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.