Savile Row revolutionary

 ‘You can’t imagine how insecure it makes our politicians when they consider that they haven’t been elected.’ The man in the Savile Row suit and the hand-made shirt gave me a shrewd grin. Even the price of his haircut would have kept a ­Chinese farmer going for a year. ‘What’s the answer?’ I had to whisper, because Tony Blair was at the lectern, going on about how important China was.

The man beside me shrugged and spread his hands. His name was — is, of course, but since his arrest people talk about him in the past tense — Bo Xilai, and I’d just bumped into him again after meeting him some years earlier. He was China’s minister of trade, and seemed to be heading for the very top.

In a few words he’d set out the problem for China’s Communist leaders. The sand is shifting under their feet, the old landmarks are changing, and they don’t possess the legitimacy of being elected. Seven of the nine top leaders are due for the traditional once-a-decade clear-out this autumn, but a smooth transfer of power will be harder for two reasons. First, the Bo scandal: his wife has been accused of murdering the British businessman Neil Heywood, and Bo himself has been playing the leftist card. Secondly, the escape of the blind political activist Chen Guangcheng from house arrest to the American embassy. The first has reopened some familiar political divisions, while the second has turned the rule of law (or lack of it) in China into an international issue.

Just when President Hu Jintao and the premier, Wen Jiabao, ought to be getting ready to go peacefully into semi-retirement beside the Forbidden City, things have turned nasty. And, as Bo Xilai hinted, it’s times like these that remind the top people in the Communist party that they aren’t there because the people of China have chosen them; they’re there because Mao Zedong grabbed power in 1949 and his followers have never let go.