STAFF
G
IN CONFIDENCE
HKA 431/2 Annex.
RECEIVED
****
RAZY NO.
YNG. 51
45
Mr Stratton
Mr McLaren, HKGD
70
GOVERNORSHIP OF MONTSERRAT
2 4 APR 1979
DESK OFFICER
INDEX
PA
12 ल
1. This post will need filling from about February 1980 and HKGD have asked for WIAD's views in preparation for the forthcoming meeting of the DTSAB.
2. Our preferred candidate is David Dale. I have written exten- sively about his personal and administrative qualities in the last 12 months and most recently in the 1978 ACR and in its illustrative attachments. I will not repeat myself here but I would welcome a sight of the draft of HKGD's paper on him for the Board.
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3. Another strong candidate is Walter Wallace. When he gave me lunch last week he made it quite plain that he was very keen on the job. I thought it only fair to describe the job in some detail and to bring out the greatly restricted horizons financial, adminis- trative, scenic and so on when compared with the life he knew in the British Virgin Islands and indeed in Bermuda and the Bahamas before- hand. I think he welcomes the prospect of a job which he clearly thinks will not be too taxing and, as he said several times, any- thing to get back into the sunshine.
4. Mr Wallace's claims to this post are substantial. He has already been a Governor for four years in the BVI and in the last few months of his service there he won glowing opinions from Ministers and higher authority for the way he handled the reprieve of Gaston.
He would not have made the sort of errors we have been faced with in
Montserrat in the last eight months. But he lacks both drive and imagination. He reacts cannily to events but has often told me that
he does not see it as his business to take initiatives.
He would,
as he more or less admitted, be coasting along in the sun. In short I do not see Mr Wallace, after a period of some 18 months on the Sussex coast, bringing to bear to the job in Montserrat the qualities needed to guide and encourage an inexperienced Government into the right paths and, who knows, to independence in two to three
years.
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