TNAG-1330-FCO40-1757-Future-of-Hong-Kong-test-of-the-acceptability-of-the-Joint-D-1984 — Page 164

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from the Master The Rt. Hon. Sir Patrick Nairne, G.C.B., M.C., M.A. St. Catherine's College Oxford oX1 3UJ

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Telephone (0865) 249541

10 August 1984

Personal and in

Richard Luce Esq MP

Foreign & Commonwealth Office

Minister of State

London SW1A 2AH

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Huck 040/46

RECEIVED IN REGISTRY

1 5 OCT 1984

Dear Minister.

DESK OFFICER

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Your Private Secretary will have told you of our brief talk on the telephone; but I feel that I should write straightaway myself to thank you for your letter of 8 August and to say how much I appreciate the honour you do me in inviting me to serve as the UK member of the Monitoring Team in Hong Kong.

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I would wish, if it is possible, to accept the invitation; but the principal purpose of this letter is to explain that I do not think that I can give you a firm answer until after we have met, as arranged, next Tuesday, 14 August.

As I am sure that you will understand, the invitation has come at a particularly difficult moment. It is not just that I have already quite an extensive range of commitments between now and Christmas (for example several speeches and other engagements outside Oxford from which I would have to withdraw): it is primarily that, during the Oxford Term, my appointment as Master requires me to be the

to be the (more or less) full-time head of this large college; and that, if I were to be away for two months, it would be necessary for the Governing Body of Fellows to appoint a Pro- Master to run the College in my place. At this moment, however, most of the Fellows are away from the College. It seems clear, therefore, that, if I accept the invitation - with its consider- able implications for the College - I shall be deciding to do so without any of the consultation which my Governing Body would normally expect.

I hope that that does not sound like an Oxford college at its most self-centred and parochial! The fact is, however, that acceptance would mean that my Governing Body colleagues here would return in September to find that the Master had agreed to withdraw from his College duties for, in effect, the whole of next term. And it is the term which, in many ways, is the most difficult of the academic year since about 150 undergraduate and graduate new- comers arrive at the College at the beginning of term and admissions for the following academic year are settled at the end of it.

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