Sucking up to China won’t be an issue – we have plenty of practice

Britain is essentially Basil Fawlty, bullying the weak and prostrating herself before the powerful

Prince William meets Yao Ming, Bear Grills and Sir David Attenborough before delivering a speech on the illegal wildlife Trade For Chinese Television at King's College London on October 19, 2015

As art, you wouldn’t give a penny piece, or even a renminbi, for the clumsily cropped photograph of Prince William on the front page of Tuesday’s Daily Mail. As symbolism, on the other hand, the snap is exquisite.

There stands William gazing up in awe at a Chinese giant as they shake hands, while Yao Ming, a 7ft 6in tall basketball player, coolly looks down on the Prince with a courteously aloof smile. The one imperfection in an otherwise immaculate geopolitical vignette is that this representative of the British state he will one day rule is on his feet, and not his knees. But be not afeared. The full genuflection before the might of the coming Chinese imperium will have followed soon enough from David Cameron and George Osborne, in their audacious attempt to raise the bar of British self-abasement at the feet of foreign tyrants to a new level of yuk.

Eight years ago, the Saudi King Abdullah popped over with a typically modest retinue from the land where the punishment for the crime of being gang-raped is a humane 200 strokes of the lash. Then, as now with Xi, the Queen greeted him at Horseguard’s Parade before hosting a state banquet, while the PM, Gordon Brown, took care not to offend a treasured guest (one with a happy penchant for paying billions for second-rate weapons) with vexing small talk about human rights.

Nowadays, the Season would be incomplete without the vista of Her Majesty sharing her Royal Ascot carriage with the Emir of Qatar, the gulf state the gulf state whose citizens are suspected of having so generously funded Isis, and whose Emir-headed government appears to have done so little to stop them. The saving grace about these nauseating niceties is that they have prepared us for this festival of grovelling to the Chinese. When it comes to stomach-turning sycophancy towards distasteful foreign regimes, no people on earth has a higher tolerance level than us.

We have seen Mr Tony Blair take President Assad to tea with the Queen (the indignities the poor old girl has to endure) shortly before the invasion of Iraq. We have read Sir Christopher Meyer’s account of the briefing he had from Blair’s chief of staff when he was sent to Washington as ambassador. “We want you to get up the White House’s arse,” Jonathan Powell told him (don’t you adore elegant diplomatic euphemism?), “and stay there”.

Since then, much has changed. With the aftermath of the Iraq misadventure and the 2008-9 financial meltdown lessening the lure of being the unofficial 51st State, the rapid growth of the Chinese economy (slowing now, admittedly, though still on course to overtake the US in GDP within a decade) has apparently made Beijing the go-to arse for British insertion.

Even while bending over the sick bowl, you can’t fail to appreciate the economic and political reality. This sad little island lost its voice after World War Two, when the Empire crumbled and Britain was too broke to feed herself. The affectation at great power status continued thanks to the twin fig leaves hiding the emasculation (the permanent seat on the UN Security Council and the nuclear arsenal).

But it was as flimsy a pretence as any economic miracle based on consumer credit and an insanely inflated London house market. Genuine influence steadily atrophied; we became a client kingdom of the United States.

Now that China is ascending and the US falling on the see-saw of global dominion, the temptation to transfer allegiance speaks for itself. No one disputes the need to trade as much as possible with Beijing, or the value of Chinese university students. The wisdom of outsourcing the future of the domestic power industry, and playing pit canary to Chinese nuclear reactor technology, seems less clear-cut.

But however opaque the economic implications of the nuclear deal, and more generally of replacing the alleged Special Relationship with George Osborne’s “Golden Age” of Sino-British relations, what is so baffling is the ferocious zeal of British sycophancy.

Other countries seem able to deal with richer nations without sacrificing every vestige of dignity. The French wouldn’t allow steel-dumping to destroy an important industry without strong protest. The Germans would not embarrass themselves by passionately embracing a regime as poisonous as Saudi Arabia’s.

The pattern of behaviour speaks of something deeper than the demands of expediency. Britain has become the Basil Fawlty of the planet, switching at will between bullying or patronising the weak, and prostrating herself before the rich and powerful. And the instinctive response to this sucking up to China is exactly the same cringeful laughter that greets Basil’s desperate ingratiations to Lord Melbury.

“Of course, we’ll raise all these issues,” said David Cameron, when asked if he is willing to discuss steel-dumping with President Xi. “That is what our relationship with the Chinese is all about.”

Yeah, yeah, we heard all that from Mr Tony about the time he was donning those pubic hair-definingly tight jeans for the 2003 visit to George W Bush in Crawford, Texas. Free and frank exchange, blah bah, full partners, yada yada yada, meeting of equals... A few years later came the dismissive “Yo, Blair”, and the unspeakable embarrassment of a British PM pleading in vain with an American President to be allowed to act as his front man in a Middle East negotiation.

If that debacle should have taught his successors one thing, it is that there is no diplomatic advantage to be had from tacitly capitulating to every conceivable demand before the negotiating begins. The Chinese will respect sycophancy no more than the Americans. Quite the reverse.

It would be nice – if only for morale, and just for a while – to imagine Britain not rolling over and hitching up her skirt at the first sniff of Chinese money. Then again, what cut price old whore ever plays hard to get?