JUNI
The moves we had made on the Functional Constituencies
and the Election Committee, as described in the
Governor's LegCo address, had been "stupid" and naive. "Anybody who knew anything about China" could
have told us that the Chinese would pocket them and
give us nothing in return.
Instead of offering these concessions, we should long ago have given the Chinese a public ultimatum. This was the only way to deal with them. Through our - mishandling of the negotiations and our unwillingness to explain to the public what we were doing, we had treated the Hong Kong community with contempt. knew what we were trying to achieve.
us any more.
Nobody
Nobody trusted
1
4.
Our handling of the OPD (K) meeting and the current
phase of the talks had been a particular fiasco.
London and Hong Kong were sending out conflicting
signals. It had been made clear to her in London that
there was no urgency about the talks: we would go on negotiating for as long as necessary. She cited this
both as evidence of a split which she seemed to have
convinced herself had developed between the Governor and HMG; and to support her thesis that nothing we
said about deadlines was credible.
Another particular hobby horse concerned the role of ExCo. Ms Righter claimed that until recently, EXCO had been consulted far more closely on all key policy issues including the handling of China. It was clear
to her that the Governor had decided to cut ExCo out, so that it had now become little more than a rubber
stamp. She claimed that ExCo members had themselves ̈ ̈
complained to her of this.
I refuted all this as firmly but patiently as I could, and explained why the negotiations had taken the course they
CONFIDENTIAL
جانم