Keir Starmer is currently away on his long-awaited diplomatic pilgrimage to Beijing, a journey that saw him jet thousands of miles to sit opposite Xi Jinping, nod politely, and essentially say whatever China wants to hear.
All the pomp of global diplomacy. And what did Britain get in return? A short visa waiver, a fractional tweak to whisky tariffs, and the lingering impression that our Prime Minister had just volunteered the nation for the role of agreeable extra in somebody else’s geopolitical epic. This was not a reset. It was a rollover.
Visa Freedom, For Holidays to Beijing?
The biggest headline out of the trip was that Britons will soon be able to travel to China without a visa for up to 30 days. Yes, really, no more paperwork to go on your summer holiday to Beijing. Because that is obviously the priority of national strategy, making it easier for us to queue at Tiananmen Square instead of, oh, securing actual economic wins.
Let us be serious.
A bureaucratic convenience, already enjoyed by France, Germany, Italy, Australia and others, is being waved about like a conquering banner. Britain did not blaze a trail. It shuffled into line and applauded itself for arriving.
Then came the whisky tariffs, trimmed from 10 per cent to 5 per cent. Five. Per. Cent. Cue the victory parade. One can almost picture the Treasury hurriedly recalculating national growth forecasts on the back of a beer mat.
No sweeping trade deal. No transformational investment pact. No industrial breakthrough. No strategic coup. Just polite crumbs, served with chopsticks and presented as a feast.
A Trip So Soft It Came with Cushioning
What makes the episode extraordinary is not merely the thinness of the spoils but the conspicuous gentleness of Starmer’s posture while collecting them.
Britain’s own security agencies have spent years warning about Chinese espionage, influence operations and cyber activity. Beijing has been frozen out of new UK nuclear power projects. Politicians have been targeted online. Concerns about infrastructure, surveillance technology and supply chains have filled Whitehall briefing papers for a decade. What about the “kill switches” found in Chinese made solar panels and buses? Surely Starmer would bring these things up?
Of course not. Starmer’s chronic allergy to sharp language suddenly returned, a condition that seems to flare up only when he is dealing with foreign strongmen, not when he is lecturing voters at home or sending moms to prison for Facebook posts.
The Downing Street spin machine that human rights were raised behind closed doors, that Jimmy Lai was mentioned, that the Uyghurs were discussed. Apparently. Everything is apparently. We are offered vapour instead of evidence, fog instead of facts, and euphemisms where clarity should be. If this was moral fortitude in action, it was delivered in a whisper and hidden behind the curtains.
No one seriously believes Starmer thundered these points across the table. The public choreography suggests something far closer to a polite cough than a confrontation. The official readouts do not read like the statements of a confident democracy speaking truth to power, they read like the minutes of a nervous subcommittee praying nobody takes offence.
When you go to Beijing to “reset” relations, that is exactly the moment you assert leverage. Starmer did the opposite. He shrank from it.
His caution was not tactical, it was paralysing. Not restraint, but retreat. Not diplomacy, but deference so pronounced it looked suspiciously like awe.
Football Shirts and Shakespeare, While the Hard Stuff Went Missing
Instead of confrontation, we got football banter. Shakespeare quotations. A signed Arsenal shirt. Pleasant cultural exchange, delightful for diplomats, wholly irrelevant to the serious business of power politics.
While Xi reminisced about English literature and Premier League teams, Britain’s deepest anxieties about security, espionage and strategic dependence drifted politely into the background, like awkward relatives not invited to the dinner table.
It was diplomacy as soft furnishing.
The Small Boats Farce
Then came the pièce de résistance, cooperation on tackling Channel crossings by focusing on Chinese-made boat motors. One struggles to decide whether this was naive, unserious, or accidentally comic.
Does Downing Street really believe criminal gangs in France will examine an engine casing, note its country of manufacture, and abandon their plans out of sudden geopolitical scruple? Will the next dinghy pause mid-Channel while someone mutters, “Sorry lads, this one’s from Shanghai, regulations”? If this is the intellectual firepower Britain is bringing to transnational crime, smugglers everywhere can sleep easily.
Across the Atlantic, Donald Trump publicly described closer UK-China business ties as “very dangerous,” a remark that Downing Street hurried to contextualise, but could not erase. The image was unavoidable, Britain warming relations with Beijing while Washington watched with a raised eyebrow.
At home, critics accused Starmer of trading security for scraps. And however partisan those attacks may be, they stick because the Prime Minister returned without anything substantial enough to silence them.
That is the real indictment. A confident leader comes back with trophies. Starmer came back with talking points and lots of embarrassing film footage.
Spin So Thick You Could Trowel It
The government’s defence is that diplomacy is gradual, delicate, conducted in private. Perhaps. But successful diplomacy eventually produces results you can point to without blushing.
What this trip produced was a press operation straining heroically to inflate modest gestures into historic breakthroughs, as if repetition alone might make them sound weightier. It was the politics of lowered expectations, elevated rhetoric.
Starmer did not stride onto the world stage. He tiptoed across it, arms hanging, careful not to offend, grateful for incremental concessions, and eager to declare victory before anyone noticed how small the booby prizes were.
A Performance Britain Should Remember
This visit was meant to prove that Britain under Starmer can stare down authoritarian superpowers with composure and steel. Instead, it projected a Prime Minister who seemed dwarfed by the surroundings, grateful for the audience, and dangerously prone to confusing politeness with power.
In geopolitics, perception is currency, and the perception forged in Beijing was not of a country asserting its interests with hard-edged clarity, but of one nervously smoothing lapels, avoiding raised voices, and applauding itself for consolation prizes. Britain did not look formidable. It looked negotiable. It pains me to say it but we looked weak.
For a nation navigating an era of sharpening rivalry and unapologetic statecraft, that is not merely disappointing. It is deeply unsettling.
If this was supposed to be Starmer’s diplomatic coming-of-age, it resembled something closer to a public unravelling. Britain required a negotiating bulldog and sent a man armed with press releases.
He went to Beijing promising a reset and returned having recalibrated the nation’s expectations of how little a Prime Minister can bring back.
The only thing that came back from Beijing heavier was the spin.
Claire Bullivant
Main Image: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
