 June
My most interesting interview of the week was with William Rees-Mogg for the Independent. When I say interview, I am not sure that that is quite the right noun. I felt more as though I was having an audience with the great man. I like William and his wife, Gillian, a great deal; they were very kind to us when we were in Bath, inviting us to rent for a tiny sum a cottage on their estate when I was first a parliamentary candidate with not much money and the need for a roof. We only did this for a few months but long enough to learn to like them for their kindness and charming battiness. You don’t have to always agree with people to like them. Anyway, William has clearly made up his mind about the future of the world and our audience took place in that context. He thinks that Europe is finished and that China in particular and Asia in general represent the future of mankind. He doesn’t think there’s anything much that we should be arguing about in Hong Kong. I’m not sure that anything I say will have much of an impact on these ex cathedra statements. I guess it’s a useful starting position for someone who is a director of GEC and looks elsewhere – I mean outside its own manufacturing and research capacity – for its salvation. After the Rees-Moggs were so kind to us, it would be nice if we could return their hospitality sometime. I tell William that we would always be happy to welcome any of their children to stay; after all, we’ve already had lots of the children of friends to spend time with us.
Friday 4 June
I have started to focus, with a sense of unease, about what we can do to resurrect proposals on the Court of Final Appeal. At a meeting today (with the demonstrators assembling again in Victoria Park for the vigil to recall Tiananmen) I learned that since Legco kiboshed the plans we had agreed in secret with China over a year ago, no further work has taken place on what to do instead. I had assumed that there would be a draft bill waiting in the locker. No such luck as Martin has discovered. It’s really ridiculous. Anyway, we will now have to get ahead with this sort of work at the same time as we try to strengthen the bench itself. I plan to keep on talking to the Chief Justice about this. Once we’ve got more proposals we will have to go back to the Chinese and for another big row.
Before going off for the weekend at Fanling, we had what Lavender calls a typical Friday evening for the Governor and his Mrs. It was the Auxiliary Police ball. Anson Chan’s husband, Archie, is the Commandant and they are amazing ballroom dancers. It’s interesting how many smart and well-off women in Hong Kong have ballroom dancing lessons; I guess it’s good exercise. More surprising perhaps is how good some of the men are when it comes to quicksteps and tangos, in contrast to my own desperate performance at the journalists’ ball.
Monday 7 June
My ad hoc group discussed a meeting Alastair Goodlad had with Ambassador Ma back in London. Alastair made clear to the ambassador the sort of progress we would like to make over the rest of the summer in our talks. We have said that we would like to have a substantive discussion on functional constituencies and the election committee at our next two meetings. If we could manage this, I would then be able to go back to London for a meeting of the Cabinet committee on 1 July and get amendments to my marching orders. I rather doubt whether we will get any movement from China yet. Their officials are now being grumpy over what they allege are our little tricks, for instance over airport funding.
Tuesday 8 June
David Ford is away and Anson Chan is acting in his place. I have made my mind up that she should get the job permanently when he retires to the post of Hong Kong representative in London. Promoting Anson has undoubtedly annoyed some of her male peers; whether it has led to the retirement of one or two ahead of time is a reasonable source of conjecture. With Anson and Hamish McLeod I discussed corruption and the civil service pay settlement. I want to put more resources into the Independent Commission Against Corruption. I think we need to do more to fight corruption as we get closer to 1997 and I also think we should add to the inflation-proofing settlement for this year in civil service pay. Some civil servants are grumbling that we need to make up for what was forgone because of overall fiscal prudence in previous years, but I don’t want us to get the reputation of being profligate and risking a resurgence of inflation. The private sector would certainly bash us if we were to go as far over this pay demand as the civil service unions would like.
Wednesday 9 June
We started discussing a draft paper largely produced in London for the Cabinet committee, which prompted further discussion on possible fallback positions for both the functional constituencies and the election committee. I questioned whether we should really be showing any movement to the Chinese at the moment. I don’t necessarily disagree with what is being suggested, though I think it’s some distance from anything that the Chinese would be likely to accept. I’m also reluctant to go along with what I think was a strategic error made back in the mid-1980s when we seemed to concede the point that everything we did before 1997 had to converge with whatever the Chinese wanted to do afterwards. This in effect gave us power but no responsibility for our last period of sovereignty.
Lavender told me a story which confirms my feeling that we are now having to make up for some awful mistakes made in the past. Lydia Dunn took her out to lunch today and was rather gloomy about how much Hong Kong will be able to protect its values and way of life after the handover. Lydia said that she was one of those who was involved in the campaign after the Tiananmen Square murders to get half the seats in the legislature directly elected. This was a policy which, despite attracting huge public support right across the community, was blocked by David Wilson, the British government and of course Cradock. There seems to have been some fairly murky work to try to prove that the community opposed this idea, a dodgy poll for example. Lavender reckons that we shouldn’t be critical when some community leaders fail to stand up for us today when we have let them down so badly and regularly in the past. Alas, I think she is right about this.
Thursday 10 June
We gave a dinner for Peter Barry, the American priest who says the English-language mass in the cathedral every week. It’s the 28th anniversary of his priesthood. Peter has spent quite a lot of time visiting the underground church in China (not least on his hiking holidays) and also, I think, the recognized (the communists would call it the patriotic) church as well. He told us that, looking for a local Bishop of the underground church, he was directed to a small house, knocked loudly on the door and heard someone shuffling down a corridor to open it. It opened a fraction and there was a little fellow in a T-shirt and flip-flops peering nervously at him. Peter said that he was looking for the local Bishop. The little guy closed the door saying he’d be back in a moment. He shuffled back a couple of minutes later and offered Peter his episcopal ring to kiss. He had gone away to put it on.
Friday 11 June
We had the first Queen’s Birthday reception since I’ve been here. It’s been pouring with rain all day (it even stopped my tennis this morning). To avoid everyone getting drenched we moved the ceremonial Beating the Retreat into the ballroom. The excellent police pipe band marched up and down making a terrific noise and closed the performance with my favourite pipe tune ‘Highland Cathedral’. I think I will ask for it to be played when I leave in just over four years’ time. Lavender suggested that the staff and our friends should bring their children along; they all seemed to enjoy it a lot.
Rupert Murdoch came to see me again. He is trying to buy part of Sir Run Run Shaw’s television empire, clearly with the intention of using Hong Kong as the base for jumping off into the Chinese market. We may have some legal problems accommodating Murdoch, which would be bad news since his media would doubtless then go into overdrive to rubbish us. His world view and his business interests don’t just overlap, they seem to match perfectly.
Saturday 12–Sunday 13 June
At the weekend we went to David Tang’sfn7 beautiful little house at Sai Kung with its wonderful garden and marvellous views out to sea. Sai Kung is a charming peninsula close to two country parks and with very good walking, beaches and little fishing villages. It must be a lovely place to live and David has made the most of it. He is one of the most memorable Hong Kong characters, indeed he would stand out anywhere. He is the grandson of a famous and very traditional Chinese comprador who made a fortune, including running one of the bus companies. Having fallen out with David’s father, the old boy largely brought up David himself. David was sent off to a school in England aged 12 speaking hardly any English. He speaks and writes beautiful English now and is a fine pianist. He is himself a successful showman entrepreneur with shops and clubs which enable him to demonstrate just how stylish he is. On top of all this, he is hugely generous, has a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, does a great deal for the arts and for promoting the teaching of English in Hong Kong, and seems to include a large number of members of the royal family among his connections.
Rosa and Dominic Lawson were also invited to lunch. Dominic is writing some articles about Hong Kong and about me. I tried to avoid saying anything too interesting about politics back home, where Norman Lamont has been sacked and is, perhaps understandably, making a fuss. I don’t always agree with Dominic but he is a fine journalist. David Tang said during lunch that he is struck by the extent to which the rich in Hong Kong have already sold out to China.
Monday 14 June
The fifth round of talks is taking place. We thought that the Chinese had decided to make a bit of progress this week but they must have decided instead to attack us for our so-called ‘little tricks’, and to insist that we agree with them on the district board and municipal council elections before moving on to other matters. My more experienced officials in these pretty awful encounters say that there is a world of difference between how we are being treated at the moment and the way the discussions on the airport were conducted back in 1991. Then, Chinese officials shouted abuse and held a press conference after discussions to continue the slagging off which they had begun inside the meetings. Some suggest that they may be being a little more careful about their behaviour now because they aren’t sure whether I will suddenly pull the plug on the talks. If only. Inevitably our Beijing team is starting to get rather weary.
I spoke in the evening to the Hong Kong College of Physicians. The dinner was full of the doctors who have been looking after me. They clearly regard me as their prize, slimmed-down, exhibit. My newish ADC, Mike Ellis, can I suppose take some credit for this (alongside our housekeeper, Elspeth, who keeps an eye on my diet). Mike has had a rowing machine installed in the rather gloomy basement of the house close to where the bodyguards crash out. I am obliged to go on this wretched thing frequently with Mike, who is himself very fit, shouting at me to ‘dig deep’. I get very bored on this machine; apparently some people row for fun! Dig bloody deep, indeed. Dig deep and die of boredom.
Tuesday 15 June
With our team back from Beijing we now have to decide what to say about progress to the Cabinet committee in London. I don’t want to be too defeatist. I think we still need to say that we will be very reasonable in negotiations if the Chinese will only put forward their own proposals. Why should we shift before they say anything? The general opinion is that the absolute deadline for ending the talks is early December. This would be late and difficult but possible. I’m not sure we can go beyond this.
At my main interview with Dominic Lawson, he reported on some of the criticisms that he’s heard from the business community. One imaginative fellow has threatened both to shoot me and has also promised to raise £5 million for the Conservative Party if I am recalled to London. The party could obviously do with the money but I think this might be pushing fundraising a tad too far.
Friday 18 June
We had a meeting to discuss further Rupert Murdoch’s ambitions to take over the TVB TV channel. The established wisdom, which I am not sure is very wise, is that we should block this purchase. I am not so certain. Murdoch is of course a foreign owner but it’s just possible that he may be rather more resilient in standing up for broadcasting freedom than, say, one of the local Chinese entrepreneurs would be. Can this be a case where the public interest may equal Rupert Murdoch? One or two of my advisers think I am being more than naïve. Martin thinks that Murdoch simply wants to have a base for getting into the main China market, and that at the point where this becomes a possibility he will lean over backwards to accommodate communist officials.
I gave a lunch to say farewell to William Ehrman. He has been four years in Hong Kong and will be replaced by Bob Peirce, whom I met in New York. William tells me that a rather limp Cabinet committee paper which I disliked on Hong Kong and our talks with China was written by Christopher Hum not Peter Ricketts. I am not surprised. I will miss William, not least his sense of humour. We now have a busy week ahead of us – a three-day meeting of the JLG, the next round of political talks in Beijing, and preparations for the Cabinet committee meeting before the end of the month. We are starting to get some movement from China on economic issues. On the airport they have agreed to beginning the Western harbour crossing and have been engaged quite positively in haggling over airport money, only asking us to put up an extra HK$20 billion. I’m not sure myself that I regard China easing up on its politicization of economic issues as a great sign of magnanimity. The Western harbour crossing will not be a straightforward issue when we put it to Legco. In the past Hong Kong has been very good at using private investment to meet public goods, but this depends on not mucking about with the financial returns for the investors. So we want to remove the legislature’s ability to set toll levels which would undermine any chance of getting reasonable rates of return for the private investors. Populism is rarely on the side of sensible financing arrangements.
Sunday 20 June
We had a group of British journalists and their wives for a drink. Lavender did an interview recently with the Daily Mail. Their man in Hong Kong apologized for the fact that it hadn’t been printed in the paper. ‘You didn’t say anything sensational’, he explained.
Monday 21 June
We had an instructive meeting about the Chinese nuclear power station at Daya Bay just along the coast from Shenzhen. Clearly in the event of an accident or emergency of any sort at the station there could be considerable consequences for Hong Kong and the public would be extremely worried. The Chinese are insisting that they should have in effect a veto over any information that we want to give to the public about an accident or emergency there. This would be completely unacceptable. The matter hasn’t yet been resolved but I took the view that we may be better off not having any agreement with China, and explaining why this is the case, rather than settling for an agreement that we simply could not defend to the public.
Wednesday 23 June
Despite an admirable display of pyrotechnics by Tony Galsworthy in the JLG talks nothing much shifted, which presumably encouraged Moody’s credit rating agency to take rather a dim view of Hong Kong’s prospects after 1997. I doubt whether even this will have much of an effect on the pro-Beijing members of the business community or those who think that safety lies in keeping quiet and their heads down.
Thursday 24 June
Just before an enjoyable day at the dragon boat races in Aberdeen, I did another district visit, which proved useful for reasons other than keeping in touch with the public. I want to see what is not going well in Hong Kong as well as the good side. I’m aware of what could be called the official visit paint pot syndrome. Before you go out on an inspection, things are tidied up as much as possible. On this occasion, visiting a temporary housing area, the local residents made sure that I didn’t just see what the housing authority officials would like me to be aware of. Much to the concern of officials and the police I was dragged off by residents to look at some truly dire housing. With the connivance of Martin and Edward I am now starting to organize snap visits with as little notice as possible.
Friday 25 June
Robin managed to put the Chinese on the back foot by criticizing their announcement that they are appointing a group of advisers to help prepare for 1997. They had said about three years ago that they were going to establish a working committee to clear the decks for governing after 1997. There was of course no cover in the BL for this. This committee is to be called preliminary rather than preparatory. It will presumably prepare the ground for the main committee and give Beijing the chance to undermine the government in Hong Kong. They’ve chosen the usual sort of suspects, whom I imagine will simply tell them what they want to hear, so there isn’t really much chance of us being sidelined.
Saturday 26 June
The sixth round of talks in Beijing suggests that China may be happy to tell us what they would like on functional constituencies and the election committee. Plainly they want the numbers voting in the functional constituencies to be as small as possible and we want them on the contrary to be as large as seems reasonable. Any fool can tell very easily whether an election is rigged or not. The vestigial shift in Beijing’s position may be the result of the Chinese knowing about the forthcoming Cabinet committee meeting and their fear of what I call ‘the mad Governor factor’. They probably really worry about us imposing our own deadline on the talks. We have dangled just above their heads the carrot of a possible visit by Douglas Hurd in early July to Beijing on his way back from a summit in Tokyo. Douglas is slightly worried that this may look as though he is undercutting Robin and me, but I think it would be a good idea.
Tuesday 29 June
Before setting off for the Cabinet committee meeting in London, we had quite a long discussion in Exco about airport funding. So far we have proposed injecting HK$22½ billion as an initial equity investment in the project, which we are prepared to increase to 25 billion. The Chinese have asked for 40 billion. Some of our members simply think that we should hand over the whole lot, which I suspect would surprise even the Chinese. I have a majority for 25 billion. The Chinese are playing games, partly I reckon because they are used to winning them.
Lavender is off to Korea to launch a ship which rather unhappily is called Soro. I don’t know what it means in Korean, but it seems rather an unfortunate name for a ship.
Wednesday 30 June
I got back to London early in the morning. It’s a beautiful summer day. I realized in the car on the way to our Victoria flat that four years from now I’ll be returning to London more permanently, provided no one has claimed their 5 million for shooting me.
It’s great to see Laura again. I went off to have lunch with Tristan and Catali. Tristan is full of schemes. He wants John to appoint John Kerr as his chief of staff and is clearly lobbying John and Douglas to bring me back in some Whitelaw-ish role to take pressure off the Prime Minister. I told him that this isn’t on; much as I love him, I tell him to bugger off. The more I think about it, the less attractive is the idea of being the government’s sweeper and spokesman. I’ve done that sort of thing before. Look where it got me – Hong Kong! A proper job which I want to see through to the end. Tristan has bought a new Spanish painting. I think the polite word for it is ‘interesting’.
We had lots of meetings in the Foreign Office in the afternoon to prepare for the Cabinet committee meeting and then I took Laura, my sister, and her husband and daughter to a local Italian restaurant for dinner.
