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values described in it. I took it, which I now understand is regarded as by some as a touch disingenuous, as my principal duty to try to do whatever I could before 1997 to see that the promises made to Hong Kong were delivered after 1997.
I do sometimes ask myself what other honourable course was on offer? The Joint Declaration was not a paper fig-leaf to allow Britain to withdraw from Hong Kong with a few shreds of dignity. It was not an elegantly drafted way of getting round or avoiding issues of real substance, a sort of diplomatic escape hatch, a clever real answer to a difficult, intellectual puzzle. The Joint Declaration was for real promises made to real people about real things. It is only on that basis that we can decently conduct a policy on Hong Kong, uncomfortable, inconvenient as that proposition may occasionally be.
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Arriving in Hong Kong in 1992, I was faced straight away with the fact that there was no agreement on the electoral arrangement for 1994 and 1995. The only thing that was clear was that there was an agreement on the proportions of the Legislative Council which should be returned from geographical constituencies, from functional constituencies which represent people at their place at work, and from an election committee, providing a balance within the legislature. But there was no agreement on how each of those elections should be carried out.
After discussions with the political parties, we put forward proposals which represented, in our judgment, the broadcast common ground we could find. We took as our parameters that the electoral arrangements should fit within the Joint Declaration and the Basic Law which was the constitution prepared by China for Hong Kong for after 1997. We went much less far than the pro-democracy politicians wanted. We went much less far than the pro-democracy and Conservative politicians had wanted three years previously after the killing in and around Tiananmen Square, but the proposals seemed to us to get the balance about right.
That, too, seemed to be Hong Kong's view. Alas it was not China's. Chinese officials rained adjectives of abuse and threats down on the Governor of Hong Kong in particular, and Hong Kong itself in general. They held discussions with me in Beijing, then they refused to talk any further unless we dropped our proposals, then they agreed at the last moment to talks which lasted over six months, 17 rounds, 160 hours, during which they barely offered a single compromise as we proffered one after another.
When we ran out of time, we stood our ground on one simple proposition. It was on our judgment for the people of Hong Kong to decide how far we should go down this road, the people of Hong Kong represented by their Legislative Council. We did not think we could go less far than they were prepared to go, but nor should we go further in providing the fair, open and widely acceptable arrangements which the people of Hong Kong had been promised.