It seems Starmer wants a deal with China at any cost – and he may have already paid for it

I was in town last week to witness Michael Gove address a haggis.

Whilst that was quite the experience, the prelude, in one of Westminster’s busiest watering holes, was the more revealing. The doyens of the Westminster media bubble were excited. For the first time since Theresa May went as Prime Minister in January 2018, the ‘select’ of the Westminster press were going to China with Sir Keir Starmer and a plane load of UK businessmen.

When I invited the press to join trips abroad with then Foreign Secretary Sir James Cleverly, I tried not to take a ‘pack’. Too often when not given ‘total access’ – which they always jostled for and was impossible to give – I’d observed on Prime Ministerial trips they would sit bored in a hotel, under pressure from Editors, and turned that frustration into negative headlines.

I preferred to take two, balanced out  – the Guardian and Express came to a G7 trip to Japan, doing interviews on the Bullet Train.  Two could then get better access, and had more ‘buy-in’ for the trip with their bosses. Aside from editorial demands, the pressure to deliver  was not just about journalistic pride, but was as much about justifying the price they had to pay. Not a deal for good headlines but cold cash for plane ticket.  A rear seat on a Government plane – not quite the same standard as the politicians up the front  – is charged, as per Government rules, as roughly equivalent of a seat on a commercial flight to the same destination.

The trip they all wanted to go on was to China. Never sure why, bit it was.

If I had a pound for every journalist who asked to be top of the list for a trip to Beijing, I could have fuelled the plane and saved the taxpayer a lot of money. Well now a group of them are in Beijing – one paper is reported to have taken three correspondents – following Starmer for his big meeting with President Xi Jinping.

The question is not what it’s cost the assorted hacks to get there, but what it’s cost Keir Starmer, and Britain?

The Foreign Office was, despite what China-hawks said of the last Government, frustrated by an increasingly suspicious and hostile Conservative attitude to the communist behemoth in the east and always eager to ask why we had changed from the Cameroonian ‘golden era’? Those were the days when President Xi had sunk a pint with a British Prime Minister, in a British country pub.

The answer was always the firmly the same to Sinophiles in the FCDO – it was not that the Conservative British government had changed, but China and particularly the aforementioned Xi had changed, and not for the better.

China under the CCP is an unavoidable global player that likes to quote the rules and etiquette of diplomacy to those it deals with whilst breaking almost all of them behind the scenes. Now, China is not just controlled by a General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and his politburo, but by an individual leader with a total grip at the top and a hyper-sensitive personality cult spread to all layers of the bottom.

It’s hard to buy a copy of ‘Winnie the Pooh’ in China.

Britain’s charge sheet against China is a long as the Great Wall.

Espionage, industrial in both scale and target. The dissemination of political disinformation. Electronic espionage aimed at Downing Street, to backbenchers – including the case of Labour MP, Barry Gardiner. Intimidation of critics on UK soil – violence in the case of the Chinese Consul in Manchester – and flat out denial of the known and documented persecution of Uighur Muslims in Xianjang. Flagrant abuse of human rights and bi-lateral agreements in Hong Kong, detention of political critics on spurious charges, and a far more aggressive and kinetic expansionism in the South China sea and beyond.

It’s true that just talking to China at all is a risk for British politicians. The word ‘Kowtow’ has long been used negatively about politicians before it was attached to the name Keir. However it feels like Starmer has almost embraced it.

Rachel Reeves could hardly wait to get to Beijing soon after her first Budget where they were desperately seeking a warmer relationship in pursuit of a trade deal, something that has now become increasingly important to them as the British economy staggers anaemically onwards, no thanks to her.

Almost as soon as he was in Downing Street Starmer dusted off a file marked ‘Chagos Handover’, picking up a deal the Foreign Office wanted, and the Conservatives rejected – despite wildly inaccurate versions of our talks with Mauritius –  persuaded by officials and his Human Rights focussed Attorney General that her was something they could do quickly and say the previous Government couldn’t.

Now despite the US seemingly turning against the deal, and grave concerns about the wisdom of it amongst many Labour peers and MPs – one of whom admitted as much to me just after Gove had served that haggis – for a mere £35billion in tax relief, for Mauritians, Starmer is still doggedly wedded to it.

China hasn’t said much about it but as an ally of Mauritius its always had an eye for an opportunity, especially to get a closer look at US/UK military installations.

Then there were the two young men, accused of spying in Parliament for the Chinese government, which both deny, whose prosecution was abandoned despite at one point it being considered a ‘slam dunk’ case. That collapse caused big political recriminations. Despite all his outraged protestations – a mix of ‘blame everything on the Tories’ and ambiguous cross government meetings and conversations – Starmer insists the government wasn’t trying to save the Chinese embarrassment. However pursuing it would undoubtedly have put bureaucratic obstacles in the way of his long desired meeting with Xi. The Chinese don’t like being accused of spying.

As a footnote it’s worth mentioning British government visitors to China have long ceased taking their mobile phone with them. My own sat in a lead lined bag in a secure minibus, just for a meeting with the Chinese at their UN HQ in New York!

Now, Starmer is there, no doubt entertained in the official Chinese complex – a one-time palace for an Emperor complete with fish pond – where the CCP entertain foreign guests, especially those so obviously angling for a deal. He insists that his interactions with China will make the UK richer.

Kemi Badenoch has questioned that this morning.

There’s a certain logic to the theory that a trade deal will help the UK, but theory isn’t practice. Veteran preacher of caution on China, Luke de Pulford wrote yesterday of the evidence that the Cameroon “golden age” of relations is merely guilty of not producing promised levels of gold.

I’ve no doubt with an FOI you could get how much the trip will cost, but the strong suspicion is Starmer bought his ticket by his government putting their thumb on the scales of another issue that was halted under the Conservatives; the go-ahead for a super-embassy or ‘spy hub’ as many Tories have branded it, in the heart of London. It may help getting long needed repairs to the much smaller British embassy in Beijing but I’ll bet a yuan, there’s will be up in London long before that job is finished in Beijing.

Back at the watering hole in London last week, one very senior political correspondent due to travel to China confided he ‘couldn’t see the fuss’ about the embassy story  as the security services had now said it was ‘ok’. Mild disbelief and the Official Secrets Sct forbade me form saying more than it was ‘quite a naïve view’ given the long running saga of overturning all the objections there had once been.

It strikes me that talking to Xi direct will soon be cheaper and logistically easier if politicians just hang around outside the Royal Mint site and chat between themselves.

Starmer likes to think of himself as a leader on the global stage. He’s certainly had far more success there than on the domestic. However in the same way every party bar Labour is doing better because he’s inept, his foreign dealings are bound to look better because his domestic affairs are such a dog’s breakfast. Is he that good abroad?

Badenoch has long used the line ‘when Labour negotiates, Britain loses’. It’s good because it is so often true. Whatever deal Starmer might produce after his meetings in Beijing, and however happy the businesses he’s taken along are with the value of their own deals, it is not only possible to argue Starmer has bought it at a political cost, but it is undeniable.

What dispatches are written from the Great Hall of the People – great hall, very few people – or from the back aisles of a returning airliner, one hopes the scribblers of Westminster won’t be too overawed with the trip to forget the real cost.