Thursday 1 July
Up early this morning for radio and TV interviews, including another one with Brian Redhead, who this time was positively benign. The Cabinet committee meeting went well enough. To be honest the discussion is rather desultory. There was a senior group of ministers, including the PM in the chair, Douglas, Ken Clarke, Michael Howard and the Chief Whip, Richard Ryder. Robin McLaren and I reported on what’s been happening. Looking around the table I doubted whether Hong Kong features in the first half-dozen of anyone’s list of priorities. I think they are all pretty happy to leave it to me with Douglas looking over my shoulder. We agreed that he should go to Beijing. If the talks continue to go badly and we don’t get any sort of deal, we must be able to show that we did everything we possibly could to secure one. Equally, since Qian Qichen seems to be in the driving seat on Hong Kong, it’s important that he and Douglas should have as good a relationship as is possible in the circumstances. We could perhaps have arrived at the same conclusions with an exchange of telegrams, but there is something to be said for me coming back and it’s probably jogged the Chinese to some extent. Later in the day I had a pleasant talk to Jack Cunningham, Labour’s foreign affairs spokesman, who has been helpful and very civil.
Kate got back from Newcastle and in the evening I took her and Laura to Clarke’s in Notting Hill. They are great company and we saw lots of friends in the restaurant.
Friday 2 July
I had breakfast with John this morning. He doesn’t seem to need my attempts to cheer him up. He pointed out that things are much worse in some other OECD countries, that economic growth is starting up again, that the Maastricht rumpus is virtually over, and that he has been proved right over Europe. But he seems to be carrying too many heavy bags, a lot of which are full of rather disagreeable right-wing MPs. I only have to read about them; he has to meet them. Once again, I feel a little bit guilty that I’m not around to help. In practice I’m not sure that there’s anything much I could do. At least now he’s got a very good Chancellor of the Exchequer in Ken Clarke, much better and more resilient than I would have been. Ken listens to experts but has enough self-confidence to follow his own instincts as well. They usually seem to be right.
Saturday 3 July
I got back from London just after Lavender’s return from Korea. When she launched the ship, the bottle broke against its side at the first effort. This was taken, she was told, as a particularly propitious sign – good news given the name of the vessel. The newspapers are full of stories about peasants getting angry in China, capital flooding out of the country, and Zhu Rongji being given more and more authority over the economy. Zhu appears to be the most economically literate leader with a serious knowledge of how markets work, much respected abroad, and a reputation for not taking crap from anyone. We also heard that Larry Yung, the head of the big Chinese firm Citic, has just bought Birch Grove, Harold Macmillan’s old home. I’m not sure that the family silver went with it but it certainly has lovely grounds around, which I once wandered with the old boy; perhaps they will be turned into a golf course. Anyway, it is perhaps an indication that relations between China and Britain have not been entirely cut off. Money has a language all its own.
Monday 5 July
I gave a farewell lunch for Anne Shepherd who has been my deputy private secretary. She has had the unenviable task of writing the speeches that I don’t much want to do myself for things like the international plumbers’ conference or the anniversary celebrations of the society of funeral directors. (I’ve made up those titles but only just.) These sorts of events go with the job and you have to do them as well as possible, evincing the greatest possible knowledge and enthusiasm for taps and coffins. Anne has done it all fantastically well; she radiates amusing charm but now has to return home to the West Country to join her husband, who is a well-known cameraman for natural history programmes. Anne is being replaced by another expat member of the Hong Kong civil service, originally from Wiltshire, called Kim Salkeld. I have not before met a Kim outside Korea. In addition to the private secretary and deputy in my office, there are always two or three younger local Chinese civil servants as well, hotshots on the way up.
Tuesday 6 July
Facing a further month of doubtless getting nowhere in the Beijing talks, I clocked up our successes so far with Martin, Edward and Mike Hanson. We stood firm over the talks taking place without a blanket of secrecy and to having officials from Hong Kong as part of our delegation. Some apparently think that that represents a triumph. I guess we have to calculate even the smallest examples of sanity as real progress when dealing with these ‘speak your weight machine’ Chinese officials. Douglas is to meet Qian in Beijing this week for dinner on Thursday 8 July and will then come on to Hong Kong afterwards to talk to Exco and to Legco members. If the leaks to the pro-Beijing newspapers are correct, the Chinese side is going to suggest separating whatever is decided for the district board and municipal council elections from the arrangements for the elections to the legislature. This is argued as a way of avoiding getting into deadline problems. We are not keen on the idea; we would prefer to deal with things as a package and avoid the beginning of salami slicing.
We are now having serious talks about when David Ford will step down from the job of Chief Secretary and Anson Chan take over. It looks as though this should happen in November, though I am supposed to be doing quite a lot of travelling then, and there may be problems with the talks in Beijing either ending or reaching – we should be so lucky – some sort of climax. If nothing much has happened by then I shall probably want to put my original package in a bill to Legco.
Wednesday 7 July
I went to look at the progress being made at Chek Lap Kok. It’s really remarkable. The reclamation work moves remorselessly across the South China Sea in the general direction of Macau. When, or if, we get the job done, it will be one of the wonders of the world, if an airport can qualify for that prize. I also established a personal first this week. After visiting the Prince Philip Dental Hospital, I got a question from the press afterwards about … dentistry. Thanks to Anne Shepherd I now know a lot about it. Actually, I’ve always thought myself that modern dentistry is one of the principal reasons for living in the 20th century.
Thursday 8 July
Willie Purves came to see me again about his successor on the Executive Council; he is keen on his number two, John Gray, getting the job and for once we see eye to eye. I think it is right to have someone on Exco from the banking sector. It will also be agreeable not to have to spend quite so much time removing a Scottish banker’s dirks from between my shoulder blades. I’ve been wondering how much Willie’s Eeyorish behaviour is explained by the fact that he is having to spend a good deal of diplomatic capital talking in Beijing about relocating the headquarters and more of the operations of the bank to London, now that HSBC has taken over or merged with the Midland. I guess that he will want things to be as politically tilted in Beijing’s direction as possible on the assumption that this will curry favour with the northern communists. This would be understandable if it were true though not terribly honourable. Nor I think would it represent particularly sound calculations. Most of HSBC’s employees don’t have foreign passports. But when I said all this to Lavender, she replied philosophically, ‘It is what it is.’ You run a business in Sicily and like it or not you pay off the Mafia.
Friday 9 July
Douglas had his dinner with Qian yesterday and came on to Hong Kong today, arriving on a Chinese Airlines plane 90 minutes late, so he was very busy when he was with us. But he was cheerful and up for everything that is thrown at him. The discussions with the Chinese Foreign Minister were pretty calm and mostly about issues other than Hong Kong. So far as we were concerned, the most bankable point was Qian’s observation that while it would be desirable to have a through train in order to make the transition as smooth as possible, if this was not possible then we would have to do what we wanted before 1997 and the Chinese would do their own thing afterwards. He also accepted that the talks should concentrate on the functional constituencies and the election committee. We would be prepared to make some compromises on these matters if the Chinese showed a similar willingness. I think this is what is called ‘a Spartan if’. What the Chinese would regard as a concession would simply be to make the arrangements in these areas as loaded in favour of Beijing as possible. At the end of the day we have to get whatever emerges from the talks through the legislature in a bill. During his brief stay in Hong Kong before catching the late plane back to London, Douglas managed to fit in informal meetings with members of both Exco and Legco. We faced one crowd of pro-democracy demonstrators, led by Emily Lau, who presented us with a petition while chanting fairly amiably in favour of a wholly directly elected Legco in 1995. This is clearly a year in which cows alongside pigs are likely to take to the air. How many of those demonstrating actually think this is possible is a nice point. They would doubtless counter with the argument of this might have been so if we’d started down this track some time ago.
After seeing Douglas off at the airport, I changed out of my suit to spend half the night on patrol with the police, both land and sea, on the border. We played with thermal images while belting up and down the coast at high speed in small boats, but didn’t of course catch anyone. I flew back to Fanling at about 3.30 in the morning by helicopter.
Monday 12 July
In Ad Hoc, we talked about how we could change our proposals on the functional constituencies and the election committee, adding additional voters to those who would at present get to take part in the election without going as far as my original ideas. The truth is that everything becomes immensely complicated once you move away from my own proposals, which were at the very least both simple and clear – and pretty fair. Finding new ways of making this part of the election process work in a fashion which would both satisfy those who want a reasonably clean election and Beijing is quite a puzzle. The present functional constituencies are completely indefensible and should never have been accepted by my predecessors or by the British government. The electorates are in most cases tiny and easily manipulated by the Chinese. The man who represents the regional council functional constituency is at present serving time in Stanley Prison for having bribed some of the small number of electors. In the constituency (which mostly represents the bosses of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce and not much more) the legislator called Ho stepped down very suddenly just before the last Legco elections because his business interests were threatened by China after he had expressed some opinions about the airport which they didn’t like. And so it goes on. There isn’t actually a functional constituency called ‘rotten borough’ but that must have been an oversight.
We also started to focus on what we think is the Home Office’s attempt to narrow the pledges made in the past to members of the ethnic minorities (mostly Indian) in Hong Kong about their status after 1997, and in particular whether they qualify for any sort of British passport and for visa-free access to the UK. A lot of the Indians worked for the garrison or for the colonial administration in the past and now risk facing a loss of any citizenship rights, since for China citizenship is a question of ethnicity, an explicitly racist policy. These issues around citizenship and UK entry are going to become stickier and stickier as we approach the handover. As has happened in other parts of the British Empire, a lot of the people involved have worked for the colonial power over the years, not least in the uniformed services. We have not had a very good record in looking after people like this.
Wednesday 14 July
I joined some training sessions for the Black Watch and had lunch with them. They are an impressive lot with some very polished officers, one of whom talks about the tough little blokes (though he isn’t quite as polite as that) in the other ranks. From what they say to me, many of them in the broadest Glaswegian, the single soldiers don’t much care for being in Hong Kong. They find it difficult to pick up girls. But it’s nice for those with families, not least because most of the wives find it easy to get jobs.
Monday 19 July
We’re getting close to summer holidays. Alice and Lavender flew back to London, leaving me in charge of the dogs, who seem surprised to discover that I too am capable of going for walks. We are making some progress on reducing the costs of the garrison and are pleased to have got 84 bills through Legco in this session, including most of our spending plans, not least on infrastructure.
Tuesday 20 July
The eighth round of talks have begun in Beijing. We get nowhere on China’s plans for the so-called through train, and our willingness to try to find some modifications to our plans on the election committee and functional constituencies doesn’t appear to buy us any favours.
Ah Liu, my excellent young valet, has enquired about whether I need any more clothes from Mr Sam. This rather suggests that my tailor has been phoning up either him or Mike Ellis, my ADC. Anyway, I agreed to go off and see Mr Sam at his shop in Kowloon and, being on my own, have accepted his invitation for a private meal. After the usual business with my measurements and the choice of some material for a jacket and some shirts, we headed off for the Indian restaurant where I was to be entertained. I should not have been surprised when I got there to find that not only is his entire extended family at the table and several others, but in addition half the Indian community in Hong Kong seemed to have turned up. All this said, it is I suppose an understandable consequence of getting a suit made in Kowloon. The suits and shirts are very good, a cut above what I used to buy and wear. This is not a Governor who is knowingly underdressed, except for the lack of feathers.
Friday 23 July
There is to be yet another round of talks in the middle of August. I can’t believe that it’s going to be possible to find an agreement, but we are scrambling about now trying to put together some new proposals on functional constituencies. These will involve a substantial reduction in the number of people who can vote in them down to below 1 million. But I’m sure that this will still be too many for Beijing, and, even if they were to agree with us, it would be too few for Legco and the community – not to mention the media. At least Exco agrees with the new ideas and, rather more relevant to the future, Anson Chan is delighted that she will be taking over from David Ford in November. She is very sensible about this. She talks about her husband’s view; he has evidently been very supportive, which may not be easy for a Chinese husband with a successful wife. (I’m not sure that this is only a problem in China.) Anson also says that she can’t guarantee to stay on after 1997, nor even to stay on right up until then if she finds she is constantly having to look over her shoulder at what China thinks about this or that decision she takes. I gave her a little speech, which I think represents the truth, that I like delegating provided I have good people like her to whom I can delegate major and difficult decisions. I obviously want to focus on the biggest issues, with her advice all the time, and will be happy to have her running much of what happens in Hong Kong without me second-guessing her.
Saturday 24 July
I had a cheerful dinner with David Tang and Simon Murray at the French restaurant in the Mandarin hotel. I tell them in confidence about Anson. They both think she is terrific, as is the meal I am delighted not to be paying for.
Monday 26 July
I took David and Gillian Ford to dinner at the Café de Paris to talk about Anson and the Fords’ move to London. He has been fantastically loyal and supportive and I owe him a great deal. I hope he realizes how happy I have been working with him. David and Gillian have become real friends.
Thursday 29 July
I arrived in London yesterday before I head to Italy for a holiday with the whole family and some friends. I continued to ward off suggestions that I don’t really have to spend five years in Hong Kong. I saw Douglas and John Major yesterday, both on their own; John for lunch today, the same day as the Christchurch by-election. (The MP who died, Robert Adley, was one of the relatively few critics of our Hong Kong policy in the House of Commons; no black spot, honestly.) I admire Douglas as much as anyone. Inevitably he is looking for ways in which he can manage his exit from the Foreign Office as decorously as possible. I’m sure that John will put a lot of pressure on him not to depart. I wish I could stop John ringing up newspaper proprietors and editors, and above all reading what some of their more disagreeable and patronizing right-wing columnists have to say. It won’t have any effect save to make them think that they’re taken more seriously than they deserve. John is himself much cleverer than most of them. Of course, I know that it’s easier to make these points than to act in that way. I can often myself become obsessed with criticism and have to avoid ‘Patten against the world’ fixations. John doesn’t drink (well, not much), so his only addiction is reading the unfair and often brutal things which people write about him. I really don’t think that anyone could do better than him, given the present state of our wretched party.
Saturday 28 August
The house where we stayed in Italy is in Umbria just north of Spoleto and not far south of Spello and Assisi. It’s near some famous springs much visited by the Romans and written about by Byron. The house itself was charming in a rundown sort of way. Some rather grand Italian family owns it and apparently is letting it for the first time. The very nice cook who looked after us, and them when they’re there, said rather philosophically that the family hasn’t worked for several centuries so it’s not surprising that they now have to let foreigners rent the house in order to pay the bills. Looking for wine glasses one day in a cupboard, we came across some framed photographs which had plainly been put away before we arrived. One of them showed a group – presumably the parents of the count – wearing fascist insignia and looking very pleased about it. We all have our family histories and some of them are much better locked up in the cupboard.
Wednesday 1 September
Back in Hong Kong we had to start preparing for yet another round of talks in Beijing; this will be the 10th, shortly to be followed by the 11th and then nothing for about three weeks until the end of September. Our general expectation is that China won’t budge at the next two rounds but may give a few inches at the end of September just before a meeting between the foreign ministers. The intention is, I suppose, to put more pressure on us. Sooner or later there will be no point in going on like this. We will have to manage a breakdown. So much of our effort this autumn will be trying to ensure that this happens in a way that gives us as soft a landing as possible. And, of course, we don’t want to get stuck with all the blame. But tick-tock goes the proverbial clock. We have to put in place the pretty complicated sets of arrangements for three lots of election starting next year. This is going to require quite a bit of both primary and subsidiary legislation. There’s also a lot of complex work for the Boundaries and Election Commission to do. We have from time to time to take a cold bath of reality. I really find it difficult to believe that the Chinese will accept a first past the post voting system since this sort of plurality voting favours Democrat candidates. Second, while they might accept a through train for civil servants and judges, do they really accept the case for one covering legislators? At bottom, they don’t want Hong Kong people to run Hong Kong if they disagree with Beijing’s view of what constitutes good governance.
Thursday 2 September
We have had to start work already on my next annual speech to Legco. It doesn’t seem very long since the last one. Until recently the Treasury was predicting that we would be running a deficit this year. But this is Hong Kong. Further calculations now suggest that we will be running a large surplus, so that should give me quite a bit of room for more social initiatives.
We rounded off our first week back by going to a play starring Derek Nimmo. We had a drink with him and his wife, Pat, who are both completely charming. The play, by William Douglas Home, is a very average English drawing-room comedy. Derek does his considerable best, but it is uphill work.
Monday 6 September
Most of the bigwigs in the Securities and Futures Commission have had meetings to brief me on a tricky issue involving Jardine’s. The commission’s responsibilities include policing the takeover code. That naturally begins with the question of its reach. Jardine’s have managed to change their listing as a company from Hong Kong to Bermuda. This obviously reflects their nervousness about possible events after 1997, above all a repeat of the difficulties they had in the past when they were almost taken over by a local company. Their argument is that since they are now listed in Bermuda (though they plainly don’t do much business in the Caribbean), they should not be subject to a takeover code in Hong Kong. There is no doubt about the commission’s jurisdiction and there is equally no doubt that it can be challenged in court. But it would obviously be extremely legally and politically damaging for me to intervene personally to try to overturn an independent and legal commission decision. I could myself face a legal challenge, and the politics of a British Governor intervening to protect a British company from the consequences of the rule of law don’t bear thinking about. What would China think about this, even while pocketing it as a precedent for the future. So if Henry Keswick and Co don’t like what is coming down the track, they can always go to court about it. I’m told now that Jardine’s were raising this issue in London well before I became Governor. There is no reason why they should not make a legal challenge.
