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have said that I hope that they will keep us regularly and carefully informed of developments, so that we have an opportunity to warn Ministers if things look like going against us. This at least will give Ministers the opportunity to consider whether they wish to put any pressure on the Hong Kong Government and, if so, how. At this point, I have to say that I would expect the advice from my side of the house to be strongly against seeking to intervene in the process. But we cannot tell what advice we will want to give until we know the facts. What we must avoid, however, is a situation in which Ministers discover at the eleventh hour that proposals are going to be put to EXCO which will be difficult to sell here.
We got
10. In this context, I would express the very strong hope that we can all avoid stirring up Ministers in the DTI or at No 10 prematurely or on the basis of partial advice. into a fearful and vituperative muddle last autumn, which helped nobody. I have agreed with Mr Adams and Mr Rodgers (PEP, DTI) that we will keep in close touch with them over the coming months. We may need to construct a variety of Chinese walls between us and the DTI and between the DTI and industry, but, on the whole, I favour being as open as possible with our DTI colleagues. They will be getting advice from Mr Heap (BTC, Hong Kong), which will not be complete since Mr Heap will not have as much access to the inner thinking of the Hong Kong Government as we might hope to have. But I believe that the BTC will be able to perform rather better this time round than this time last year in getting alongside the decision makers in Hong Kong, and we will do our best to ensure that a reasonably clear picture of developments is available for Ministers.
11. Finally, you are absolutely right to point to the question of export credit. The Governor has consistently made clear that this is crucial to the success of any British bid. According to the DTI, following discussions with ECGD, there ought in fact to be quite a lot of money available for export cover, particularly now that the Airport MOU should have calmed some of the previous Treasury concerns. But we are dealing with a very big project, and one of the problems presumably is that we might find that ECGD developed a very great concentration in the Hong Kong-China market. I should be grateful for advice from the experts on how we should take matters forward with ECGD.
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J. Ithum
ff. RA Burns
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