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НКК 6/548/3
Во лик
Meur 13/1
10 January 1969
وه
It is time I began to act on the New Year Resolution I mentioned to you in my letter of
10 December 1968, by beginning the promised series of 1969 News Letters. Whether or not we maintain the frequency of fortnightly intervals between such letters is a point we shall need to reconsider in the light of experience, but I shall do my best to ensure that the intervals are certainly no less.
2. As good a starting point as any might be the matter of the Croce Harbour Tunnel over which, from the telegrams, you have obviously been very active during the last 3 or 4 weeks. I was glad to see that you had taken the initiative of discussing this question with the Governor, and you will of course be aware that as a result he sent us a telegram urging that the matter should be re-considered in the light, not only of our commercial interest, but also of the political consequences which might follow if the contract were awarded to the French firm, and public opinion drew the conclusion that a French credit institution had more confidence in the future of Hong Kong than ECGD. It will be no surprise to you that other parties (e.g. Montagu) had been urging not only the FCO, but the Board of Trade to do the same, and the upshot was that yesterday Lord Shepherd sent Lord Brown a letter, of which I enclose a copy for your personal and confidential information. You might think that I should have waited until I was in a position to tell you the outcome of all this, which we shall presumably know before long in view of the urgency of the matter. But the fact is that we do not yet know what the outcome will be.
3. I do not need to say that it would be most undesirable if Colonel Clague, for example, were to leam any more than he is able to guess about the state of play.
If you needed to say something to him, I would see no harm in his being told that the whole question was under urgent Consideration, but that is all. In spite of what we say in the letter about lingering doubts that political risks must have played some part in the ECGD assessment of the guarantees necessary to cover the commercial risk, this is of course the one thing to which we must never at any time, now or in the future, plead guilty. Public opinion may draw what conclusions it likes, and from the Governor's telegram they have obviously done so, but we must never be heard to admit that they are anywhere near the truth.
/I was