Senator Dianne Feinstein had dinner with Lydia and her husband, Michael Thomas. She too came to see me. She has just been in Beijing and thinks that all the members of the leadership there are obsessed with stability, which is presumably in part a result of some of the economic issues China is facing that we hear so much about.
Wednesday 8 September
We are starting to get into a bit more detail when thinking about my Legco speech. I had a lively discussion with David Ford, Hamish McLeod, Leo Goodstadt and others, including of course Martin and Edward. How many of the pledges that I want to make on health, education, welfare and infrastructure are already government policy or should be? How many of them can we afford? Can we reallocate money from our surplus this year without running up unaffordable current spending consequences in the future? How can we put some of our long-term capital allocation decisions into the speech? I’m going to start writing something myself which is sometimes the best way of bouncing people into decisions. I am starting to get more relaxed about the Beijing talks now that I know that they cannot be infinite. I’m sure that the Chinese are pretty resigned now to a breakdown. While they are battling against their own economic problems, I don’t think that they are going to be prepared to take too many risks about Hong Kong. It is probably true that they understand that any settlement to which we could agree might be potentially destabilizing in Chinese domestic politics. When Robin came down to talk to me about all this he was correctly keen to spell out what he believes might be the results of a breakdown. He suggests that we might have a rough few months, a worsening of Sino-British relations, no further dialogue between Chinese officials and me, and attempts to build up pro-Beijing provisional bodies (including the threatened provisional legislature). He is not trying to suggest that I should simply cave in (with the support presumably of the British government) but that I should not be too gung ho about what lies ahead. In other words he is doing exactly what a good official should do.
Murdoch is selling the South China Morning Post to a Malaysian group. I imagine that he wants to remove any possibility of his television ambitions in China being affected by having a newspaper in Hong Kong. The bid for the paper has been bankrolled by the Bank of China. I had been told in the past that it is strapped for cash, but I suppose that Beijing would want to turn it into a Hong Kong version of the Straits Times. Pity.
Friday 10 September
We don’t really have any work to do to prepare for the next – 11th – round of talks in Beijing. Robin McLaren had an awful incident on his flight back to Beijing. The plane’s windscreen shattered in an electric storm when they had almost got to the end of the journey and they had to fly back all the way to Hong Kong on autopilot because they weren’t allowed to make an automatic landing in the capital. Lavender reminded me that Robin has a very bad back and must have been in awful pain. Sitting through all the negotiations must be agony too, physical even more than intellectual for him. He is a very brave man.
After this round of talks, there will be a gap until October while the leader of the Beijing team goes off for a trip round Europe with China’s Vice President. It’s clear that the Chinese side have been tipped the wink that our deadline isn’t October but December. I’m pretty certain that some officials who used to work for Cradock are still happy to treat him as someone on our side. I don’t for one moment believe that on issues like our approach to the talks he misses any opportunity to tell Beijing what we are up to. But I’m sure that there are other channels of communication as well. In any event I mustn’t get too obsessed about deadlines.
Saturday 11 September
We had an informal Exco meeting at GH with Robin McLaren to discuss tactics and strategy for the coming months. We think that we should probably make a very small concession during the 12th round of talks, beginning on 14 September, probably reducing the number of people who can vote in the functional constituencies. We also need to draft a message which Douglas can send before he meets his opposite number about the through train, and we have to think about what I can say on the talks in my Legco speech. Peter Ricketts has prepared the draft of a White Paper in the case of either success or more likely a breakdown. This is not easy to do given the number of audiences to whom we would be appealing. In continuing JLG talks, we should now be able to reach a deal on the defence lands, not least since we are giving away almost everything. But we are trying to insist that the Chinese should make a verbal commitment to use the defence lands as they have been used in the past, handing them back to the Hong Kong government for social and economic development if they are not needed for purely military purposes. Everyone will assume that the main reason why the PLA wants so many defence sites is so that they can then develop them commercially for themselves. However, there is obviously some difficulty in trying to refuse sites to the PLA which our garrison has gone on saying for so long that it needs.
Sunday 12 September
Father Lambertoni has been pressing me for some time to go for a hike with him and a few friends from his Italian missionary order. After our wedding anniversary on the 11th (which I remembered and bought Lavender a very nice candelabra, plus a good dinner with Kate and Alice), we set off with Kate to meet Father Lambertoni on a hiking trail in Sai Kung. Kate was prepared to be bored, obviously expecting to meet a lot of old farts in long cassocks, but when we got to the meeting place, there was a group of fit-looking young and middle-aged Italians wearing trainers, shorts and bright T-shirts. They are making lots of noise and doing a lot of singing. We had a great morning with them, though it is very hot and sweaty. There were about 12 of them and when we got to the highest point in our walk, they sang us a lovely Italian folk song. We then went off to their mother house nearby to have an Italian meal with all the members of the order present in Hong Kong, including a lot of the older ones. There used to be over 70 of them here; now they are down to just over 40. We had prosciutto, lasagne, osso bucco and a huge gateau. There was lots of Chianti and Asti Spumante. We must do it again. I’m not sure whether this is the church triumphant but it is certainly the church molto frizzante.
Monday 13 September
I had a good discussion with Lydia Dunn. She is a great one for picking up rumours and has heard a lot of talk in London that I am going to go back there to help John Major in some senior job or other. One of the rumours she’s heard is that I will be made Leader of the House of Lords with general sweeping up responsibilities across the whole of government. I assured her that almost regardless of what happens in London or Hong Kong, I intend to stay and do the job until 1997. The only thing that would change my mind would be if all my plans were thrown overboard, or if the community turned against what we had been attempting to achieve. She also seemed to think that we could have agreement to disagree with the Chinese on political affairs and just get on with running Hong Kong as best we can. She feels that the business community has largely written off the prospect of any agreement on politics. If they are right, this would mean of course writing off all the stuff about the through train. But as I go on saying to people, if we are expected to do China’s dirty business for them before 1997, then it is simply not a bargain we could accept.
I also had a useful conversation with John Gray, who will be the new boss of the Hong Kong Bank here when Willie Purves goes back to London, and I invited him to join Exco when Willie departs. He is a fine man and we had an open talk. He pointed out that some people would criticize his appointment because he is an expat and that on political issues he takes the same views as many other businessmen in the territory. At least, however, I will know where we stand with him. I think he will disagree with me, when he does, to my face.
Tuesday 14 September
John Redwood arrived. He is now in the Cabinet as Welsh Secretary. Martin asked whether this is the first time we have had a Dalek to stay. It must be difficult for John Redwood, who is probably the most right-wing member of the Cabinet, to be responsible for one of the most interventionist bits of government, which he has brought with him, namely the Welsh Development Agency. They want to know whether they should invest here, or on the mainland or in Vietnam. I met the Australian trade minister, who is attempting to find a middle path between his Prime Minister, Paul Keating, who is trying to drum up as much business as possible with China (no questions asked), and Gareth Evans, Foreign Minister, who is happy to do more business with the Chinese but doesn’t think that Australia can avoid raising human rights issues. Most of the conversation, however, was about European protectionism. He has been told about the piece I wrote in the Economist about free trade which apparently came out the previous week. When I met at lunch the senior team from Jardine’s, several had read it, including Nigel Rich, who told me that he started reading it but fell asleep. There’s honesty for you.
Wednesday 15 September
We took Kate and Alice to William and Caroline Courtauld’s home for dinner this evening. Caroline had lots of young people there for Kate and Alice to meet. The Courtaulds are wonderful company and very generous. William is Rab Butler’s stepson (he works for Jardine’s) and Caroline knows lots about both China and Burma, on which she writes good books. She is a friend of Aung San Suu Kyi. Edward will be interested, he is very keen to visit Burma. I would like to do so as well but don’t think I can while the generals are in charge. I should add a confession about William’s mother, Molly Butler, who is Rab’s widow. She is getting on, but sharp as a tack and wonderful looking. She continues at every opportunity to fight Rab’s corner, in particular laying into Harold Macmillan whenever the chance arises. I am a huge fan despite the fact that she can’t stand the European Union. I think she has sort of forgiven me for being a supporter. She wrote an extremely good memoir, and the passages about the death of her two husbands, a Courtauld and a Butler, made me cry. The book was by the bedside when I stayed once with Francis and Valerie Pym before making a speech in his constituency. I love it when hosts have obviously taken some care about choosing the right books to tempt a guest at bedtime. Books of collected obituaries are usually welcome, but perhaps they make it more likely that you will die in your sleep.
Friday 17–Saturday 18 September
Over the weekend we had political guests from London, first Virginia Bottomley, who is now the Health Secretary, and then David Hunt, who was my number two when I was Environment Secretary and is now the Secretary of State for Employment. David is one of the best House of Commons speakers that I know. We were almost hit by a typhoon; at least, a typhoon passed quite close by. It’s the third of the season and there was a storm warning eight. The rain lashed down. The house shuddered under the gale. Lots of meetings were cancelled, the good side of the bad weather. When it was over, I went off to play tennis with David Ford and the two senior members of the Hong Kong Davis Cup squad, Colin Grant and Mike Walker. They are becoming an important part of my life support team, extremely nice chaps and of course very good tennis players. They don’t try to knock me off the court (they couldn’t do that with David, who is himself an excellent player) but keep the ball in play so we have long rallies. I have to start playing rather better because I’ve accepted a challenge to play in a charity game with, among others, Roscoe Tanner, who serves at the speed of light. My serve is more readily comparable with the speed of my alas now dead Morris Minor.
Monday 20 September
Douglas has, a little surprisingly, torn into the Chinese bid to hold the Olympic Games, which I imagine will cause a bit of a stir when he next sees his opposite number from Beijing, and we started trying to work through the various scenarios for dealing with the end of the talks. The nightmare scenario is one in which we can’t get a majority in Legco for anything at all, not for anything we manage to agree up north, and not for going forward with our own original plans. That’s the charm of democracy for you. After Exco I announced Anson’s appointment as the new Chief Secretary. When we finished answering questions in English from the journalists, Anson went back to do the whole thing again in Cantonese. I guess that is part of the point.
Tuesday 21 September
After doing an interview for Panorama at No. 10’s request about John (Douglas and Ken Clarke are the other two people they are interviewing), we had a lovely evening at a charity performance in our ballroom of The Magic Flute by a visiting chamber opera. The acoustics were terrific.
Wednesday 22 September
We gave a farewell dinner for Willie Purves and his wife before they go back to London. This seemed to be one of a string of such evenings. He is having more farewells than Frank Sinatra. I’ve been told about some of the things he has said about me at other dinners; he must presumably know that people will all report them back to me. I have a moderately thick skin but thought I could respond (with a degree of subtlety) in the speech that I gave for him. I noted that Exco’s role has changed, that it does not any more have the responsibility of providing a sort of representational legitimacy for the colonial government (that has changed with the development of Legco), but that it does help the Governor to make political judgements. I went on to say that whether the Governor is a wise and urbane diplomat or a vulgar and cackhanded politician, these judgements are difficult. I then did a little turn on politics and principle, the importance of loyalty, and finally flashed a few emaciated compliments in Willie’s direction. He is an old bruiser with a very thick hide and I rather doubt whether he got the points I was making. But others clearly did. As I’ve noted before, he is presumably a good bank manager.
Thursday 23 September
A sadder occasion was the farewell lunch that I gave for Tony Galsworthy. He is a very clever diplomat and it cannot have been easy for him to work for me after so many years as part of the Cradock team. As the chairman of our side in the JLG he has been as effective as is possible in coping with some pretty dreadful diplomats on the other side of the table. I hope that sooner or later he will become our ambassador in Beijing. He would obviously like it. It’s a good job the offer will never be made to me. Now Tony can spend a bit more time with his moths. He is to be succeeded by Hugh Davies, who was a long-term China hand and gets very good reviews from all his colleagues as an excellent and sensible team builder.
Speaking of Craddock, the South China Morning Post have run a story saying that at my insistence his memoirs are being suppressed by the government. He has apparently been phoning up journalists to tell them this. It’s a complete lie. I actually wrote to Robin Butler, the Cabinet Sec, saying I didn’t want to have anything to do with looking at Percy’s memoirs. I think the truth is that the FCO and the Cabinet Office have been trying to get him to take one or two things out of the book he is writing. They are exactly the sort of things that he wouldn’t have tolerated a civil servant saying in his days in office. He is such a vain old thing. I was about to describe him as a bore. But he’s not really that. It’s what he’s doing that is boring; it takes up too much time having to think about it and deal with it.
Saturday 25 September
The Waldegraves came to stay with us yesterday. William has to fly on to Tokyo for a few days, but Caroline stayed and hugely helpfully spent a lot of time in the kitchen teaching our chefs all sorts of useful and delicious new tricks. It’s been raining very hard and I had to go off to the New Territories to inspect flood defences. We are working up on the border and it’s been difficult getting agreement with the Chinese authorities for some of what needs to be done.
Wednesday 29 September
After another good district visit, this one to Mong Kok, Lavender and I had to go to our second Chinese National Day reception. Bob Peirce wrote a first-rate little speech for me which I more or less knew off by heart. He included some lines from an eighth-century Chinese poet about the need to climb higher in order to get the long-term view. I’m not sure that I really knew what I was supposed to be getting at but it went down well. Zhou Nan and I toasted one another at the end in feigned good humour. Jonathan Mirsky, a really excellent journalist who is now working here for The Times, told Edward that the photographers were instructed not to photograph us when we did the toasts – no signs of Entente are to be allowed. Jonathan is a great addition to our social life in Hong Kong, not least because he knows so much about China and has admirably clear views on the usual behaviour of the Communist Party.
Thursday 30 September
We had a bit of time with William and Caroline when William returned from his ministerial trip to Tokyo. Any time with them is a bonus, and Caroline and Lavender went on quite a few walks together. William is having a tough time because of the wretched Scott Inquiry into the alleged ministerial complicity in the sale of arms to Iraq. Scott himself is a judge whose knowledge of the law must be a great deal stronger than his ability to tell honest people from charlatans. In having to decide whether William and Nick Lyell are telling the truth or whether he should believe Alan Clark, he seems to have some difficulty arriving at a judgement which most people who know them all would have reached in a nanosecond.
Friday 1 October
Today, after the Waldegraves left, was a public holiday. I worked at Fanling while Lavender went to visit the Down’s Syndrome Centre at Tung Tau. Back in August there were some awful demonstrations by a few local residents against its establishment. This small group of neighbours didn’t want to live next door to a few kids with Down’s. Lavender (who is patron of the charity that helps look after people with Down’s) thought very properly that she should visit the centre with one or two others, including David Tang, who has himself done a lot for them, to show support. It is sometimes argued, though I am not sure that I wholly believe this, that there is a cultural Chinese hostility to facing up to disability or death, for example the existence of AIDS or the establishment of hospices. Lavender’s gesture of support was very well received – except by the protesting neighbours. She was told in advance that there would be a big and noisy demonstration and that some of the protesters were planning to throw bags of urine at her. ‘I suppose there is a first time for everything’, she said. In fact, it all went off very peacefully and with good humour. Lavender was told that the majority of residents were fed up with the small band of protesters and were isolating them. It amused Lavender that only a few days ago our friend Mike Medavoy, who is looking after Laura in Hollywood while she is there on holiday, telephoned to announce Laura’s arrival. She was apparently asked at Immigration where her mother was. She replied, ‘I’m sure that she is playing golf and walking her dogs in Hong Kong.’ Lavender said, ‘I hope that she doesn’t think that that is all I do all day.’
Saturday 2 October
Douglas had a meeting with Qian again yesterday. As we anticipated, it was a pretty barren discussion. After the meeting Douglas and Christopher Hum, who was with him at the UN in New York, discussed whether we could perhaps separate the issue of the elections to the district boards and the municipal council from the rest of the political package, giving us more time to talk to the Chinese about Legco. There are a lot of technical reasons why this is difficult, but there’s also a solid political case that we need to consider. The Chinese will only move when they really believe that we have got a deadline. If we keep on changing the ones we have already specified, they won’t believe that we have a deadline at all and will refuse to budge from their existing positions. We sent off a telegram to this effect. We also discussed whether in the event of a breakdown we should put to Legco my original package or an amended one taking account of the moderate changes we have suggested both to the election committee and to the size of the functional constituencies. I’m not sure myself that this will take any tricks. It will probably lose support on both sides in the legislature, meaning that we finish up with no one agreeing to what we suggest.
