THERE we were idling away the time at the door of the Legislative Council chamber, when who should come dashing out at his characteristic breakneck pace, but bankers' representative David Li? Since it was about 3.55pm, he'd just had to sit through the whole of the Financial Secretary's speech and was therefore at least 20 minutes late for his usual Wednesday afternoon appointments, we could understand the urgency. But there was something about the way he avoided looking at the assembled multitude that caught our eye.
Here, we thought, with the unerring instinct of the seasoned door-stepper, was a man who'd just been teased in the most embarrassingly public fashion and didn't want to talk to the press.
So the press talked to him instead. Was there, we asked, echoing Sir Hamish Macleod's words, anyone left who seriously questioned the importance to Hong Kong's stability and prosperity of the linked exchange rate? It turned out there wasn't.
'Um . . . well . . . they have to stick with it until some alternative is available,' Mr Li conceded. Perhaps it was the experience of having the Preliminary Working Committee disagree with him on the issue that had changed the banker's mind. TALKING of David Li, a colleague of ours happened to be wetting his whistle in one of those weird and wonderful bars in the Felix complex at the top of The Peninsula hotel last weekend when the Bank of East Asia chairman turned up with a group of friends.
Having noted this and returned to his beer for a moment, our colleague looked up again to discover Mr Li had vanished. 'Shortest visit ever,' said the journalist. 'Must've thought he was in Legco.' PERHAPS it was the price of the wine that put him off. There are a few educated palates around town crying into their Appellations Controllees at the Finance Secretary's decision to keep the present ad valorem duty on alcohol. None more so than Thierry Laloux, the assistant trade commissioner at the French consulate.
'We were slightly disappointed,' he said. 'Actually, a bit more than that. We had expected some concession on this front. We'll be pressuring very hard.' It was France, after all, which last year delayed Hong Kong's elevation to observer status at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in protest at the duty. The problem, as we understand it is not that Sir Hamish's logic is insufficiently Cartesian - I drink, therefore I am - but that it encourages the consumption of cheap plonk at the expense of fine wines.