JA B Stewart Esq OBE c/o Protocol Section Government Secretariat * HONG KONG
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PERSONAL & CONFIDENTIAL
Foreign and Commonwealth Office
London SW1A 2AH
7 October 1976
S TO HONG KONG,
The submission you put up about my visit to Hong Kong has returned after being agreed all along the line. I have therefore been talking to Derek (who saw and has agreed this letter in draft) about dates and a possible programme.
On the first, he and I are thinking in terms of a fortnight sọ in Hong Kong from Monday 8 November. As to leave, I would hope to get to Bangkok for the week before I arrived in Hong Kong or, if the coup prevented this, to KL en route and Djakartá en retour for a few days each. Do you agree?
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I have the following thoughts on the programme. Derék has ersuaded me that, were I to give most call of my time to a engthy study of just one for two aspects of the Hong Kong Government's work, (eg, as I once suggested to you, education and health) I would, in a sense," be wasting it. He considers, and so now do I, that it would be better for me to broaden my experience « of that part of the Department's work that I actually do here. To put it bluntly, a detailed knowledge of Hong Kong's education system will not help me answer MPs' letter/PQs on, for example, LegCo I consider therefore that I should go for a more general programme. That said, I am reluctant simply to have the 'standard tour.
Derek has done this recently and there seems little point in my merely repeating a departmental experience. Furthermore, in that much of the standard tour covers subject with which Tom now deals and with which I, except in his absence, do not, it would again involve me in some waste of my time, however fascinating it proved to be. I am therefore thinking in terms of something tailor-made for the job I am doing at present. In the "Red Book" my responsibilities are listed thus: constitutional, political, defence, sacurity mattero and external relations (except Hong Kong/China . . .). This argues calls on the Political Adviser's office, the Security Branch and Counoils Branch of the Secretariat, the Home Affaire and Immigration Departments, the Police, the Army, and on members of Logo and ExCo. There could also be profit if I were, to follow to some extent in the footsteps of MPs who have recently toured Hong Kong, (and so look at, for example, the
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