Tuesday 5 October
Tony O’Reilly (the Irish businessman and former international rugby player) is in Hong Kong. When I was a schoolboy, I once saw him play rugby: a big, strapping, handsome Irish lad. He still is. As well as running Heinz he also owns several newspapers. He is in town for a world press freedom conference. Despite all my usual bluster about doing my own speeches, I made one opening the conference written by Edward, which is a real cracker and went down very well. When I had a drink with Tony and his wife today, he invited me to go to Dublin to give what has become a very prestigious lecture organized by his newspaper group. It’s not until next March and it looks as though I can manage the date. Putting cream on the cake, he says that there is a fee of about £20,000. Very nice but I told him that I can’t really receive it; I’m already paid for doing my job. I don’t think he really understood my ethical problem and replied, ‘We could make it a bit more.’
Wednesday 6 October
And so, after a lot of work in recent weeks I came to my annual Legco speech today. When I got to the building, there was a pro-democracy demonstration outside with lots of familiar faces. They were obviously expecting me to run up the white flag. This is odd really because the NCNA and quite a lot of the pro-Beijing business community think I’m going to pull the plug on the talks and table my bill straight away. I was rather worried that the speech was going to take most of the rest of the month to deliver but I got through it all in just over two hours. Lavender advised me to go faster than normal. After setting out all my views on economic and social policy (with several new proposals on welfare), I turned at the end of the speech to politics in Hong Kong. I’m quite pleased with what I wrote in the peroration. ‘We now have only weeks rather than months to conclude these talks … We are not prepared to give away our principles in order to sign a piece of paper. What would that be worth?’ I finished by going a bit over the top, ‘We cannot be bolder than you, because liberty stands in the heart. When it shrivels there, nothing can save it.’ Then came the press conferences, interviews with local and foreign press, radio and television broadcasts and once again public meetings, the first of them once more in Shatin tomorrow.
Friday 8 October
The worst part of the week was a meeting today with two ghastly blokes from the bank Robert Fleming – the one from London is called John Manser and the even worse one, who looks after the bank’s interests in Hong Kong, is called Alan Smith. A lot of what they’ve been saying in private has been played back to me already. People might be surprised to discover how much the Governor gets to hear. They have spent a good deal of the week kowtowing to the NCNA. If they only knew how much derision this causes in the ranks of even the most hard-boiled of Chinese apparatchiks. Apparently, they have even told the Chinese that of course the UK demonstrates some of the inadequacies of democracy and that nobody in Hong Kong agrees with me about elections. What creeps.
Sunday 10 October
There was an important poll this weekend in the South China Morning Post suggesting that quite a good majority think it’s important to stand up for democracy. Alastair came for one of his regular ministerial visits, but this time he had other things that he wanted to say. He asked for a private word during which he set out in some detail one or two quite specific suggestions about the notion that I should go back to a big job at Westminster. It’s probably the only job that I’d be really keen to do. But I went through all the reasons why it would be impossible and pretty dishonourable. I’ve promised again and again that I would be in Hong Kong for five years provided enough people here want me to stay. I guess if Legco threw out my plans I’d probably have to leave with my tail between my legs, but that might not be the best recommendation for a post in the government. We have to go back to London in a few days for a Cabinet committee meeting to agree on the way forward and I guess that I’ll get a lot more of all this stuff about returning when I’m there.
Monday 11 October
We spend a lot of time thinking through what modest concessions we can make in order to secure at least some progress in the talks which are now heading for the 14th and 15th rounds. We also have to get the Cabinet committee meeting and the paper for it prepared. Allen Lee and some of his colleagues came to see me yet again. They want us to split the discussion of district board and municipal council elections from the arguments about the bigger matters involving Legco. I explained to them that this would be a red herring and that we need to get all our legislation in place by July 1994. If the Chinese are prepared to agree with us on the voting age, on the local elections and on the voting method for the geographical elections – none of which raise Basic Law or Joint Declaration points – we would be very happy for them to make this clear at the outset of the next round of talks. I said this myself in stand-ups with the press after a degree congregation at Chinese University. The real problem is what it has always been: the Chinese side won’t agree to anything which would make the elections even moderately fair and acceptable, and we won’t put anything forward which will leave us looking like a pathetic transmission mechanism for Beijing two or three years before 1997. In a way the Chinese cat is let out of the bag when David Akers-Jones gave evidence to the Foreign Affairs committee of the House of Commons on Hong Kong. He told the committee during the course of one of their sessions, ‘The Chinese style is not to rig elections, but they do like to know the results before they are held.’ Quite so.
Sunday 17 October
Today, we started a sponsored walk by 10,000 civil servants at Shatin and then Lavender went off with Caroline Courtauld and Millie Yung, an old friend of Caroline who is very smart and knowledgeable about China, on a visit to Yunnan in the far south-west of China.
Wednesday 20 October
At the beginning of the 14th round of talks today, the Chinese offered the prospect of vestigial progress. They said that they will take note of our view that they should recommend objective criteria to the committee that will be set up before 1997 to prepare for the transition and to vet the legislators who will be allowed to travel on that clattering through train. They have also said that if we will agree not to press for completely elected district boards and municipal councils, they will consider sympathetically our ideas about the voting age and the voting method for the local elections. As concessions go this takes very few biscuits. It wouldn’t even satisfy Allen Lee and his pals.
Friday 22 October
Nothing happened on the second day in Beijing to compare remotely with the excitements I had to face in Hong Kong on the 21st. This was the day when I took part in a charity challenge tennis match in front of a large crowd in the stadium at Victoria Park. I played with Vijay Amritraj against David Ford and Roscoe Tanner. My increasingly good friend Colin Grant, along with his tennis pals Hans Franklin and Mike Walker, have spent a lot of time trying to get me into shape for this game. I more or less survived, though I was so nervous that I found it very difficult to toss the ball over my head when serving. I did have one or two quite long rallies and eventually Vijay and I won a tiebreak with a backhand volley off the frame of my racket. John Barrett, the former tennis player and correspondent for the FT, wrote a report about the match which was modestly flattering but which did include a count of my unforced errors.
In Beijing, Chinese officials boasted about the huge concessions they have made. We think again about how we should handle a breakdown and what package to put subsequently to Legco. I really don’t think we are going to be able to make up our mind on this until the event, but I would be surprised if we don’t table the 1992 package. I keep on coming back to the same mixture of the practical and the honourable. There isn’t much point in us changing our plans if they then satisfy neither Legco nor Beijing.
Sunday 24 October
Lavender got back this weekend from Yunnan, where she had a terrific time, and I managed to talk to Laura in Los Angeles. I have also started writing the lecture which I have to deliver in Newcastle when I visit Kate there on our next home visit. Pretty much every visitor who comes in to see me here thinks that the economy in China is in some trouble or, if not actually in trouble, is defying the laws of gravity. In my experience people say this when they don’t really know what is going on. James McGregor from the Asian Wall Street Journal makes the most interesting good sense. He says that it is not surprising that no one knows what is happening in China. It is in effect run by a secret society. What launched the recent economic frenzy? It was one old man (Deng) going to Guangzhou. Li Peng, the Prime Minister, disappeared for four months this year; no one knew where he had gone or what was happening while he was away. He then suddenly reappeared in his bathing trunks. Hu Jintao is said to be a great figure in the leadership. He has come from nowhere. He was party secretary in Tibet but couldn’t go there very much because he suffered from altitude sickness. What’s the secret of his success? Altitude sickness? Meanwhile, with the politics entirely inscrutable, the economy is probably booming away in a way which baffles traditional economists. Or perhaps it isn’t!
Thursday 28 October
The 15th round of talks started yesterday. Paint drying on wall. Will to live disappearing fast. On the second day today, however, the Chinese made quite a clever move which suggests they don’t want the talks to break off. At the beginning of the round, out of the blue, they suggested that we should record an interim understanding on five points that we have been discussing and which they think we have come close to agreeing. They will accept a reduction in the voting age to 18, pocket the right of Hong Kong citizens who are members of the National People’s Congress to stand in local and Legco elections in Hong Kong, go along with a single-vote, single-member system for local but not for Legco elections, accept the nature and function of district board and municipal councils elections though not the size of the electorates, and recognize that while we can replace appointed members of these bodies before 1997, they may be put back by China after that date. In other words there would be the return of appointed members. Whether or not there is any chance in the future of an agreement on contentious issues such as the voting system for Legco and the possibility of duly elected legislators travelling on the through train was to be put to one side. On the through train, I suppose that we could accept a reasonably drafted oath in order to qualify for the post-1997 Legco, after all, MPs at Westminster take an oath. But there could be no question of retrospection. This would have to be explicitly ruled out. Clearly (insofar as anything is clear) the Chinese side seems to be keen on avoiding a breakdown, but we haven’t really got into a serious discussion about the membership of the electorate in the functional constituencies and their delineation, nor about the other fundamental matters.
Friday 29 October
After discussing all this we worked on a paper for the Cabinet committee and on a message which the Prime Minister could send to his opposite number, focusing on the many issues that remain outstanding and calling for a speeding up of discussions. This will be sent after the Cabinet committee have agreed on the way forward through any future talks.
Monday 1 November
I began the month with a deeply depressing lunch with the board of Standard Chartered Bank. They are critical of what we are doing in Hong Kong – no, not critical, really hostile. They don’t think we should be doing or saying anything which annoys Beijing. Their advice and knowledge of what is happening in Hong Kong and China seems remarkably limited and deeply and uninterestingly small-‘c’ conservative. No wonder that despite the fact that a few years ago they were the top bank in Hong Kong, they have been knocked far off this perch by HSBC, who were much more prepared to lend money to up and coming local Chinese businessmen.
Wednesday 3 November
Nancy Thompson has lent Lavender the catalogue of the old Chater collection of works of art which used to belong to GH and was lost during the war. The pictures were buried in the garden of GH, but the two men who knew the spot died during the Japanese occupation and the paintings were never discovered. It’s a tragedy because the collection contained some beautiful works by Chinnery.
Lavender and I had a quick trip to Macau today. The Governor invited us to a performance of Turandot at the music festival. We get on very well with him and his wife. Lavender suggests that this is clearly in part the result of the fact that we are in a similar position in relation to China. Macau is of course very different, much smaller, and the Portuguese half threw in the towel in 1967 during the Cultural Revolution, and then threw it in again after it had in effect been handed back into their safekeeping during one of their own Portuguese revolutions. But whatever the differences in our respective colonies, the Chinese Communist Party and its behaviour remain the same. On the way home we just miss a big storm.
The general mood of foreign journalists is captured by the great Jonathan Mirsky, whom I much like even when he is annoying the hell out of me. But he is brave, knows a lot about China and is very lively company. Apparently he tends to storm out of dinners from time to time but the people he treats like this are normally people who deserve it. Anyway, when he interviewed me, he plainly couldn’t make up his mind whether we are heading for a sell-out or a complete and utter ceiling falling down disaster.
Friday 5 November
I had a drink this evening with Eric Anderson and his wife. He is stepping down as head of Eton and is off to be Rector of Lincoln College in Oxford. A more regular visitor is the formidable Jessica Rawson, who has been running the Asia department in the British Museum, and is going to Merton College. I wonder what those jobs are like? We had a few good rambles with Jessica through the back streets of Hong Kong looking for antiques. There couldn’t be a better guide on this hunt for bits of old China.
Sunday 7 November
We got back to London at dawn on 6 November and after clocking in at Morpeth Terrace I went off for a Turkish bath at the RAC Club. Apart from talking about Hong Kong to Douglas over the weekend, I also checked where we stand on a difficult civil service pensions issue in the territory. It’s all about sterling safeguards, with the Treasury trying to avoid setting the figure at today’s Hong Kong dollar price against the pound. It’s not about who we pay in Hong Kong but what the retired civil servants get in sterling. The Treasury are being as mean as they have been with most colonial civil servants’ pensions, but they are obviously dug in. There will be one not very high-ranking official in the Treasury who has made it his life’s work to screw colonial pensions, thinking every evening as he waits on the platform in the cold and wet for a train to Guildford about all those allegedly living it up in warm climates, with servants at a snap of their fingers, being taught a bit of reality by the man in the Treasury. The problem is that these are the sort of relatively small issues, except for those who are personally affected, which ministers rarely think are worth trying to understand or deal with in a way which contradicts official advice. In my experience the best ministers, like Tristan, George Young and Richard Needham, take the trouble to understand and deal with the sort of questions which will only appear in lengthy submissions at the bottom of their ministerial boxes. Douglas also wants me to encourage the Prime Minister, when I see him, to keep up his interest in Northern Ireland.
Monday 8 November
I saw John for breakfast this morning. He seemed much more cheerful than I had been led to expect. He is fine about what we are doing in Hong Kong and thinks that on most domestic policy issues, and even maybe on Europe, the worst is behind the government. Others have appeared a little more doubtful on this, given that for a small number on the right of the party Europe is now an issue pursued with religious fervour. On Northern Ireland, which I raised dutifully, John thinks there may be what they endlessly call in Northern Ireland ‘a window of opportunity’. He obviously gets on very well with his Irish opposite number, Albert Reynolds. They met first when they were finance ministers; in my experience former holders of this office remain very clubby even when they go on to other things.
Later in the day I met Sir Philip Haddon-Cave, who is often spoken of as one of the architects of Hong Kong’s economic success alongside the brilliant economist John Cowperthwaite. It is said that Cowperthwaite was sceptical of government playing any role in the economy at all. He even harboured doubts about collecting economic statistics. Haddon-Cave did not go this far but there’s no question of his important role in rejecting any idea of Hong Kong pursuing a Singapore style model of government intervention in economic matters. He was plainly a considerable admirer of Teddy Youde and believes – more and more people have been saying this to me – that it is a great tragedy that he died since it allowed the ‘don’t at any cost have a row with China’ school to prevail in determining policy in the colony.
Tuesday 9 November
I went to see John Smith and Jack Cunningham in the Commons. They were extremely amiable. John Smith asked intelligent questions and was interested in whether the Chinese seem particularly interested in what would happen in the event of a Labour government. He has obviously twigged the fact that the next election is likely to come just before the end of our time in Hong Kong. He looks rather overweight but he’s sharp and likeable. Come the next election I imagine he will be a terrific asset to his party. He has always appeared to me to be a very identifiable form of politician, a decent, radical Scottish socialist lawyer. He is also a brilliant public speaker, especially in the Commons, rather like Malcolm Rifkind, also from Scotland.
Wednesday 10 November
For the Cabinet committee meeting today we produced a rather complicated paper on the way forward. I had a chance of going through it yesterday with John Coles, the new permanent secretary at the FCO who has taken over from David Gillmore. We suggested aiming for a first-stage agreement in the next couple of rounds of talks, dealing with local elections in the district boards and the municipal council, the voting age and other more technical matters. We can also have a go at drafting and tabling the sort of oath which members of Legco might be able to take in order to guarantee a place on the through train. If we don’t make progress on these questions in the next few weeks, we will go ahead and legislate on some of them anyway, giving ourselves some breathing space to decide what to do about the more complicated and controversial issues like the functional constituencies. But eventually Legco will have to decide. We will not be able to go any further than they are prepared to travel.
The meeting went pretty much to plan. The PM had (as ever) read the paper carefully. Ken Clarke and Tony Newton were very supportive. Ken said, ‘We must trust the Governor’s judgement on these matters.’ Michael Heseltine asked some reasonable, searching questions about the impact of a row with China on our economy and on British business. I was able to point out that during the last few years, when we were leaning over backwards to avoid any fuss with China, the economic consequence was not just minimal; our exports were actually doing quite badly. Any British business which did not now get a contract in China would blame our policy in Hong Kong whatever the real circumstances. The Chinese of course fed this suspicion. Other than these questions we had an easy and helpful ride. The bad news this week was that we are going to have to work for a while without Robin McLaren. For some months he has been suffering terrible back pain and has been taken into hospital for an operation. He is a brave, phlegmatic and thoroughly decent man. For the next few rounds of talks, we tried to secure Tony Galsworthy to lead our team, but the FCO tells us that he can’t be spared. So Christopher Hum is to do the job. I doubt this will be greeted in Hong Kong with delirious enthusiasm.
