Thirty years ago, he says, Mexico chose North America as its main market and decided to find what tourists wanted. This proved to be sun, sea and sand and tourism officials promptly got to work in places such as Acapulco, Cancun and Ixtapa.

'These places were not developed; there was not a hotel in sight. They put in airports, long streets away from the beach, created tax incentives for hoteliers . . . and 12 years later you have Cancun, holiday destination extraordinaire.' Yes, Mr Lambert, but what you actually have in most of these Mexican tourist spots is a polluted mess on what were once pristine beaches with Mexicans gaining few benefits other than the joys of bowing and making forced smiles as waiters and maids for their new Yankee masters.

The tourists certainly love it. There has been overbuilding of tourist resorts of course and room rates have tumbled. It's quite a bargain.

The foreign hoteliers like it too. They're mostly operators, not owners, and they get a cut of the revenue whether or not that revenue is enough for the owners to cover their costs. The airlines also rake in money as do foreign suppliers of hotel equipment and vehicles, foreign food and drink and the foreign contents of the shops in the resorts.

You didn't expect the tourists to buy Mexican did you? Well, you see, it's unfortunate but they just don't have it available in this country. Maybe a tequila or some Mexican dish in the restaurant but we're doing it American style, thank you.

Meanwhile, Mexico groans under the load of the foreign debt taken on to build it all and, with the tax breaks and other incentives given to the foreigners, is often not getting enough of a return to service the debt. That wonderful buzz word 'tourism strategy' has been one of the reasons that the Mexican economy lurches from one financial crisis to another.

And what does Mr Lambert see in Hong Kong as a contrast to this enormous success in Mexico? 'In Hong Kong it's a different kettle of fish,' he said. 'When demand increases, entrepreneurs build hotels; when demand decreases, entrepreneurs close hotels - look at the Victoria, the Lee Gardens and the Hilton.' Exactly, Mr Lambert. And do you recognise this principle by which the tourism industry operates in Hong Kong? It's called the free market. It works so badly relative to your Mexican success story that more visitors travel to Hong Kong than any other Asian destination. That's right. No 1, dai yut, that's us.

It is so insensitive to the changing need for hotel rooms that the three hotel closures you lament took place in time to prevent a plunging hotel occupancy rate from becoming even worse in 1997.

The fact of the matter is we don't need a tourist commissioner and let's hope the Government keeps the position vacant despite having made the mistake of creating it.

All we will get is another proponent of Mexican-style wastage, a high spender on the payroll who will inevitably sell himself to that narrow constituency of hotel and airline operators because they have the biggest interests at stake.

And they have plenty of rotten ideas for throwing away huge sums of our money. There's the Disney theme park idea, for instance, Mickey Mouse being such a wonderful expression of Chinese culture, or the colonial-times theme park so that we can dream again of the days of institutionalised racism.

Yes, pour the concrete, fellows. We've done with the free market which has served us so well in tourism. We want a policy now, a strategy, something to take us where Mexico has gone, something on which we can lose our shirts.