Chinese health check

A government minister said to me the other day that after being in power for a few months, having read the high clearance briefings about where the world was going and Britain’s inevitably diminished role in it, he sometimes feels he has to pinch himself as he hears debate after debate about something relatively parochial, micro or ephemeral.

I was reminded of that when I heard how one member of Vice Premier Li Keqiang’s entourage explained why he had come to Europe for his hastily arranged trip (mild panic in some parts of the FCO when he announced his desire to visit in January during David Cameron’s pre-Christmas trip to Beijing – anyway, UK leg of trip now over).

I’m told that one UK delegation that met Vice Premier Li Keqiang was told he was here to check out the economic health of Europe. Not to talk to us as equals, seek our views, my informant told me, “but to check Europe’s economic pulse and see if there was one.”

Makes you think.