China is right to chuckle at Britain’s foreign policy

The Foreign Office has seven ministers, 16,000 employees, an £11bn credit card and one of these days it might get itself a foreign policy. If the trailed excerpts of James Cleverly’s speech to the Lord Mayor’s Easter Banquet are to be believed, the Foreign Secretary will articulate the government’s pivot back towards Beijing. Cleverly will reportedly declare that ‘no significant problem… can be solved without China’. He will say that while ‘it would be clear and easy – perhaps satisfying – for me to declare a new cold war and say that our goal is to isolate China’, it would be ‘wrong’, ‘a betrayal of our national interest’ and even a ‘wilful misunderstanding of the modern world’. 

This pro-China tilt does not come out of the blue. A week ago, Cleverly told the Guardian that the UK couldn’t ‘pull the shutters down on this relationship’ because ‘China will carry on carrying on whether we engage with them or not’. We’ve come a long way, baby, from trade boosting human rights.