Mr Stewart o.r.
CONFIDENTIAL
6
"Drafteller to the Thearty | B.gfuepland
attacked.
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1411.
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HONG KONG PLANNING PAPER
1.
Thank you for your minute on Mr Scholar's letter of
23 December.
2.
You rightly recall that we have already discussed briefly whether the Treasury (and possibly the Bank of England) should not see either the Planning Paper on Hong Kong, or passages relevant to the Treasury's and the Bank's concersn. We left it that you would sleep on my sugges- tion that there might be advantage in getting these cards on the table, not least because this would prevent
Mr Haddon-Cave giving his interlocutors outside the Foreign Office a bowdlerised or positively misleading version of what the paper said.
3. I agree that the tone of Mr Scholar's letter is not
such as to win friends in the FCO. But I think it perhaps rests with you as guardian of the sacred scrolls to decide how we should deal with the question of substance which the Treasury have now raised.
6 January, 1977
Ally hand
(H J H Maud)
Financial Relations Department
CONFIDENTIAL