I had the usual round of interviews, including the Today programme and John Humphrys for a TV show called On the Record. It’s much easier to do these interviews nowadays since (though I try not to be too cocky) I know a lot more about the subject than the interviewers, and in addition China has not been playing its hand very well. After a good dinner with Douglas and Judy Hurd, we watched the last episode of a series on Margaret Thatcher’s years in Downing Street, which dealt with her fall. She wasn’t critical of me but observed quite gently that I hadn’t used any beautiful words when I spoke to her explaining why I thought she should step down. Perhaps I should have been more elegiac; but they weren’t very elegiac times.
Thursday 11 November
We went up to Newcastle to see Kate and for me to give the Earl Grey memorial lecture on human rights. We stayed in a pub on the way to Hexham. Kate is living in a rented house with a few friends. It is the usual sort of student pit; they have obviously tried to clear it up before our arrival, but it is still fairly grotty in a friendly way. Lavender got me to admit that at least it’s more salubrious than my small flat in Oxford when I was in my third year there. There was a packed audience for the lecture with an overspill. There aren’t really any pickings for the Hong Kong press who have travelled all the way to the north-east to hear me. Beforehand we had tea with the Chancellor, Matthew Ridley, who is far nicer than his brother Nick. There was then a dinner given by the Vice Chancellor, James Wright, who is a classicist from Scotland and Cambridge. Slightly to my surprise he turned out to be a serious foodie and a collector of modern Scottish art. He and his wife were delightful company. I also met John Ashton’s mother, who is a professor at the University, and quite properly proud of her clever son.
Friday 12 November
On this crisp autumn day, we took Kate and a friend for a bracing walk along Hadrian’s Wall and then out to dinner at the restaurant Number 21 Quayside, where we had a meal together last year. She brought along a very nice young man called Mark. Rather against her advice, he had on a tie and jacket for dinner. I doubt whether he has worn either for some time. He told us that his mother had asked him to cut his hair but he declined to go that far.
Sunday 14 November
Back on a plane to Hong Kong on Saturday night. While I’ve been away there has been a storm about the sacking of one of the senior staff of the Independent Commission Against Corruption. This has involved the use of the fairly draconian powers that we have to use in cases like this. Some people understandably get a bit nervous about this and I can see that it could all be abused after 1997. But there is really no other effective way of dealing with creeping corruption, and in order for us to use the powers it is always necessary to get judicial approval.
Monday 15 November
We still can’t make up our minds about whether the Chinese are serious about wanting a deal of some acceptable sort. We occasionally get messages leaning in a positive direction through intermediaries like C. H. Tung. But whatever Lu Ping says in Beijing, the NCNA continue to give very hard-line briefings in Hong Kong. We spend a lot of time at meetings looking at possible draft oaths for would-be through train legislators. Quite how to describe subversion in such oaths, in a way which Chinese communists would find acceptable, seems some way on the road to intractable.
I had a meeting and dinner with President George Bush and his wife, Barbara. They are very fond of John Major. The former president shares John’s concern about the press, arguing for example that they downplayed the economic statistics in America which had shown the beginnings of economic recovery. The statistics have now been revised upwards and he says that he thinks that this economic story torpedoed his campaign. All this said, he is remarkably un-bitter and very gentlemanly. He has near-perfect manners, rather like my old boss Peter Carrington. He is just about the only visiting political leader who has thanked me for all the help he has got from the police and others while he has been in Hong Kong. I do reckon that he was a very unlucky loser and a good example of a Conservative internationalist. I am not surprised that he got such good people to work for him. The Princess Royal also arrived, and is staying with us. She is here for some sort of international meeting involving horses. I’m sure that it’s important; but I have not the faintest idea what it is all about.
I am becoming more preoccupied with the number of Vietnamese migrants who are still in Hong Kong and have a useful meeting with the new UNHCR [UN High Commissioner for Refugees] head about encouraging returns to Vietnam. I doubt whether there are any refugees, or rather illegal migrants, around the world who are being offered a better deal to go home than the one we are prepared to subsidize. We have still got about 30,000 in Hong Kong’s camps and I fear we are likely to be left with an institutionalized hard core to deal with. Unfortunately, while the presence of these migrants and camps is a live issue in Hong Kong, this would be the same story anywhere. Perhaps the fact that so many Hong Kong citizens were themselves migrants makes it a less toxic issue than would otherwise have been the case. But we have to find some civilized way of making it more manageable. Lavender has paid more visits to the camps than I have and had more meetings with the voluntary organizations which are trying to help them.
Thursday 18 November
The day began with the doctor telling me that I have to lose more weight, but continued more satisfactorily, not least because I spent an hour with Henry Kissinger. He is never boring. He thinks that America has got to sort out its relationship with China and reckons that Bill Clinton will pay far more regard to jobs and prosperity in the run-up to the 1996 election than to human rights. American business wants access to the China market, though it is possible that some investors may find over the coming months they have done the equivalent of buying the Eiffel Tower, in other words put their money into dud investments. He talked quite a bit about Lee Kuan Yew, whom he describes as being in effect the mayor of a medium-sized city between Malaysia and Indonesia. (Harry, as he calls him, would love that.) This is one reason why the connection to China is so important to Lee. He told a very funny story about a visit made by the Singaporean leader to Harvard in the late 1960s. Lee had a discussion on Vietnam with a group of members of the faculty, who all gave him their views, which were highly critical of American policy. At the end they asked him what he thought and he just replied, ‘I think you are a bunch of traitors.’ He told me that Lee does not speak disdainfully of my intellect even though he strongly criticizes my views on life and politics. Henry Kissinger, as he was departing, returns to this theme. ‘At least he doesn’t think you’re stupid.’
We had dinner in the evening for the Princess Royal and her lady-in-waiting. It was just Lavender, Alice and me. As usual, she was intelligent and interesting company. When she takes on honorary responsibilities, she finds out a lot about the issues involved. So, for example, she is more knowledgeable than many of the ministers I used to deal with at Overseas Development on international aid. But I fear that I can’t do horses.
Today, for reasons that no one can quite fathom, unless the Chinese have been selling on the basis of a pessimistic assessment of our talks, the Hang Seng Index plummeted. There have also been some pessimistic stories about the China economy. Barton Biggs, who works for Morgan Stanley, and who was puffing China’s economic prospects back in September, has now said that it is a bubble and he has advised people to sell Chinese stocks. I sometimes think the extraordinary thing is not that stockbrokers are so highly paid but that they are paid at all.
Friday 19 November
When will this all end? The 16th round of talks began today with the Chinese side back-pedalling fast and with no apparent embarrassment on what they promised in the last round about making progress on some less important issues. How are we supposed to know what their game is? The rules seem to be written by Lewis Carroll. Perhaps this is all a sophisticated negotiating tactic or, on the other hand, maybe they were just stringing us along. They aren’t prepared to do the sort of first-stage deal that we could manage, and even appear to be going back on what they said about the local elections, namely to agree to disagree, with the possibility of different situations before and after 1997. They now refuse to accept that we can abolish appointed seats. I hope they are not miscalculating and misreading any signals from us or being badly advised by some of our home critics. We may just have to tell them that if nothing is accomplished in the next round we shall pull the plug. Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Jiang Enzhu is said to have come close at one point to frothing at the mouth in denouncing our infamy.
Saturday 20 November
To cheer me up, we had a visit from Chancellor Kohlfn8 on his way back from Beijing. I have got to know him a bit over the years and we get on very well. I saw him when I used to do exchange visits with the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung when I was director of the Conservative Research Department, and again more frequently when I was chairman of the Conservative Party and attempting to negotiate the party’s membership in the European Parliament of the centre-right grouping – the European People’s Party. Surprisingly, before my time as chairman, Margaret had been keen on the idea and John Major gave it a big push. Kohl suggested that we should talk together on our own with just his interpreter as we had done in the past. She often seems to know exactly how he’s going to end a sentence when he begins it. We had a cheerful but rather meandering discussion. He obviously sees China through the prism of what has happened in the Soviet Union and central and eastern Europe. He doesn’t think that the opening up of the market will do other than erode the structure of Marxism/Leninism. He larded discussion about China with lots of references to Prussia, Bismarck and the Stasi. He is particularly interested in the activities of the intelligence community in Hong Kong, seeing similarities between our city and Berlin, but nevertheless expressed scepticism about the product of intelligence. He wasn’t a bit surprised that the business community is not supporting our efforts to put in place fair elections. He doesn’t think that they are likely to look further ahead than the following day and the profits they can make. Elections don’t have a place on balance sheets. He said that Hong Kong came up during his discussions and that he was promised by the Chinese that they would go for a smooth transfer. It’s not unfair of course to wonder how different his own attitude is to that of the businessmen he criticizes when he himself is talking to Chinese leaders. We had just over an hour together. Before leaving he expressed once again great enthusiasm about John Major and some understanding about Britain’s problems over Maastricht. He invited me to go and see him next time I’m in Germany. I wish he had worked to help us revalue sterling within the European exchange rate mechanism before we crashed out of it. Much as I like him, I doubt whether he lost very much sleep over that.
Back from Beijing, Michael Sze (who as the new Secretary for Constitutional Affairs has been part of our team there) told me how appallingly badly the Chinese side had treated Christopher Hum in particular and indeed all of them by the end of the meetings. This behaviour continued during the end of talks banquet (if that is the right word for a meal with these bullying and reckless hacks). Jiang Enzhu refused to talk to Christopher for the first three courses. He was subsequently rude and didn’t see our negotiators off the premises. And they tell us that this is the greatest civilization in the world. I have to go on believing, which is I hope and trust true, that there is a difference between China and the Communist Party. Michael for example is Chinese, courteous, kind and intelligent. It’s the party which is the awful problem. I rely on Michael, like Anson, a great deal. They are both very honest with me and tell me when they think I am wrong.
Sunday 21 November
William and Gillian Rees-Mogg came to dinner during a visit to the city; their son Jacob is staying with us while preparing for a job here. We have known him since he was a titch – five going on 45. He’s a kind and amusing young man who has decided to embark on life dressed and behaving as though he was playing the part of an English upper-class twit in an Ealing Studios film. He comes on hikes as though dressed for the City, though he does take his tie off when he goes swimming. He is kind to Alice and helps her with her maths homework.
Monday 22 November
We began work with a discussion on the 16th round. I’m not sure how many people outside could believe the way the Chinese behaved. I wish that everything had been recorded for the TV. One of their more surreal tactics is to decline to explain what something means unless we offer a concession on our side. In other words, openness, accuracy and transparency are themselves regarded as Chinese concessions. This is a long way from the Confucius Analect in which the master says that the first thing a ruler should do is to rectify the names, by which he means that what you say should represent what the word is actually meant to signify. The bad good news is that this can’t go on very much longer. We will need to carry Exco with us in sorting out the best way of concluding this purgatorial episode. I made a speech at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club at lunchtime (the club made famous in a John le Carré novel) about the universality of values. It was an abbreviation of the lecture I gave in Newcastle and dealt with the relationship between human rights, the rule of law, democracy and economic progress.
I had afterwards one of those curious discussions with Lydia, a result I think (as I’ve said before) of the extent to which in the past leading members of the community, and I suppose everyone else, were kept in the dark about so much of what the British government was up to. It led to a rather unhealthy search for conspiracies fed by the most improbable rumours. Lydia has heard – from whom? – that I didn’t go to Newcastle at all. Apparently, I was either being interviewed for the job of president of the European Commission or attending a special secret Cabinet meeting. It is said that I gave my lecture in Newcastle via a television link. When I probed gently on the basis for this, what it amounted to was that the daughter of Philip Crawley, the very nice former editor of the South China Morning Post, who is at Newcastle University, tried to go to my lecture but couldn’t get into the main theatre. She went to the overspill instead, where they had to watch me on television. Of such things are conspiracies constructed.
Tuesday 23 November
C. H. Tung came to see me twice before Exco. He has been talking to Lu Ping, who wants to assure him of Chinese sincerity, claims that the Chinese haven’t changed their position at all, and that he cannot understand why we are making so much fuss about the voting method in Legco elections. At a long Exco meeting there was general agreement that we should go ahead with what is described as a part one bill dealing with the easier issues without too much delay.
Wednesday 24 November
A highlight of the week was a lunch with the American Chamber of Commerce. They are incomparably more sophisticated than most other groups of business leaders. They said just the right things to and about China. Maybe it helps to have the American economy behind you.
Thursday 25 November
During a discussion on trade, Hamish MacLeod gave an interesting readout on the Apec meeting which he has just attended. He said that Jiang Zemin – all those present at these meetings are national leaders or their substitutes – only contributed what he was able to read out, but one rather bizarre result of this was that what he said invariably had very little relationship to what others had just been saying during the discussion.
Friday 26 November
The first day of the 17th round of talks – yes, 17th – went entirely as predicted. The Chinese went back to what they seemed to be saying a couple of rounds ago. There was no give at all on the voting method for Legco elections and a reaffirmation that after 1997 members of district boards and municipal councils will be appointed with the Hong Kong government able to decide the appropriate numbers. Any idea that the Hong Kong government or Legco should have any autonomy in this matter is for the birds. So much for the Joint Declaration. Predictions about an imminent breakdown in talks come thick and fast, partly a result of some judicious leaking on our part. Mike Hanson did this very well. Understandably maybe, the embassy in Beijing and Christopher Hum are trying to find ways in which we can keep things ticking over. Most of us take the view that it’s once again a case of ‘Carpe diem’. If Horace meant by that that we should enjoy ourselves then it’s certainly true that nothing could be much more miserable than allowing Chinese apparatchiks to continue stringing us along with no regard for the best interests of people in Hong Kong.
Sunday 28 November
We had an informal Exco discussion in GH in the evening. Andrew Li and Denis Chang were particularly strong in pointing out that the latest proposal about appointments after 1997 to the local government institutions is a serious erosion of the autonomy of the Hong Kong Special Administration Region government and would be a flat contravention of the JD and the BL. There’s no sign of Exco going soggy and general acceptance that we should go ahead as we agreed with London – splitting our proposals and tabling legislation on the first part of them – and that if we were to go back on this we wouldn’t have any serious position in any future negotiations.
Monday 29 November
I had an investiture this evening. We do these in the ballroom with a police band at the end of a large room with the doors behind open to the main corridor of the building. About halfway through the ceremony I looked over the heads of those who had come to see their relations honoured and caught sight of four or five of Alice’s schoolfriends creeping down the stairs in their Doc Martens from the tower where she has her bedroom and out into the main part of the house to make their escape. It’s fun seeing normal life carrying on while I’m doing these duties. I doubt anything happens like this in Buckingham Palace.
Tuesday 30 November
The formal Exco meeting today was a continuation of Sunday’s discussion. Almost everyone favoured gazetting our proposals this Friday and introducing legislation in Legco next week. My first instincts are on the same side. But the Foreign Secretary wanted to give it another week largely because his timetable over the next few days is impossible. We spent some time afterwards looking at drafts of my statement on all this, the press briefing, the draft of the White Paper and so on.
Wednesday 1 December
Before making a statement on Thursday in Legco, I had discussions with lots of legislators, including Allen Lee. He has just been up to Beijing, where he was given a rough time with officials bending his arm while he was trying to persuade them not to be provocative and stupid. He was annoyed by the way they tried to beat him up. He is fundamentally a decent man who occasionally falls among rotters and the faint of heart. Even when I have disagreed with him I still find him very likeable.
Thursday 2 December
I made my statement to Legco about our intentions on handling the electoral proposals: we will put our original plans to Legco if we cannot reach an acceptable agreement with Beijing. It seemed to go pretty well and the press was fine. The only comment so far from Beijing is that if we introduce any legislation at all on our own, that will end the talks.
Saturday 4 December
There was a sort of mini blast from Beijing this morning. They claimed that they made what is a very good offer and that we have behaved wholly unreasonably, not least by claiming that Legco should have more than an advisory role. So far the polls suggest that opinion is running in our favour by a margin of about two to one. According to our friend from Northern Ireland, Hugh O’Neill, Peter Sutch of Swire’s told him and others at a briefing for businessmen that Hong Kong was being run by ‘a politician from Somerset’. Sutch’s brother is a monk at Downside, but I still don’t think that this was meant as a compliment.
