DIARY
DOMINIC LAWSON LHong Kong ast September (the 7th) when M. Jacques Delors was paying one of his always entertaining visits to Britain, he was summoned by Mr John Major to Admiralty House, the Prime Minister's base while 10 Downing Street was being redecorated. You might recall that Mr Major gave M. Delors something of a dressing-down, to the immense satisfaction of the press gath- ered outside. Unfortunately, the doorstep boys were too busy filing their stories to notice the Prime Minister's next visitor who had arrived promptly for his 3.30 p.m. appointment. He was Mr Tsui Tsin-tong, the major supplier of nitroglycerine to Chi- nese industry. T.T. Tsui, as he is commonly called in his native Hong Kong, was received altogether more warmly by the Prime Minister. Indeed, I am told that Mr Major said he was 'very grateful' to his multimillionaire visitor. For what I am not sure. It had been over a year and a half since Mr Tsui had acted as Mr Major's secret emissary to Peking, setting up the Prime Minister's subsequent trip to China to break the deadlock on negotiations over the new Hong Kong airport. Perhaps Mr Major was expressing gratitude to Mr Tsui for his more recent donation of £1.25 mil- lion to the Victoria & Albert Museum, in the form of the T.T. Tsui Gallery of Chi- nese Art. Or perhaps — though I can hard- ly believe it was the sole purpose of the meeting — Mr Major was merely express- ing his gratitude for Mr Tsui's generous donations to the Conservative Party.
So it is strange to see the way in which the Conservative Party is now seeking to distance itself from such good friends as T.T. Tsui, not to mention Mr Li Ka-shing, the richest man in Hong Kong, and another generous donor (half a million pounds, it is said) to party funds. It has not yet reached the newspapers, but I gather that last week Conservative Central Office told its direc- tor of external funding, the man responsi- ble for raising such substantial sums from Hong Kong's businessmen, that he was off the case. I should declare an interest here. That director, or rather ex-director, of external funding is Mr J.G. `Algy' Cluff, the chairman of The Spectator. Algy is a man of integrity, far too good for the politicians he has — unpaid and unrecognised — sup- ported for a decade. Now they have dumped him in a panicky reaction to the public's discovery that Mr Azil Nadir gave £400,000 to the party. Neither Mr Major, nor the party's chairman, Sir Norman Fowler, seem able, at least in public, to dis- tinguish between donations of possibly stolen money by a fugitive from British jus- tice, and those from respected Hong Kong businessmen who have invested hundreds of millions in the British economy. Their attitude guarantees that, even if it hadn't given the resourceful Mr Cluff the heave- ho, the Conservative Party will have to whistle for any more money from our last colony. We can be sure that the party's board of finance will even now be trooping round to its bankers, asking for an exten- sion to its overdraft of £20 million. Here, it seems to me, is the only real scandal about Conservative Party funding. How can a party which claims to represent sound money have so mismanaged its own affairs as to be effectively bankrupt? And how can we expect an organisation which can't man- age a private deficit of £20 million to cope with a public one of £50 billion?
The point about Hong Kong's tycoons is that they are not just rich. They are stu- pefyingly rich. Donations which seem to us large are to them a mere bagatelle, a whim. What is £500,000 for a man of Mr Li Ka- shing's billions? I also suspect that for such men putting money into political parties is akin to a flutter on the horses, only less entertaining (the Conservatives always win). The Sunday before last I gained some idea of what is meant by a flutter in Hong Kong. We went to the Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club's meeting at the Sha Tin race 'I was sent down for teaching vigilantes a lesson.' track in the New Territories. A giant screen facing the grandstand informed the thou- sands of Chinese on-course gamblers how much money they were staking. By the end of the last race, the scoreboard showed that in one afternoon HK$1.36 billion had been lost and — though not in my case — won. The Conservative Party's £20 million deficit is, in Hong Kong terms, no more than the losses on a single race.
Aparticularly bizarre artefact, a kind of suspended carpet with grey smudges, captured my attention in a Hong Kong art gallery. 'How much is that?' I asked the owner, thinking I had found an eye-catch- ing rug for the little hall in our cottage. 'That will cost you £40,000,' he replied, with the inscrutability for which his race is famous. I let out a little yelp. 'Sir,' said the art gallery owner, 'we have sold ten of them at that price.' I staggered out feeling at once philistine and pauper. Later I told one of Hong Kong's leading collectors of my encounter. 'Let me explain,' he said. 'Those rugs, as you call them, are the work of Deng Ling.' Who's he?' I asked. 'She', he replied, with a sigh of irritation, 'is the daughter of Deng Xiaoping.' So, Hong Kong political donations yet again, although this time tribute not to the cur- rent rulers of the colony, but to its future ones.
0 ur host at the races was Mr David Tang, who, according to last Sunday's Observer, was one of the Hong Kong busi- nessmen supporting the Conservatives with donations. But to describe David Tang as a businessman is inadequate. He is also a concert pianist (Messiaen a speciality), a translator of Roald Dahl into Cantonese, the proprietor of Hong Kong's most fash- ionable watering-hole, the China Club, and, if these things still matter, a welcome guest at Sandringham. On the day before the race meeting, David invited us to lunch at his country house in the New Territories. Among the other guests were Chris and Lavender Patten (Tye asked the Gov and Lay,' said David). Our host, with great deliberation, took photographs of the Pat- tens in front of his house. What they might not have realised, at the time, was that behind them, on the Tang flagpole, flut- tered the yellow star on deep red of the People's Republic of China. Or perhaps the Governor did notice. At the end of the lunch, as the Pattens were leaving, David asked 'The Gov' if he would like a copy of the photograph. 'No,' said Mr Patten, 'just the negative.'
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