TNAG-0389-FCO40-435-Visit-of-trade-mission-of-the-London-Chamber-of-Commerce-and-1973 — Page 40

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3. In the event the way in which the Mission was recruited had the almost inevitable result that there were hardly any candidates of the kind originally contemplated. It turned out to be a typical down-to-earth hard-sell Mission representing mostly medium-sized or even quite small firms. It was none the worse for that. They were an admirable lot, tremendously keen and hard-working, and it was an education for me to be with them. The London Chamber will naturally be asking itself how it came to plan one kind of Mission and send another. How much this really mattered in present circumstances, I frankly don't know. I could hardly feel, however, that there was much justification for my presence, except just perhaps in Hong Kong. With his great experience Jeffrey Hamm would have been an admirable leader of the Mission. Most of its members felt under such extreme pressure of time for their own affairs that they wanted the absolute minimum of Mission activities and one or two I hardly saw again after our arrival in Tokyo. For many of them an ordinary group travel arrangement would have been almost as useful. There was, however, a minority who did participate regularly and I hope sufficiently to justify us calling ourselves a Mission, with all the extra work that this involves for posts.

I very much hope too that the results of the Mission in hard business terms will have justified all the trouble that was taken to prepare our way and to help us when we arrived.

4.

If there is one main impression that remains with me after our visits to Tokyo and Hong Kong it is of the extreme pressure under which our commercial staffs there are working because of the endless succession of export promotion events and visitors brought by the export drive. I don't suppose that this is a new problem or one in any way special to these posts. In a way it is clearly a Good Thing : but it surely has dangers. What the remedy is, I don't know. We heard pleas for greater selectivity in the choice of Missions and visitors whom the posts are asked to support. This sounds good sense to me, though it may be difficult to apply in practice. One point in particular that was made to us was that a post's recommendation that a particular Mission group should not be sent, should be given more weight than is apt to happen. I would have thought that this is right and that in such circumstances a Mission's recommendation should only be overruled after very careful consideration by High Authority.

5. I hope I need not say that none of this implies any criticism of the way we were received in Tokyo and Hong Kong. We were most kindly received in Tokyo where everything that we could reasonably

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