PERSONAL & RESTRICTED
Foreign & Commonwealth
Office
14 April 1992
Hamish Macleod Esq, CBE JP
Financial Secretary
Government Secretariat
Central Government Offices Lower Albert Road
HONG KONG
Dear Hamish.
London SWIA 2AH
Mars 101/2
1. I should have written before now to thank you very much indeed for making so much time available to Simon Broadbent, Nigel Cox and me during our visit to Hong Kong ten days ago. I am enormously grateful, particularly when I know how extraordinarily busy you were that week.
2. As I have told the Governor, we found the visit tremendously useful. We were able to think through a lot of issues where inevitably on the other side of the world we had developed either slight confusions or bright ideas which needed to be tested against the reality of Hong Kong. Everybody we saw was very warm and positive and in tremendously good spirits, I thought. As I said to you, I do realise that from time to time our comments from London may seem to you to cross the bounds of acceptability, but our approach is only designed to be supportive and constructive, and a help in the process of pointing out the pitfalls along the way.
Far be it for me to make judgements, but it seems to me that you have settled in tremendously well to your new responsibilities and, to use Francis Maude's memorable phrase (about some McLaren exploit, I think), "to be playing a blinder". Long may it last.
3. Thank you too for providing tickets for Simon and me to see the rugby football. It proved to be a marvellously exciting and remarkably wet afternoon in the course of which, sitting in the Cathay box, I was able to do quite a lot of work with Willy Purves, Robin McLaren, Richard Allen, David Gledhill and a host of others. Naturally everybody here thinks we only went to Hong Kong for the rugby, but the size of our notebooks and the length of our reports belies that.
4. Incidentally, I should have written to you at the beginning of the year to congratulate you on your CBE.
Younis
سمة ما
R A Burns
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