This government has many faults, but one really cannot fault them on their comic timing. On the very day when the Americans withdrew support for the Chagos ‘deal’, partly on the grounds that it showed weakness in the face of China, the government also gave approval to a massive new Chinese embassy complete with access to sensitive underground cable systems and an unspecified subterranean complex that definitely won’t be used to torture dissidents. 

Inevitably, this provoked questions in the House of Commons. Answering for the government was Security Minister Dan Jarvis. Clearly aware that he was about to get a barrage of difficult questions from unimpressed opposition MPs, Mr Jarvis had deployed a classic Labour two-pronged strategy. Firstly, allude to information that you can’t possibly share in public but is very important and if the opposition were allowed to know it (which they can’t be) they would change their minds. This deranged legal Gnosticism has become a central plank of Labour’s strategy........

© The Spectator