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that the rights of the British people
have to be protected but I think if
they have to be protected in terms of
not keeping Hong Kong in perpetuity, we also ought to look at that in the
same logic when you apply to the Falkland
Islands and I think the political
imperatives of both those problems
are going to have to come to rest with
the British government. Now how do we
get over this problem? I absolutely
agree with what Bernard Levin has said,
we have certain rights and duties towards
those people who are British protected
within the Hong Kong territories and we must I think do everything that we can
within the international arena to
ensure that those rights are carried
through and properly discharged.
Now the next question is then, how do
we deal with the Hong Kong problem? Well the one thing that is absolutely
certain is that we don't deal with it
in the way that the Prime Minister has
currently dealt with it. This is not
a situation in which megaphone diplomacy of the sort that we saw, what was it, a
month ago, when she was making I think
very dangerous statements on Hong Kong
in a public arena, indeed making two
different statements, one in China and
one in Hong Kong as though they never
spoke to each other. This is a matter
of great delicacy, it is a matter in which I think people standing up and waving the Union Jack is just a very inappropriate mechanism for solving that