Why are we even considering China’s ‘super-embassy’? |
One day the story of China’s “super-embassy”, whether it is built or not, will be the subject of the kind of book-length investigative reporting that wins worthy prizes, writes Eliot Wilson
Last week this paper reported that senior figures in the City of London Corporation were concerned about the new Chinese embassy which is proposed for Royal Mint Court near the Tower of London. The government of China bought the freehold on the 5.4-acre site in May 2018 for £255m, and local residents were first notified of the redevelopment plans in November 2020.
This was not a bolt from the blue for Whitehall: quite the opposite. As foreign secretary (2016-18), Boris Johnson had appointed his ally Sir Edward Lister, then a non-executive director at the FCO, to lead negotiations with China over the purchase. This was the death rattle of the “Golden Era” of Sino-British relations, before the Chinese Communist Party’s brutal 2020 crackdown in Hong Kong.
It is symbolic of Johnson’s later premiership that Lister was at the time also a paid consultant to CBRE, the property company acting for China, and to Delancey, the owners of the site. Sir Alistair Graham, the long-ago chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, stated “the Foreign Office must investigate whether he [Lister] satisfied the seven principles of public life”. But that was akin to asking Guy Fawkes if........