Monday 6 December
Before having a talk to Francis Cornish,fn9 our consul-general and the main focus for British trade efforts in the territory, I had a look at the British trade figures. Francis gets a huge amount of flak for our policies allegedly screwing British industry’s prospects in the China market. The official figures confirm that our exports to China actually fell during the high days of genuflecting to China from 1985 to 1992. Amazingly at the beginning of this period we had a surplus with China, but by the end the surplus was two to one in China’s favour. We will see in due course what is happening while I have been behaving like a Somerset politician. Douglas Hurd’s statement in the House of Commons went very well. Every intervention on our proposals for the way forward has been supportive. The House of Lords has been more negative. I suppose it is best described these days as Westminster’s version of a functional constituency.
Tuesday 7 December
We came back after Exco from a very successful housing visit with big and enthusiastic crowds to learn that the Hang Seng Index has started to rise very steeply. Can this be Chinese mainland buyers putting their cash on the table before the megaphones are turned up in Beijing? A group of pro-Beijing advisers have gone there to – surely not give advice – receive their instructions. Nothing is emerging from the latest JLG discussions. No surprise there.
Thursday 9 December
We woke up and turned on the radio to the pinched tones of Percy Cradock giving his very critical evidence to the foreign affairs committee. I guess he’ll make a bit of a stir at home, but it really doesn’t matter much here since (to put it charitably) he would never win a popularity contest. It’s interesting that we have produced a generation of Sovietologists who thought that it was right to stand up to the Soviet Union alongside a generation of Sinologists who thought we should cave in to China.
Friday 10 December
Lavender and I went off to a ball organized by the Black Watch at Stanley Fort. We always get someone to give us a short tutorial on Highland dancing before events like this, which helps to avoid too much embarrassment. We did rather a good reel together and I got to dance as well with the colonel’s wife, who was perfectly charming and told me without any self-pity a harrowing story about what all parents fear above all else, the loss of a child. Dancing went on far too late, and, as Margaret Thatcher’s parliamentary private secretary, Ian Gow, used to say, wine was taken.
Saturday 11 December
The noises from Beijing have gone up several notches. Both Qian Qichen and Li Peng talked ominously about the damage done to British trade and the economic relationship with China. This was in marked contrast with Ambassador Ma in London, who spent part of this week going around advising British firms to invest in China despite the row.
Tuesday 14 December
Apart from endless talks this week about how to handle China in the New Year, the most interesting discussions have been about pensions and whether we should introduce a comprehensive pay-as-you-go scheme with an iron link between money paid in and pension withdrawn. This is a big issue for Hong Kong. Until now the government’s policy has been to make private schemes mandatory, but this has become more and more nonsensical as the government had to accept contingent liability for any schemes which go wrong. Neither Anson nor I are wholly happy about introducing a new scheme, but we concluded that this is the only way we can meet the community’s demands for better care for the elderly.
Wednesday 15 December
Michael Sze introduced the first-stage bill in Legco today. We had the private office Christmas lunch and Lavender’s brother and his wife – Malcolm and Jenny – arrived for Christmas. My sister, her husband, Pete, and their daughter, Lucy, arrived as well, and Kate and Laura flew in too. Up and up went the Hang Sang Index, maybe a reaction to Laura’s arrival. I had a long meeting with Anson and the officials involved about housing, sewage strategy and land use planning in the New Territories. I am rather an expert on sewage, much to officials’ surprise, a consequence of my ministerial responsibilities a few years ago. I always seemed to be dealing with sewage plumes and outfalls during European meetings. I’ve also had lots of interviews with foreign press and politicians this week; I suppose many of them are having Christmas breaks with better weather than back home. In London the Sun had a go at me. I bet that’s the first time they have ever had an article about Hong Kong. Various old foes are said to have had a hand in this. Do they really want me to return to British politics?
Wednesday 22 December
The weather is gorgeous and the stock market is going through the roof. We had a lovely carol concert yesterday. With the stock market still roaring ahead, we visited the school in Father Lambertoni’s parish for the end-of-term celebrations today. It was great fun and Cardinal Wu brought me a Christmas message from the Pope (how nice of him to think of me!).
Thursday 23 December
Sir S. Y. Chung came to see me. He was a stalwart of past colonial administrations, serving both on Exco and Legco. During the 1980s he tried to play a more assertive role on behalf of Hong Kong public opinion in the discussions on the handover – being tougher with China – but was rebuffed rather rudely by the British government and MPs. Perhaps inevitably, having failed to influence the departing colonial power, he eventually went over to the other side and is now one of Beijing’s advisers. I rather admired him and thought he had been badly used in the past. He didn’t believe much in democracy but felt passionately about Hong Kong. He gave me a long explanation about China’s position. At the end of it I’m not sure that I understood it any better but felt I should keep in touch with him. I wished I’d seen more of him earlier.
Thursday 30 December
I played some tennis with Colin on Christmas Eve. He is wonderful to play with because he just keeps hitting the ball back until eventually I make an error, as of course I always do, and is thoroughly good company. He runs a small business at the moment renting videos mostly to expats. After tennis I did some late Christmas shopping and after a delicious dinner we went to midnight mass at St John’s Anglican cathedral. The house was absolutely full for Christmas Day and the days after. Lots of friends from Hong Kong, relations and our American friend Mike Medavoy with his son Brian. We played lots of games – carpet bowls, Chinese checkers, table tennis, charades and so on – and after Christmas made several expeditions and had an evening at the jazz club.
By this time, Ken Clarke and Gillian were staying with us (on the way to meetings in Seoul), including some officials and a brilliant young private secretary called Jeremy Heywood who looked far too young to be carrying so much responsibility. Ken said that he was superb. As well as taking the Clarkes to the jazz club (about which Ken was very complimentary, partly I guess because Guy Barker was playing), we also went bird spotting in the Mai Po marshes. Ken claimed to have spotted 50 different sorts of bird. We also had a good hike on Lantau, finding all sorts of wild flowers. The Clarkes and the Treasury team left us for South Korea. One game in which we did not involve them was our extremely noisy version of sardines around the house. I won by cheating, taking a bottle of wine out onto the veranda next to my dressing room and enjoying a quiet glass while everyone ran around looking for me.
There was one drama. On Christmas night, the stewards forgot to put the candles out after dinner. Mike woke up early on Boxing Day morning and came to knock on our door at about 7.15 a.m. to say that he could smell smoke. I went down and there was a blaze over the fireplace in the dining room; flames were leaping out of the wall, so it seemed. Anyway, I got lots of water and put it out with a couple of stewards who had woken by that time. Meanwhile (as Lavender noted) the cooks next door in the kitchen were happily making breakfast unaware, but it caused considerable damage in the dining room which we have only just redecorated. It really could have been much nastier. Elspeth has gone home for Christmas. It just shows what happens when she’s not around. I hope she’ll forgive us. I assured the stewards that it wasn’t really their fault. At the end of dinner we had all rushed away from the table to start playing a noisy game in the sitting room, and I think it distracted the staff, who were probably slightly mystified by why and how we were having so much fun. The dog that didn’t bark was of course the fire alarm – a room full of smoke but not a sound from the alarm.
Between Christmas and the New Year there was a steady drumbeat of criticism from Beijing and indeed quite a lot of activity in London, part of it apparently resulting from Lord Young’s efforts to persuade the business and political communities that I was ruining Britain’s prospects in China. The word has it that Tim Bell, the ubiquitous PR man, is helping him out, for example with the Sun.
We had one more direct confrontation in Hong Kong. Before our enjoyable walk on Lantau I had to go first to the inaugural ceremony for the Tian Tan Buddha statue at Po Lin Monastery on the island. It’s a large, indeed colossal, bronze statue of the seated Buddha situated on a hill above the monastery. The monks were lined up on the steps leading to the statue wearing saffron robes and carrying gold and orange parasols. Zhou Nan and I both had to make speeches. He greeted me with a Buddhist gesture rather than a handshake, which the press all took as an insult. In his speech Zhou said that China had always respected people’s religious opinions and beliefs. You couldn’t make it up.
Monday 3 January 1994
There is clearly growing interest in Anson among the senior communist officials. They seem to be particularly concerned about the civil service transition and economic issues. Maybe it indicates a little nervousness on their part about their ability to cope competently with Hong Kong. I hope they will trust her. She would cope very competently with Hong Kong without a lot of political fuss. She comes from such a distinguished patriotic background, never communist but a greatly respected Chinese family.
I have made Rosanna Wong chairman of the housing authority and we had a good discussion with Anson and Hamish about housing policy. The authority needless to say is flush with money and the main question is what to do with it. Rosanna is handling the job with considerable political skill.
Tuesday 4 January
In Exco there seemed to be an emerging consensus for sticking to my original ’92 proposals in the second stage bill that we will put to Legco in the next few months. One of the principal considerations with everyone is of course what will actually get through the legislature. But we don’t have to make our minds up finally until nearer the time. The Preliminary Work Committee met in Beijing. It seems that about one third of the members have foreign passports – a vote of confidence in the future I suppose. There was a poll showing that people don’t regard this group as representing their interests, about two to one against. They are pressing us to send civil servants to brief them in Beijing and accuse us of not being cooperative because we decline to do so. They just want us to give them credibility as what they call a second stove. I’m perfectly happy that the first stove should talk to them in Hong Kong as we would to any other group, but we are not going to cut across existing means of communication such as the JLG and the committee that deals with airport issues.
Thursday 6 January
Among my guests in the first week back was Senator Mitch McConnell and his fairly new wife, Elaine Chao, who was born in Taiwan. At the end of a long conversation, she asked me whether we are not in the same position as the recently defeated Mayor of New York who has been making appointments just before his Republican opponent takes office. I replied politely, noting among other things that we still have three and a half years before we leave. But I don’t give the reply that I should have offered, which is that, if we had been in the position of the incumbent mayor, I doubt whether we would have been defeated. There can’t be many other examples of colonial situations where the local citizens want the colonial power to stay on.
Friday 7 January
Alastair Goodlad and Peter Ricketts are with us to talk about what we should say in a White Paper and in the preparations for the next Cabinet committee meeting. Do we stick to the 1992 plans or amend them, particularly to reduce the number of voters in functional constituencies and to make the election committee less democratic? My own view is that there is not much to be said for abandoning our original proposals and that we should press ahead with the second bill as soon as the first is out of the way. We also have to take account of the fact that drafting a bill based on the putative compromises looks tricky; we can’t really disguise the fact that they would be an obvious second best. A further complicating factor is the timing of the National People’s Congress meeting in March, though I really wonder whether we should bother much about this since its noises about Hong Kong are entirely predictable even now.
Monday 10 January
We had a stimulating meeting and dinner with Rod and Emily MacFarquhar. He is probably the most respected commentator in the academic world on Chinese politics. He thinks that after the death of Deng, there will be a three-way split and perhaps a fight between a group rather on the left around Li Peng, a more centrist crowd behind Jiang Zemin, and a competent and conceivably reformist faction behind Zhu Rongji. He seems to expect the balance to be held between the second and third groups, though whether that will lead to real reform is another matter. The centrist group are pretty useless but they are great political survivors.
I saw Sir S. Y. Chung again. He has fallen hook, line and sinker for the Chinese version of the end of the talks. It’s sad and surprising. He used to argue that we should hold on to Victoria island and bring in water by tanker if necessary. After taking Jack Cunningham on a visit to some of our public housing with Rosanna Wong, I had dinner with the Australian consul-general to discuss my forthcoming visit. The Australian papers are writing up a clash between Paul Keating and Gareth Evans, with the former not wanting to support what we are doing in Hong Kong but the latter doing so vigorously. Keating doesn’t want to do anything which might upset China and its economic and trade relationship with Australia – his view of it anyway.
Wednesday 12 January
Jack Cunningham, the Labour Party’s foreign affairs spokesman, came to lunch with his wife. They are in Hong Kong for a few days. I gave him a full briefing and he is overwhelmingly helpful.
Thursday 13 January
I had to answer questions in Legco after Lavender and I had too good a lunch at the Ritz Carlton with the Duchess of York and David Tang. While sipping my wine carefully, I looked enviously at the two unfinished bottles of Château Pétrus on the table. The Duchess was charming and very much on best behaviour, though I don’t know what bad behaviour would have been like.
Friday 14 January
Hugo Young has been in Hong Kong and has written a thoughtful piece for the Guardian. To put it mildly he doesn’t think that the rich are behaving well, though at the 25th anniversary ball for the Community Chest, held in our ballroom at GH this evening, they coughed up huge amounts of money for good causes – HK$7 million in all – 2 million is raised in an auction for a Ferrari. I think that if we were able to aggregate the value of the jewellery on show we would have raised a lot more than that. When I think back to charity functions, for example for the Conservative Party back home, I recall coronation chicken and auctions conducted by Jeffrey Archer. The main point that Hugo makes is that when he was last in Hong Kong four years ago the rich were all in a panic and criticizing the Governor for being too weak. Now they say the Governor is too tough. This also appears to be Geoffrey Howe’s line. He is starting to give interviews in London criticizing our stance just before I have to give evidence to the Foreign Affairs select committee.
Monday 17 January
At a conference on press freedom organized by the Freedom Forum, I made the usual points but got one or two difficult questions about how far we have come in Hong Kong in reviewing our laws on the press, introducing freedom of information laws and tabling more legislation to protect rights in general. The truth is that we have done a bit but we should probably have gone further, and I hope still can do so. The main reason for caution so far is that there is quite a conservative feeling in the political establishment, both Exco and the administration, as well as back in London, about human rights protections. The argument is that we shouldn’t go out of our way to antagonize the Chinese on too many things. We may need to review this rather more before we leave. As William Shawcross said to me when he was here, and has subsequently written, it is important for us to put lots of panes of glass in the windows in Hong Kong before we leave. It will be vital for people to be able to see when the protections for human rights are being broken.
Tuesday 18 January
Lavender opened a new centre for the charity Against Child Abuse. For reasons deep in the social culture it is very difficult for the government to intervene in tough family situations in order to move and safeguard abused children. Lavender says that most children in institutions in Hong Kong are orphans or have been rejected by their parents for some reason. Very few have been removed from the family home against the wishes of their parents. But it does appear that more cases of abuse are being reported by neighbours. It shows that public awareness of children having rights is starting to increase. This is the sort of area that Lavender used to work in as a barrister.
I talked to the CS and the FS about the draft budget statement. Our latest figures for the predicted fiscal surplus in 1997–98 have almost doubled from HK$78 billion to over 130 billion. This puts our proposals on the airport and container terminal in a slightly new context. We can certainly afford to be more generous in making offers on the airport, and could perhaps embarrass the Chinese by meeting the whole of their demands on funding. We can also look at other ways of funding the container terminal if, that is, we really need more container terminals.
Before taking the night plane back to London, I saw the heads of our overseas offices who give lots of evidence about the French and Germans sucking up to China. The rather shameless way in which the French have just done this makes one wonder whether the word perfidious was attached to the right side of the Channel.
Wednesday 19 January
I arrived home at the flat at the crack of dawn, took Laura on a spending spree (‘don’t tell your mother’), and then went off for a very dreary meeting with Geoffrey Howe. He kept on falling asleep during my attempts to explain what we are doing. His most substantive point was that we have done something fundamentally wrong on functional constituencies, but he doesn’t quite say what it is. I hope that any criticisms will be conveyed in his customary code. He is a decent man who has done great service to the Conservative Party and the country. I saw him having to take far too many brickbats from Margaret. I think the problem today is that he feels that his baby – the Joint Declaration – will grow up into a difficult teenager. Some of those who were involved in negotiating the JD now have some reluctance to accept that English words should mean what they say, even when expressed to a Chinese communist. You cannot live indefinitely with concepts which mean one thing to Parliament in Britain and the citizens of Hong Kong and something completely different in negotiations in Beijing. Is the rule of law, and is democracy, to have one meaning in Hong Kong and another in the capital of China?
I saw Robin McLaren before a number of meetings in the FCO. Even though he doesn’t look awfully well, he is about to return to his post in Beijing. He is rather worried about the upcoming National People’s Congress and what will be said there about Britain and Hong Kong. I think this is another argument for introducing the second stage of our proposals as soon as possible after we have got the first-stage bill through Legco towards the end of February. Delay until after Easter, for example, would give the rats an awful lot of time to gnaw away at everything.
Thursday 20 January
I gave evidence to the select committee, supported by David Ford, a welcome face, and Michael Sze, who are holding things together for us in London. The main points I made in my evidence are fairly familiar. First, it may be true to say that as a politician I probably do take more account of public accessibility and accountability than some others might. Second, I don’t regard Hong Kong as an unnecessary irritant in the Sino-British relationship. There is no element in our relationship with China which is as important as Hong Kong; it’s natural that I should see things through the prism of our last major colonial responsibility. Third, I don’t regard it as acceptable to try to cover up matters of substance with forms of words packed with strong nouns and weak verbs. Finally, I’m not persuaded that, because the Chinese may behave in a thuggish way, we should always give in to them.
