Delhi
It’s a sappingly humid Sunday evening, but I decide a suit and tie are in order for Sir Michael Arthur, the British High Commissioner. Bad move. He is in shirtsleeves as he takes me out on to the terrace of his Lutyens villa in Delhi. His bearer pours me a gin and tonic and I inquire after another man known for his aversion to mufti: the Prince of Wales. Sir Michael explains that he couldn’t spend as much time as he would have liked at his side when he visited India with the Duchess of Cornwall last month. Jack Straw had summoned him home for the launch of the White Paper ‘Active Diplomacy for a Changing World: The UK’s International Priorities’. It is hard to imagine any previous High Commissioner to India bailing out — even briefly — of a visit by the heir to the throne. A further manifestation, for Charles, of the end of empire, and maybe, on the part of Her Majesty’s Government, a recognition that a new empire is emerging.
India is expected to be outperforming North America economically by 2050, and last year alone, according to Delhi’s Economic Times, £10 billion flowed out of the country — a lot of it, happily, to London (Britain is already the capital’s second-largest overseas investor). Sir Michael talks a lot about ‘UK plc’ and uses terms such as ‘consolidating our position’ and ‘strategic partnerships’. The politicians, he says, woke up to India’s potential some time after the businessmen, but now Straw and Gordon Brown are regulars. It seems to me that if we need India a lot more than India needs us these days, it’s because it’s a lot more competitive than we are.
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