It seems Starmer wants a deal with China at any cost – and he may have already paid for it
This framing isn't accidental.
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 …
This framing isn't accidental.
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 …
It seems Starmer wants a deal with China at any cost – and he may have already paid for it
This framing isn't accidental.
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 …