Monday 24 January
After the Today programme, I had a meeting in the FCO with Douglas and senior officials. He is completely on my side on the way forward. The 1992 proposals are the ones most likely to win majority support in Legco. We should introduce the bill as soon as the first one is out of the way and show the minimum excitement over the threats that China makes on trade. The subsequent Cabinet committee meeting goes well with everyone very supportive, as they were apparently last week during a full Cabinet discussion. At present, government backing at home is the least of my problems. I had a City lunch with business and banking leaders. Jim Prior was there and in a very gentlemanly way expressed understanding of our position but nervousness about the threats to our trade prospects in such a rapidly growing market. I don’t think that the financial services people there are too worried. China needs them and I don’t think they will suffer from any discrimination against the UK, but Ambassador Ma can still make knees knock elsewhere. The figures of course still tell a rather different story, but the Chinese get away with their often repeated threats to British exports and investment.
Wednesday 26 January
We arrived back in Hong Kong on a glorious clear day. The Chinese have just put out a ridiculous statement on the airport, obviously angered by the vote in favour of new funding for it by 38 to 2 in Legco on the previous Friday. We are going to put them on the spot now by making a new offer which will meet all their financial demands. I guess that will simply encourage them to redefine what the demands are or just to say that those were never their demands at all. Sicilian threats.
Just to lower my spirits, I saw Willie Purves after lunch, who is at his most sanctimoniously thuggish. He told me that many business leaders are talking to him about the difficulties of our present policy and its implications for British trade with China. (No figures or examples given of course.) He is sure that they will want to call on the Prime Minister to change tack. This will be very awkward for John Major at a time when he is under a lot of political pressure. But they will want a U-turn in government policy, otherwise they will be reluctant to support the government in general or the Conservative Party in particular. All this was said with a lot of sad shaking of the head. I can’t wait for him to go back to London. He also told me that he is going to address the Conservative foreign affairs backbench committee on 22 February. Of course, he would like to talk just about banking, but he fears they may want him to talk about China and Hong Kong. Not being a politician, he added, he might find it difficult to give adroit answers. I doubt whether in fact he will have any difficulty at all in saying that I’m completely off my rocker. How much I prefer dealing with old-fashioned pro-Beijing hardliners such as Tsang Yok-singfn10 and Elsie Tu.
We have started to prepare for my visit to Australia. I had several interviews with the Australian press and CNN. Lavender and I went to southern district near Stanley accompanied by Australian journalists. We started in a squatter area which is apparently about to be cleared and were mobbed at a children’s club by lots of excited kids. Lavender insisted on seeing some of the toilets and kitchens, which looked pretty primitive. We went on from there to see some of the massive rebuilding programme with impressive new blocks of flats which have been splendidly landscaped. Big crowds of cheering and excited residents should make a statement on Australian TV about whether people in Hong Kong think we are trying to do the right sort of things.
Thursday 27 January
Two lots of goodbyes. First Lavender and I said farewell to Sgt Lo, who has been looking after the gates and the security at GH for several years, and I also had a last discussion with David Gillmore, who is making a farewell visit before retiring as permanent secretary. He is far from convinced that China’s emergence as a superpower will go smoothly. He thinks that at the moment people are treating China a bit like they treated Germany in the 1930s. He doubts whether many Chinese businessmen understand at present what we are saying about the rule of law. I pointed out that the more cynical among them make it clear when pressed that they don’t really expect the rule of law to survive 1997. They shrug their shoulders, accepting that Hong Kong will then be a Chinese city much like any other.
Charles Powell (who since he sadly left the FCO has been an adviser to Jardine’s among other things) called in for a chat. He doesn’t think the business criticism at home is yet too severe, not least since nobody can actually point to real examples of discriminatory treatment by the Chinese. We also discussed the wretched takeover code again. Martin Dinham is having to spend an inordinate amount of time on it and it’s driving us both mad. If Jardine’s want to try their arm in court so be it. But there’s no way I can simply ride roughshod over what the SFC [Securities and Futures Commission] has argued.
Friday 28 January
Lu Ping tore into us over the airport, making totally fabricated claims that we had agreed with Beijing levels of borrowing for the airport and railway which we are now exceeding. Apparently even Percy Cradock says this isn’t true. Wow! We have no idea what game the Chinese are playing. It may be they are getting nervous that we will make an offer which they would have difficulty refusing. On the other hand, they may just want any offer we put on the table, and which they accept, to look like a Chinese victory rather than a triumph of common sense. Anyway, we are putting the final touches to a new offer, which, in view of their allegations about secret deals, we will make public before the Chinese New Year.
Tuesday 1 February
Before heading off to Australia, we clarified the details of our airport funding plans which will be passed to Chinese officials before they are published, and also the arrangements we need to make for Legco debates on our first stage political proposals at the end of the month and for the subsequent White Paper and the gazetting of our second stage bill. I continued to urge that the review of legislation on press freedom produces sustainable and defensible answers. Among the several more interviews that I do with business leaders, the one with the geologist, Sir John Jenkins, who is now chairman of Shell, took the first prize for ghastliness. (I wasn’t in the best of spirits, because I had just been speaking for 2½ hours.) He was keen to tell me that everyone in London wants my guts for garters, that Ambassador Ma was an excellent fellow and had made no threats to British interests, and that Hong Kong’s success at the moment was a sign that everybody was happily waiting for 1997 and Britain’s departure. I learned afterwards that Shell was trying to start a US$4 billion refinery and petrochemical project in China alongside PowerGen who would be required to pick up responsibility for most of the financial exposure. I could not help wondering how what I had heard would square with the commitments made by Shell in their annual reports to confront the world’s social concerns.
Saturday 5 – Tuesday 22 February
We arrived in Australia on the 5th, had a few days holiday north of Sydney at a small resort, and then embarked on a round of Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra. I made speeches and had multiple meetings in each place. Two in Sydney were particularly interesting. I met the distinguished Australian jurist, Justice Michael Kirby, who has been very active internationally in support of human rights. He follows closely what is happening in Hong Kong. Before my trip, there had been much speculation about whether Paul Keating would see me and how the Australian government would balance the difference between the Prime Minister’s and Foreign Minister’s views on China. In the event, and I think slightly to his surprise, I got on rather well with Keating when we met at his official Sydney residence looking out across the harbour. I noted at the outset that we were both the offspring of Irish immigrants. I don’t think he was expecting this. He had obviously anticipated meeting what Gareth subsequently described to me in his words as ‘a Tory weasel’ and a be-feathered colonial Governor. He was highly intelligent, listened more than I’d expected to what I had to say and gave me a lot more time than the press had been led to expect. Everyone says that he has a chip on the shoulder of pretty substantial proportions being both clever yet not formally educated. He clearly resents the fact that some, because of other advantages, get to the top in what is called a meritocracy without having much discernible merit at all. When I met Gareth in Canberra he told me that he had teased the Prime Minister about the fact that we seemed to have got on so well.
Everywhere we went the boat was pushed out. We saw state governors and stayed with the Governor in Melbourne in his magnificent mansion. In Canberra we had good discussions with Gareth and his impressive foreign ministry officials. I enjoyed an engagement with the Australian Asia Institute. In remarks after my speech, one of Australia’s leading sinologists who had been ambassador in Beijing noted the tendency of the old school of diplomacy to accept negotiations with China entirely on that country’s terms. He said that I was doing the rest of Asia a favour by focusing attention on China’s treatment of Hong Kong since this would be a paradigm of China’s treatment of other countries in the region. Throughout our visit I had loads of telegrams from London and Hong Kong about the publication of our White Paper and the other arrangements concerning the next phase of our political agenda. Everything seemed to be going smoothly.
We both loved Australia. But Lavender noticed that state governors are treated differently here. When we paid a call on the Governor of New South Wales, the butler walked out backwards after serving us tea, bowing as he went, and the Governor was served his tea and biscuits first before the guests. Lavender’s conclusion was that Australia wasn’t ready quite yet to become a republic. I’m glad that nobody has to walk backwards when leaving the presence of the Governor of Hong Kong.
Wednesday 23 February
The bill that Legco considered today dealt with what should have been – at least if one wasn’t dealing with Beijing – the less contentious part of our plans. In the geographically-based constituencies in Legco and the municipal councils and district boards, elections would be on the basis of a single seat, single vote system. Appointments to the local government bodies would be abolished, and the voting age would be reduced to 18. We would allow Hong Kong residents who were also members of the Chinese People’s Congress to stand for elections in Hong Kong. The beginning of debate had to wait for the rejection of an attempt by Elsie Tu, giving a vitriolic speech, to defer discussion. We won this vote by 36 to 23, and then went on to win the second reading vote by 48 to 2. In the light of her performance, I have decided to rename her, Elsie Vous.
Thursday 24 February
We published the White Paper, following which I made clear at one of my regular question and answer sessions in Legco that in early March we would proceed to legislate on my 1992 proposals. The questions homed in on whether or not I would block any bill which gave Hong Kong more democracy than I had proposed, and whether I was prepared to contemplate any amendments to the legislation. I tried to tread the line between on the one hand saying that we wanted to get the bill through Legco and on the other hand seeming inflexible in responding to majority feeling in the council. Needless to say, all this increased Martin Lee’s anxieties that we were going to conspire with some members in the centre of opinion in Legco to water the bill down. I suppose he is entitled to want to have it all ways. He intends to vote against the bill to try to make it more democratic while at the same time we are supposed to defend it at every stage. I hope on reflection he will give support. The White Paper itself got a bit of a mauling at a press conference which Bob Peirce and Peter Lai rather heroically give. It isn’t their fault. We are in the usual position. If we had offered the London A-Z, the press would have asked for the telephone directory as well. The journalists want to know about every splutter and hiccough in the talks.
Friday 25 February
The Chinese reaction is fairly muted by their standards. It’s as though they don’t think there’s much point any more in going through the motions of an issue which has been resolved on our side. It may have helped that the government in London has made clear that the White Paper and the decision about further legislation have the complete backing of the Cabinet. Nevertheless, I’m sure that we will have further blasts down the line. In Beijing they brought out their answer to our White Paper which is published too late in the evening to get much coverage and, perhaps above all, serves to underline that when it comes to understandings of the JD and of Hong Kong’s promised autonomy London and Beijing are streets apart. We were also helped by an excellent statement that Leon Brittan (the European Union’s Trade Commissioner) made in Beijing giving the Chinese trade minister a dressing down about discrimination on trade and investment issues. He put the point very strongly that in the European Union, discrimination against one member would be regarded as discrimination against them all. He said that he has been given assurances ‘at the highest level’ that there won’t be any discrimination. We shall see whether this amounts to very much, but at least it’s on the record. Christopher Hum said there appears to be no sign of discrimination against British trade in either Shanghai or Guangzhou despite all the noise. He quoted a British official in Shanghai saying that he had heard a conversation between Shanghai municipal bureaucrats saying that they should keep trade and politics separate and that all the stuff about British exports was Beijing rhetoric. Whether it will actually turn out like this, we shall in due course see. Lavender and I went with Alice and Martin and Janny Dinham to a Bob Dylan concert. Alice seemed to enjoy this treat for the oldies.
Tuesday 1 March
We had a quiet Exco meeting to start the month. I suggested that the best line to take after the Legco success, the publication of the White Paper and the announcement about the next stage of legislation, is to draw a line under the whole issue, and move on to areas where we should be able to cooperate with Beijing. I repeated all this to the press after the meeting. I reckon it is probably the mood of the community.
Thursday 3 March
We had the budget, which is another success for Hong Kong’s economic management. Taxes were cut for individuals and corporations, expenditure was increased in priority areas, and we announced bigger reserves every year from now through to 1997. Time once more to call an election? It would certainly be a reasonable conclusion to reach after Lavender and I went on another district visit to Tai Po. There were big enthusiastic crowds. We visited a Taoist temple and the cleanest factory I have ever set foot in.
We heard that Rupert Murdoch is going to drop the BBC from Star, the satellite channel which he has bought and which he wants to use as a jumping-off point into China. My own suspicion is that however much he grovels in Beijing, the Communist Party is never going to allow a foreigner to control much of the media in their own country. They leave that sort of thing to us in Britain.
Bob Peirce has been in Vancouver with Peter Ricketts and Peter Lai talking to their opposite numbers from Canada, Australia, the US, Japan and New Zealand. It’s clear that these countries, while hoping for the best in Hong Kong, are making plans in case the worst materializes. For example, they’re considering how (or if) they would cope with a lot of emigration from Hong Kong before and after 1997. I am told that we are having trouble at one of the camps for Vietnamese immigrants. The numbers have now fallen to 26,000 but we are starting to hit difficulties in shifting the hard core and persuading them to return to Vietnam.
Friday 4 March
The news out of China is that the leadership has been vigorously locking up dissidents, including Wei Jinsheng. This may be related to what Robin Munro of Asia Watch tells Edward, namely that there is at present a lot of social and industrial unrest in China, which is worrying the authorities. Or maybe it is simply that they are trying to shut critics up before the next meeting of the National People’s Congress. For this to be happening just before the visit to Beijing by Warren Christopher [the US Secretary of State] is clearly far from ideal and it will complicate the resolution of MFN.
On the home front the Jardine’s issue continues to bubble away: the Securities and Futures Commission [SFC] is resolute on the importance of making it clear that if you’re largely based in Hong Kong, you can’t avoid the provisions of the takeover code. The Hang Seng Index has been falling. This does not seem to be related to any local politics; but part of a wider fall in equities and bond markets. That doesn’t mean that we won’t be blamed for it. The worst news is that we are to lose Peter Ricketts. He is off to another posting in Paris. We will miss him hugely. He has protected our backs in London and acted as a perfect conduit with the Foreign Secretary and other senior members of the government and of the FCO. I admire him and hope that he can remain a friend whom I see from time to time.
Sunday 6 March
The Princess Royal is here once again and we also had a visit from the new head of Asian affairs in the FCO, David Wright. I filled him in on where I think we are – the United Front attacking us, Martin Lee and the Democrats suspecting that we are about to abandon them, Beijing firing occasional broadsides, and the community, on the whole, seeming to support us and give us the benefit of the doubt. Despite the row with China, I reckon that we can govern Hong Kong perfectly adequately until 1997 and lock in as many of its liberties as possible. But ultimately, after the handover, much will depend on whether the Chinese Communist Party can actually be trusted to honour ‘one country, two systems’. There may be worries on the Sino-British trade side, but the statistics just don’t bear out the fears which are sedulously encouraged by Beijing for political purposes. Robin McLaren is also with us for medical reasons. His back continues to give him a lot of pain. He gives us all a pretty deadpan assessment of what is happening in Beijing. He must be as well informed as anyone but no one really knows exactly what is happening behind the walls of the Zhongnanhai.
Monday 7 March
This is going to be the sort of week in which I’m given huge numbers of assessments of what’s happening in China from businessmen, diplomats, academic experts and politicians and will finish discussions conceivably better informed but not much wiser. Something which I don’t normally record here is that some days I must spend literally four or five hours talking. There is hardly an American politician, British politician, business leader, European politician – this week’s visitors include a former Italian Foreign Minister, lobbyist, fixer and so on – who doesn’t get in to see me. I could make a celebrity list of all those who appear to be interested in the fate of the last (or pretty well the last) outpost of the British Empire. I think I do have to see them all, and of course they get the same sort of messages. Mike Hanson, my excellent and preternaturally gloomy press chief, sits in on quite a few meetings and I watch him glaze over as he hears the same messages repeated over and again. ‘Hong Kong is probably the only example in the world of a society which is liberal but not wholly democratic. Its route to full democracy has been curtailed by the imminence of the handover to China. It is and has been an extraordinary example of the successful relationship between economic and political freedom. The Chinese communists have promised to allow that to continue after 1997, a pledge which is contained in the Joint Declaration. We have no choice but to try to trust them and assume that they will be as good as their word. For Hong Kong to do well is good for China; and the reverse is true. But we have to give Hong Kong and its way of life the best chance of continuing as a free city after the handover. Most of the people who live here in Hong Kong are themselves refugees from events in mainland China. They know the difference between communism and freedom. I am determined to give them as much of a chance as possible of deciding how strongly to build the defences of Hong Kong’s sense of its own citizenship. I don’t believe that there is really a cost to the British economy in doing this. There are threats but no statistics.’ And on, and on, and on. This doesn’t mean that I don’t believe it, but I do get a bit bored saying it and certainly feel sorry for Mike. The visitors will continue to pour in and I think I have an obligation to see as many as possible.
