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2.
that Hong Kong might be losting a few friends over this, at a time when it needs all the international support it can get.
4. The Hong Kong Government throughout has stressed that it arrested the Venezuelan Consul-General with the full agreement of the authorities in London. I appreciate that this was a delicate matter, but it would have been helpful to have been party to the exchanges, or at least to the advice and comments coming out of the FCO and Caracas, both because of my own membership of the consular corps and the resulting need to meet frequent questions from colleagues, and also because on the information side here we inevitably had to answer a number of questions about it. You may recall my telno 507 of 5 December 1989 in which I asked if I could be plugged into more of the exchanges on politically related matters. I never received a reply. I appreciate all the difficulties and sensitivities, probably by now better than anyone, but it would help enormously to have repeated to us more telegrams on the wider issues of the day. It is strange, and it debases my position here, when not only my own government but my own department, as in this case, are involved in a policy which we have to defend, and which my colleagues and contacts want to discuss with me, and about which we know less than almost anyone. (An answer no doubt could be that we should try to keep ourselves better informed here; never is that easy, and in this case it met with the answer that it was an ICAC matter on which no one was free to comment).
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CONFIDENTIAL