Mick Hartley

Jung Chang, the Wild Swans author, on Sir Keir’s sad humiliation:

Speaking just days after the Prime Minister’s return from Beijing, the 73-year-old – who fled China for London in 1978 – is unable to hide her disdain for the visit. “What makes me feel both sad and angry is watching Britain’s Prime Minister go to Beijing and be openly humiliated. The Chinese authorities went out of their way to do it.

“Instead of being received by Xi Jinping himself, he was sent around the Forbidden City by a tour guide. That is not accidental.

“When Donald Trump visited Beijing, Xi personally accompanied him through the Forbidden City. When Emmanuel Macron visited recently, crowds were carefully organised to welcome him, to flatter him, to make him feel admired. With Britain, the opposite message was sent.”

Pointing out that “hospitality and protocol are central in China”, the softly-spoken dissident tells me and my Daily T co-host Tim Stanley: “These signals are deliberate. Britain invented modern diplomacy – this was not a misunderstanding.”

The picture says it all, really.

She is similarly unequivocal on the Chinese “super” embassy that has just been given the go-ahead on the site of the old Royal Mint in central London, amid mounting fears it will be used for spying. “Anything that poses even a remote risk to Britain’s national security should not be permitted,” she insists. Chang herself is no stranger to surveillance, with intruders once scaling the balcony of her London home and methodically destroying all her plants and flowers with a serrated knife.