IN TIMES of Imperial crisis, the Brits have always been keen to turn their guns on anything French. Things haven't changed, it seems, especially when the French criticise the British Empire.
'The general thrust of most arguments is that Britain has little to be proud of in Hong Kong and got it all wrong,' sobs Robert Hardman in the stuffy Daily Telegraph. He claims the Americans are privately happy to see the British brought down a peg or two, while the French are positively 'ecstatic'. 'President Chirac,' he writes, 'just back from four days' grovelling in China, had to be restrained from proposing marriage to President Jiang Zemin ... Britain's departure [from Hong Kong] he said, would 'close one of the darkest pages in Chinese history inflicted by imperialism.' ' The idea of a Frenchman slighting the once-mighty British Empire - especially to a Communist - is clearly too much for Hardman. 'Looking out on one of the liveliest, safest and richest cityscapes in the world,' he writes, 'I find myself wondering that if this is 'a dark page', what does that make French disasters like Cambodia?' Ouch.
Having seen off the troublesome French with this most powerful of literary broadsides, Hardman turns his guns on Chinese, communists and anyone else who dare slight the Imperial legacy. 'Had Britain not spread its evil empire to these shores,' he blasts with deliberate self-irony, 'Hong Kong would today be an unremarkable port, a communist Grimsby stuck on the end of Guangdong province instead of an international titan.' Give the Cantonese people a 99-year lease on the northern British fishing port of Grimsby, Mr Hardman, and just watch the change.
heir of the dog AN ALTOGETHER more liberal British broadsheet, The Guardian, is not so much worried about the French but what the departing colonials are going to do with Pickles. Pickles is a dog, the bones of which were buried beneath the Prince of Wales Barracks at HMS Tamar.
'When the advance guard of the PLA arrived in Hong Kong recently,' writes Andrew Higgins, 'to share the Prince of Wales Barracks with the Black Watch, a patch of freshly dug soil betrayed the sign of an eleventh-hour evacuation from Britain's military headquarters.' Pickles, we are told, was the mascot for the 1st Battalion of Rifles in Burma, India and, finally, Hong Kong. He has been dead for more than a century.
According to Higgins, navy historians in Britain thought it proper that the military memorabilia should stay in the care of the PLA. This was judged unwise. 'We were not quite sure it would survive,' says Commodore Peter Melson.' They might be leaving some people behind without passports but their not leaving any dead dogs.
out for a duck SCOTLAND'S Hong Kong concerns appear more to do with ducks than dogs - ducks embroidered on boxer shorts on military posteriors that is.