THE final handover of Hong Kong on June 30, 1997, was not the Prince of Wales’s finest hour. Thanks to a tropical downpour that drenched the 30-minute ceremony, he could not have been wetter without having a bath as he stepped to the microphone to deliver a brief farewell message on behalf of the Queen.

Observers noted that its content was upbeat but its delivery lugubrious, as though he profoundly wished to be somewhere else. The outgoing governor, Chris Patten, his wife and three daughters, were at least seen to cry a bit.

Reading from a script, the Prince made the bland message sound particularly leaden, to those who could hear what he was saying through the torrential rain. “Hong Kong has shown how East and West can learn to live and work together. It has brought us together and enriched all our lives.”

A crowd of many thousands, watching a live telecast in Tiananmen Square in Beijing greeted the speech with stony silence, while they dutifully cheered the subsequent speech by their President, Jiang Zemin.

Despite a spectacular fireworks display and the playing of rousing Scottish and English melodies by the departing colonial power, the ceremony was austere. Because most of the invited guests were clutching umbrellas against the tropical downpour they found it impossible to applaud; the only audible response to the Prince was a modest drumming of heels.

Tony Blair and Robin Cook, then Foreign Secretary, were present, but other British ministers and Madeleine Albright, the US Secretary of State, chose to boycott the occasion in opposition to Beijing’s decision to scrap the former colony’s elected legislative council and replace it with an unelected legislature.

But, when the formal ceremony ended, the Prince and President Jiang left the rostrum together, apparently engaged in amiable enough conversation.

The Prince and Mr Patten boarded the Royal Yacht Britannia, on its last royal voyage before it was decommissioned. The new masters of Hong Kong were not the only thing the Prince had to be lugubrious about.

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