The UK’s Keir Starmer won power last year with a to-do list longer than Harry Styles’s One Direction-era hair, but reviving the British economy was right there up the top.
So when he met China’s Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the G20 last year, sure, Starmer raised Hong Kong’s detained pro-democracy media mogul Jimmy Lai, but he swiftly also dispatched his own Chancellor of the Exchequer to Beijing with verbiage around his government’s “commitment to explore deeper economic co-operation.”
But then the diplomats got in the way.
Okay record scratch. Not exactly, but embassies are involved.
It all started with the 1648 Peace of Westphalia Beijing’s long-planned “mega embassy” on the site of the old Royal Mint, near the Tower of London. It’s a sprawling complex that’d be 10x China’s current embassy and the biggest embassy anywhere in Europe, hence the apparent requirement for every British headline to add ‘mega’.
But the project has sat in limbo since 2022, when local officials blocked planning permission over security and community concerns. Those concerns you ask?
The building drawings showed several areas “redacted for security reasons”, implying some kind of intelligence asset or activity
The complex itself is located right above sensitive fibre-optic cables near London’s financial district (pssst, espionage)
Neighbours voiced unhappiness about all the inevitable traffic and protests, and
The broader public voiced unease at British heritage being handed over to China.
Side bar, but it’s odd China redacted its building plans. Every country that can spy, does spy. And ordinarily you just make up a cover-story for whichever part of the embassy you plan to jam full of spies and listening gear: oh, that vast, windowless, heavily fortified floor up there? Haha nothing to worry about, just the sauna!
Anyway, the local council then blocked China’s embassy plans again in 2024.
So the decision has now climbed all the way up to the (new) housing secretary, who’s attempting to stick to a 21 October deadline. And he’s in a real bind:
China is peeved given it paid a cool £255m for the property back in 2018, and has been burning more cash every year it’s been stuck in development purgatory. Beijing is now arguing the UK is breaching its obligations under the Vienna Convention (which regulates how countries treat diplomats/embassies).
And the US is losing patience, too: successive White Houses have warned the UK about this embassy, partly on intelligence-sharing concerns: the ‘five eyes’ () arrangement is only as strong as its weakest link, and a vast London compound hoovering up every byte of data might weaken the UK link. But the US also realistically wants allies onboard in countering an increasingly assertive China.
Anyway, take your pick, Keir: keep the US happy, or keep China happy, though your economic recovery realistically involves figuring out how to keep them both happy.
And while he works on that, it’s all metastasizing into a political problem for Starmer on two fronts. First, tabloids report that China has periodically halted the water supply for British diplomats over in Beijing! That, together with China slow-walking its approval for the UK’s own embassy upgrade in Beijing, looks like a classic reciprocal pressure tactic.
But second, UK prosecutors also just abruptly dropped an explosive case against two British men both called Christopher (Christopher²) accused of spying for China, with Starmer facing claims the case collapsed after his government avoided labelling China an “enemy” in testimony.
The two tales combined are feeding into opposition claims that he’s
weak on China
.
He’s sent his foreign office chief (Olly Robbins) to Beijing in an upcoming visit billed as routine, but the timing could not be worse.
Anyway, that’s how the most boring diplomatic work — embassy construction paperwork — has turned into the latest proxy front for East-West relations.
