Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, The Spectator's Daily Politics Podcast.

I'm Patrick Gibbons, and today I'm joined by our Deputy Political Editor James Hill and Sam Hogg from the Oxford China Policy Lab.

Now, James, Kirstarmer's jetting off to China this evening, the first Prime Minister to visit since

Theresa May in 2018. What's he hoping to get from the trip? Money, pure and simple. I mean,

this is the first Prime Minister to go in eight years. What was striking to me was that in the

pre-visit interview he gave to Bloomberg was how clear-eyed and sober his tone was. Now, Kirstama is a pretty sober politician at the best of times,

but what was interesting to me was it was a much more realistic tone than 12 months ago when Rachel Reeves went out there,

was talking about how much money they were going to drum up and came back with a pretty meagre half a billion in investment,

which was very different from, I think, the four billion that Theresa May secured eight years ago. I think that reflects a couple of things, one of which is that the foreign

direct investment from China has dried up post-pandemic, also just that the world we're living

in that has changed since the so-called golden age evaporated, best part of a decade ago.

And I think that what the Prime Minister

was trying to do was walk a very difficult tightrope. And it was striking to hear even someone like Sir Jeremy Hunt, who of course was quite a moderate Tory foreign secretary, you know, talking about the need for a tightrope, etc., which reflects that, look, if you are of the view of a sort of China moderate on this, is that we have to engage with China and get the best deal possible. But how, you know, should we go in that and, you know, try and get a good connection with China? And there are some people who want to quite hawkish view, cut off all contacts, etc. But Kirstama has chosen to sort of engage with China. But he is just saying, I'm going to go in and be realistic, what we can give them, etc. But this was really what the whole Chinese embassy was about. We greenlit that. And now he's going in and he's quite sensibly tacked on a visit to Japan at the end of that. So as much of the three-day visit to China, you'll also have this trip to Japan, a country which in recent years, of course, has been sort of ending its long period of post-war isolationism and sort of neutrality and actually sort of re-arming and getting involved back in the kind of Western sphere.

So that helps sell it, possibly sort of trip to Japan and China.

Sounds very different from just going off to China.

And I think that was what's so striking was the difference between Kirstarman's comments today and what Rachel Reeves was saying a year ago.

And I think that reflects the reality that actually, while it probably isn't some metric sensible to engage with China, we're not going to get the sort of great dividends that you might have hoped to have 10 years ago. You mentioned the tightrope that Stama's trying to walk there. I mean, he was asked this morning in an interview to choose between the US and China and he declined to choose. I mean, the very very fact that he's being asked that tells us something, doesn't it? Well, it does. I mean, every British pro-swar prime minister has been asked to choose between the US and Europe. And, you know, someone like Churchill would have had his three concentric circles, the idea being Empire, Commonwealth, America and Europe. And that was something that Kirstama, who is someone who didn't

come into this brief with any particular knowledge or interest in foreign policy beforehand,

has obviously clearly thrived in that role as the foreign policy prime minister. He's always

tries to sort of be equidistant between the US and Europe to some extent. And China is a

continuation of that fact. But the reality, as you say, Patrick, is that we've seen on Hawaii, as we've seen on lots of things with the Trump regime, ultimately we have to choose sometimes because of what Donald Trump wants us to do. And I think that that's why we have chosen, as we probably have to, to go with our five-hour security partner, rather than with China. So it's no great surprise that. You know, we share much more in common than we do with the Chinese system. But ultimately, the UK, I think, has seen itself as a little more arms than a little less side of skeptic. And frankly, we don't have the capability to do something like the Chips Act in the same sort of way. And that's one of the striking things, for instance, about the war in Ukraine, which is that, you know, the Ukrainians have had to use a lot of Chinese drones, for instance, and so that a lot of the money has gone into sort of funding that industry, rather than building up our own sovereign capabilities. We don't have the same level of infrastructure that the Americans have. So we always will be slightly less hawkish, because we can't afford to be, I think, as hawkish as the Americans. But we will always probably be having to make constant tradeoffs between those two worlds. But I don't know what Sam thinks about the eternal question of where the UK stands on the Silk Road between Beijing and Washington. Well, I think you've articulated it very well, James, and thanks for having me.

I think to pick up on a couple of your points, you're absolutely right to frame this as an

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