There’s a story in the papers about Jardine’s delisting from Hong Kong. From their point of view the story doesn’t look good. Charles Powell came up from Malaysia incandescent with rage. Poor Martin had to take an earful. The truth is that Jardine’s have brought this down on their own heads. Martin discovered that the initial leak came from Jardine’s themselves, and when it was checked out by the newspapers the SFC leaked back rather more effectively. What’s more, there’s nobody in the market who has much sympathy with Jardine’s. But it will probably confirm Henry Keswick’s view that we are not going to provide a proper payback for their initial support for me over the first year or 18 months. David Wilson was regularly rubbished by this great figure of British imperial might. And I assume that it’s my turn next, not least since Keswick apparently already regards me as a socialist.
Tuesday 8 March
Lavender and Edward have written an excellent speech for her to deliver on International Women’s Day to an audience of almost 400 business and professional women. She had to be careful to skirt around one or two live political issues like whether we should join the international convention which seeks to eliminate all forms of discrimination against women, and whether we should also create a women’s commission. But she still managed to say a lot of interesting and important things about equal opportunity and pay, about discrimination on promotion and about sexual harassment. The subjects are much the same here as elsewhere around the world and as ever men have dragged their feet. Lavender told me that there was one man in the audience. I suppose it should have been me.
The changing of the FCO guard continues here. Hugh Davies took over some time ago from Tony Galsworthy. He is not a moths man but I don’t regard that as a terrible defect. He knows a lot about China, has a lovely wife and is polite, funny, charming and competent. His skills as a tolerant negotiator and indeed as a charitable human being are going to be tested by his chairmanship of our side of the JLG. It continues to be a horribly demanding job, which he and his team do with great intelligence and competence. Indeed one of Hugh’s great strengths is the way he manages those who work for him sensitively. He has an excellent team with a very clever deputy, Alan Paul. They do much of the grinding ground work that will make the handover possible, even given the fairly dire quality of those they have to deal with. It’s difficult for an outsider to know whether the Chinese officials in the JLG cannot help how they behave because their instructions are to be obstructive, or whether they are appointed because they fit naturally into these roles.
Wednesday 9 March
Peter Ricketts is to be followed by Sherard Cowper-Coles. I would not say that his appointment has been greeted with universal enthusiasm by his FCO colleagues; they are able to contain their joy within polite bounds. He is said to be clever. When I met him today, he was clearly keen to make the best sort of impression. Why should I disagree with those who have slightly reluctantly suggested the appointment? They presumably know what they are doing, though they say that I can decline.
On the same day, I had dinner with the Federation of Hong Kong Industries. I noted some statistics in my off-the-cuff remarks after dinner. Twenty years ago the per capita GDP in Hong Kong was about US$1800, the Hang Seng Index stood at 400 and there were about 5000 students. Today, the respective figures are US$18,000, the Hang Seng now stands at just over 10,000 and there are 35,000 students in tertiary education.
Thursday 10 March
I went to breakfast with Vincent Cheng,fn11 a decent man, and some of his fellow independent members of Legco. They mostly supported us on the first bill and are now looking around to see what amendments they can make for the next piece of legislation on the elections. They are very keen to get some sort of steer from us suggesting that we would be happy to see the ’92 bill turned into an outcome closer to the sort of compromises we were prepared to make during the negotiations. But we have to play an absolutely straight bat. One of the members present, Eric Lee, asked us to provide the possible ’93 compromise proposals in legislative form. But if we give any impression at all that we are not rock solid on the ’92 plans, Martin Lee and the real liberals in Legco will argue that we have been involved in a cynical manoeuvre, and there would be some truth in that. It’s going to be a tricky summer. My reckoning is that there is a 50–50 chance of us getting the ’92 bill through as it is. If we don’t achieve this we will probably get some of the ’93 proposals instead. That wouldn’t be a bad outcome for Hong Kong but not a particularly good one for me and the government. But we have to make sure our hands are absolutely clean as the process develops.
I then saw Anson Chan and Bob Peirce about the Independent Commission Against Corruption. We are checking out some allegations made by the ICAC in intelligence reports about corruption and the discipline services. We can’t quite make the reports stand up but we have to be on our guard as we run up to 1997. The last thing we can afford is an insidious growth in corrupt behaviour.
The Princess Royal left in the evening. She always works very hard when she is here. Royal visits continue apace. They take quite a lot of time and effort. But when the visitor works hard, it makes it all worthwhile.
Friday 11 March
Li Peng made his big speech yesterday at the beginning of the National People’s Congress, called here the mother-in-law of parliaments. He was remarkably moderate about Hong Kong, certainly more moderate than expected, though his remarks were enlivened by a marvellous Freudian slip in which he initially blamed the Chinese side for the breakdown in talks before hurriedly correcting himself. Lord MacLehose has given rather a tiresome interview to the South China Morning Post rotting me off. George Walden did much the same the other day in a British paper. I used to be a colleague of his in government, in the same department. I wonder what they think the point of these contributions may be. Exactly whom do they think they are helping?
We had a rather difficult meeting with officials to discuss private members’ bills. Several senior officials simply want us to announce that we won’t allow private members’ legislation to proceed if it has financial implications. This would put us in a very difficult position politically when, for example, Christine Loh introduces proposed legislation on freedom of information and when Anna Wu introduces her own bills on anti-discrimination and the appointment of a human rights commission. We have to try and get involved in a dialogue with Christine and Anna, both independent-minded and moderate appointed members of Legco, and make at least some commitment to taking over parts of their bills. It won’t be easy. Anson and Hamish are very alive to the full political horrors of slapping down these private members’ bills and not allowing them to be discussed. It’s all made more difficult by the fact that the constitutional arrangements in Hong Kong are pretty ridiculous. While the government may be executive led, there is no governing party and the executive doesn’t have the sort of fallback powers which, for example, an American president would have. The constitution has certainly not been designed by a politician used to political activity. But, of course, we can’t start rewriting it now.
Sunday 13 March
We had a cheerful day playing golf and tennis in Macau against the Governor and his wife. Just to make sure that I won, I asked Colin Grant to play with me. Mind, the Macau Governor’s political adviser from the Portuguese Foreign Ministry was the University champion in Portugal so we needed to confront fire with fire. The Triad problem in Macau is difficult; it’s one of the main reasons why I am resolutely opposed to allowing the building of any casinos in Hong Kong. Much better to let the Hong Kong Jockey Club take the money from betting on horses and spend it on good works.
Wednesday 16 March
We are now having what I hope will be a fairly quiet week in Hong Kong, though it did begin with a meeting with Henry Keswick and Charles Powell on the 14th. On the delisting issue and the takeover code they seemed to be trying to prove that the Hong Kong Bank has the same problems as them. This is a point which the Hong Kong Bank and the Bank of England vigorously resist.
Monday 21 March
After another good district visit to Wong Tai Sin, I was asked about remarks that Qian Qichen made at the end of the NPC [National People’s Congress] about Hong Kong. He seemed to have suggested that while there can’t be any cooperation on politics, we would all have to cooperate on other things in the interests of the territory. If there is an agreement to disagree in the offing that seems to me no bad thing. After spending 10 days with us, and even going to the races in our box at Happy Valley, Sherard seemed to think that we are doing the right thing though he is gloomy about the prospects for Hong Kong after the handover. After I talked to the Premier of Tasmania, he said to me, ‘There’s one thing that you haven’t said.’ ‘What’s that?’ I asked. ‘What you are doing is right.’
Tuesday 22 March
London is suggesting that Alastair Goodlad should go to Beijing at Whitsun to ‘thicken up’ our relationship. The argument appears to be that since the Chinese haven’t kneecapped us, we should go and visit them to see if they still like us. In Hong Kong we all think this is barmy. There is a terrible tendency on the part of the Foreign Office to keep on wanting to take the cake out of the oven to see if it is cooked. We think there is very little upside in a visit and a lot of potential downside. Among other things it would concentrate Chinese attention on Hong Kong, and they could hardly admit they were prepared to go on doing business. This is a situation in which what we should want is a general drift in the right direction. The Chinese are very unlikely to be explicit about this. Obviously, Alastair and the FCO aren’t happy that we are so hostile. I guess we might have to give in but a visit at about the same time as our second bill on the elections is going through Legco will undoubtedly increase conspiracy theories there about what we are doing – especially if the bill is amended in any way.
I’m spending quite a lot of time preparing speeches for the period between Easter and Whitsun and receiving lots of messages that the Chinese want to put the political row on one side and carry on with other business, provided that we don’t get up to any of our ‘tricks’. The visit to Beijing by Warren Christopher has clearly not gone very well and may make MFN negotiations rather more difficult. We have continued to have difficult discussions about Jardine’s, including at Exco today (someone suggested that the company has folk memories of what happened in Shanghai in the 1940s), but overall it’s interesting that there appears to be a more normal political discourse in all the meetings I attend.
Is there anything much that we can do about soaring property prices? Both Anson and Hamish warn that the only thing worse than prices going up would be a collapse in prices and in the market. If you try to prick the bubble you may fetch up pricking it far too much. If we had longer to deal with the issue than the period between now and the handover we might be able to approach this more resolutely. I don’t want to see a stock market collapse in the next year or two. When I was asked by a visiting British MP, Terry Dicks (who, given his generally right-wing views, is surprisingly supportive of John Major), what worried me most about the next three years, I thought of referring to the stock market and property, but instead I said – which would indeed be a bigger, a far bigger, problem – ‘Another Tiananmen Square massacre.’
While Michael Sze, in his relatively new job as Secretary of the Civil Service, is pressing ahead in dealing with some of the complicated issues involved in localization, we are aware of a characteristically heavy-handed effort by the NCNA to make lots of contacts with civil servants. After a dinner or a meeting, they are handing out three documents – the collected works of Deng Xiaoping on Hong Kong, a copy of the Basic Law and a copy of an essay from one of the newspapers in Hong Kong about how Britain always leaves its colonies in a frightful mess in order to extend British influence. They then offer a private telephone number in case the civil servants want to ‘come over’. The results are predictably dire, with civil servants increasingly worried about having to do business with this lot of gangsters.
Thursday 24 March
The Jardine’s row goes on and on with more attention in the press, which is particularly bad for the firm. They really haven’t handled this at all well even though I bet they have had very expensive PR advice. I doubt whether Charles Powell has been allowed to steer this issue. We are also deeply embroiled in discussions about the private members’ bills especially Anna Wu’s on the human rights commission and anti-discrimination legislation. Lavender made another visit to a Vietnamese migrant detention centre, this time the one at Whitehead, where there have been strikes and demonstrations in protest against the UNHCR-forced returns to Vietnam. She has taken a particular interest in the position of the children; increasingly she also wonders how families can think it’s worth continuing to live in these camps, given their conditions, when the position in Vietnam of the returnees seems to be getting so much better.
Friday 25 March
Jane Fonda and Ted Turner came to breakfast. Jane is much more interesting and articulate than her partner, though I suppose he must be a very good businessman. He expressed views on human rights in China (very different from his wife’s) which suggest that he is hoping for the chance of getting his television channel accepted there. I think that is very unlikely. The corpse of this ambition will doubtless be found on a battlefield which contains so many other similar corpses.
And then it was the rugby sevens! Bowen Leung had to do some fancy footwork in advance to prevent a catastrophe because the liquor licensing board failed until the last moment to give the stadium a licence, and the temporary licence allowed by the police prescribed an amount which would clearly be regarded as Lenten teetotalism by most of the 40,000 fans. Bowen got people to see sense. We gave a reception for the organizers of the sevens and some of the players, for which happily no liquor licence was required. David Cameron, who is a friend of Edward Llewellyn and worked in the Conservative Research Department before becoming a special adviser in the Treasury and the Home Office, is also in Hong Kong, presumably for the sevens. He has charm and intelligence and Edward is not the only one who told me he is on a fast upward trajectory in politics. He seemed likeable and was easier to get on with than the principal guest at the sevens, the King of Tonga. To describe him as vast is an entirely insufficient adjective. The organizers found a seat which was sufficiently large to accommodate him wrapped in his enormous raincoat. He is perfectly amiable with a sweet smile but is no great talker. The chairman of the Hong Kong RFU struggled for half an hour but secured no response until eventually the king turned to him and said, ‘Did you know there are twelve nations here that have red, white and blue in their flags?’
Saturday 26 March
Simon Holberton of the FT is just about the first journalist who is starting to write stories suggesting that we have come through the worst in Hong Kong and that life is returning to something which can pass as normal.
The French are being bloody about the fact that Hong Kong has observer status at the OECD. They have been trying to make us change Hamish MacLeod’s alterations in his budget statement to excise duties which increase the price of expensive French wines even while they lower the price of cheaper wines from elsewhere. The French are claiming that this is in some way against the spirit of the GATT [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade]. It’s no such thing but it just happens to be unpopular with France, whose officials regularly make it more difficult for me to remain a Francophile. This is a reminder of how little support we have got from the European Union. All our support comes from Australia, Canada, America, Japan and New Zealand. The European Union, except for Leon Brittan, has done damn all. French ministers are pretty well the only ones from anywhere who come through Hong Kong on the way into China while studiously avoiding seeing me or any other members of the government. They must think we don’t notice. Europe’s aspirations to have a world view and reputation based on values is regularly shredded by corporate sales departments.
Tuesday 29 March
At Exco we discussed Europe and also the beginning of discussions with Beijing on the public order legislation. This has previously been subject to my least favourite doctrine. Every time we have been about to start discussions on the subject there have been a number of people around who have argued that the time is not quite appropriate. We have to do it sometime and this seems as good a time as any. Gareth Evans passed through Hong Kong today on his way into China. We can depend on him to speak up for us. After a quick chat with him I took the night plane back to Dublin.
Thursday 31 March
I had a meeting yesterday with the Taoiseach, Albert Reynolds. There was some confusion back in Hong Kong about this meeting before I set out. I kept on looking at drafts of my programme and, despite the invitations from the Irish government, could see no reference to it; one of my local private secretaries asked Martin eventually why the Governor was so insistent on going to a teashop. Reynolds is a genial fellow but I guess he has to carry a club behind his back. Then I went on to give the lecture organized by Tony O’Reilly and the Independent group of newspapers. I was introduced by my old friend Maurice Hayes, who was one of my permanent secretaries when I was a junior minister in Northern Ireland, and the lecture seemed to go well. It was on freedom of the press. Lavender noted that despite everything I seem to be in favour of it. Beforehand, there was a reception in the library at Trinity College and then after the lecture a dinner in the panelled room of the Bank of Ireland where the Irish House of Lords used to meet. On either side of the narrow room there were big tapestries featuring King Billy, which led Tony O’Reilly to describe it rather happily as ‘the ravine of the ascendancy’. We slept last night at Castlemartin, Tony O’Reilly’s splendid house full of great Irish paintings, several by Jack Butler Yeats, brother of the poet.
Friday 1–Saturday 9 April
Back in London, Douglas told me the whole story of a humiliating climbdown over the voting method in the European Council (it seemed to be about qualified majority voting) and that it had been the worst week in his political career. The government had been all over the place and nobody had behaved particularly well. I made what will probably not be very helpful remarks telling everybody to get a grip and behave properly. It’s much easier to say that when you’ve just flown in from Hong Kong. I explained to John once again why I can’t leave Hong Kong until I’ve completed the job. Anyway, it’s all a shambles and the government is making a very good fist of tearing itself apart. I had dinner with Carl Bildt, the Prime Minister of Sweden, who is an old friend from way before we both got into Parliament. He has obviously been extremely upset by our balls-up over qualified majority voting in Europe and finds it inexplicable that we got into this scrape.
While I had some disagreeable meetings with businessmen and fund managers (a group who have just cheered Ambassador Ma when he addressed them on China’s policy on Hong Kong), I sense that the political support in London remains pretty solid. The rumour is that the Select Committee report on Hong Kong, which will be out soon, will be supportive.
Lavender, Alice and I had a great time with Kate and Laura, celebrating Kate’s 21st birthday with some of her friends. We have sold our small cottage outside Bath and did a little desultory house-hunting in London thinking about our return in due course. We spent Easter with Robert and Hannah Cranborne in Dorset again and went to see the Dimblebys just outside Bath. Returning to Hong Kong was not too difficult – except for leaving the two girls. But I have been told that I have to get more fit and take more exercise than the regular games of tennis.