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Governor: I don't find that at all. And as I go around the streets and as I go around on my district visits I am very encouraged by the buoyancy and the warmth and the encouragement that I get from everybody. I am also delighted that the last opinion poll I saw suggested I had a 62% approval rating. I remember what approval ratings used to be like in the United Kingdom, so I was pretty pleased about that. So I think this is a very difficult job and it is one that will remain difficult right down to the wire, but I think I will be judged by the extent to which I stood up for Hong Kong and stood up for the promises made to Hong Kong in the Joint Declaration.
Question: You are being judged now, you know, on Hong Kong, and I don't have much confidence in you. Don't you feel powerless and redundant increasingly?
Governor: No. Do you?
Question: No. I mean your record on the environment, you break promises about that, it hasn't come off. You said that everybody would be owning their own home by the time 1997 comes round, it hasn't happened.
Governor: No, no. When did I say that? When did I say that?
Question: You said that when you arrived.
Governor: No, I didn't. You don't have to tell fibs, come on.
Question: Anyway, okay. What about employment? We didn't have unemployment in Hong Kong before you arrived, now it's a serious problem.
Governor: Just tell me what it is?
Question: Let me finish. Most importantly, you've really let Beijing off the hook. As a professional politician you have let Beijing off the hook, you have let them walk away from the negotiating table and you have given them carte blanche to do anything they want after 1997. It's disgraceful.
Governor: I have not given them carte blanche. That is what a lot of people wanted me to do but I declined to do that and one of the results is that I think Hong Kong has a lot more sense of the importance of its own autonomy and a lot more self-confidence than it would otherwise have. I thought that your litany of capital charges, though delivered with a cheerfully gloomy voice, was ..
Question: Well it is not as cheerfully gloomy as yours.