JASON GROVES: As Starmer visits China, how when Theresa May was in Beijing she was informed to dress below the mattress covers so native spies could not movie her bare

Keir Starmer will vow to thaw the ‘ice age’ in relations with China this week, despite warnings that the communist superpower is a bigger threat to Britain than ever before.

When he sits down with Xi Jinping in Beijing‘s Great Hall of the People this week, he will be the first British prime minister to visit China since Theresa May exactly eight years ago.

And he does so at the time of a great double threat.

The peril posed by China is no secret to anyone in government. Tight security protocols have been put in place, with ministers and officials issued ‘burner’ phones and laptops in the expectation they will be hacked by the communist regime.

When Mrs May last visited in 2018, she and her team were advised to get dressed in bed because of the risk of hidden cameras in their rooms hoping to catch compromising material.

As far back as 2008, an aide to Gordon Brown had his Blackberry phone stolen in a suspected ‘honeytrap’ operation in a Shanghai disco while on a trip accompanying the then prime minister.

It is also a dangerous time for the PM to be out of the country for the best part of a week. Ever since Margaret Thatcher’s notorious trip to Paris just over 35 years ago, prime ministers have been rightly wary of being caught abroad at a time of crisis at home.

In November 1990, Mrs Thatcher pressed ahead with attending a summit in the French capital despite facing a vote of confidence from her own MPs.

Back in Westminster, she fell four votes short of delivering a knockout blow to her challenger Michael Heseltine. Conventional wisdom at the time was that she would have won the vote outright if she had stayed and fought. Instead, she was forced from office just days later.

Sir Keir does not appear to be in quite so deep a hole yet. But his decision to block potential leadership rival Andy Burnham from standing for Parliament at the weekend could yet trigger a rolling backlash.

One Left-winger called for the PM to quit on Monday, while other angry MPs were accusing him of a cowardly stitch-up.

Mr Burnham was playing nicely on Monday, but it is not hard to imagine the revolt against Sir Keir gathering pace while he is sipping green tea with Xi Jinping 5,000 miles away.

Whitehall sources on Monday suggested key allies of the PM, including the Chancellor Rachel Reeves, dropped plans to join the mission to China this week so they could be on hand to deal with any political unrest at home.

Since Mrs May’s visit, much water has flowed under the bridge – and none of it has been good. On that fateful visit in 2018, the Conservative leader was still talking of her wish to ‘intensify the golden era of UK-China relations’ first championed by David Cameron and George Osborne. Her Chinese hosts even suggested upgrading relations to a ‘diamond era’, despite clear signs that relations were starting to fray.

Since then, Beijing has implemented a brutal crackdown in Hong Kong, tearing up the ‘one country, two systems’ agreement with the UK which sought to preserve democratic freedoms in the former British colony and locking up pro-democracy campaigners like Jimmy Lai.

The decision plunged relations into the deep freeze and has led to around 180,000 Hong Kong residents taking up the offer to flee to the UK. China has also stepped up its espionage efforts against this country, including cyber attacks and spy plots.

And all the while, president Xi has reiterated his claims on Taiwan and intensified his brutal crackdown on the Uyghur people in Xinjiang province, where critics accuse Beijing of implementing a genocide. British MPs complaining about Beijing’s increasingly hostile behaviour have faced sanctions, with even their families being harassed by the communist regime.

In the meantime, according to many experts, Chinese scientists also bequeathed Covid-19 to the world by allowing an experimental virus to escape from a laboratory in Wuhan, killing millions around the globe.

President Xi, who once sipped a pint of beer with Mr Cameron in an Oxfordshire pub, has become increasingly autocratic and is currently carrying out an extraordinary purge of senior military officers suspected of treachery. Despite all this, Sir Keir has bent over backwards – or, more accurately critics would say, kowtowed – to Beijing in order to set up this week’s visit.

In opposition, Labour promised a ‘China audit’ setting out the state of relations with Beijing. The review was finished last year, but was never published in full, apparently to avoid inflaming tensions with Beijing.

Sir Keir also stopped short of branding China a threat and placing the country in the top tier of the Foreign Influence Registration Scheme, which aims to hamper the operation of foreign spies in this country. There is no shortage of evidence of China’s hostile intent, but Beijing is reported to have threatened major reprisals if it was placed in the top tier alongside Russia and Iran.

Last year, the prosecution of two men accused of spying for China collapsed in dramatic fashion at the 11th hour after the Crown Prosecution Service said it could not get evidence from the Government that China was a national security threat. And most recently, Labour has decided to grant permission for China to build a mega-embassy – dubbed a ‘nest of spies’ by critics – in the City of London.

Plans show secret chambers, triggering fears (denied by British sources) that they could be used to detain and even torture Chinese dissidents snatched off the streets in this country.

Diplomatic sources say Beijing had made clear that Sir Keir’s trip this week would not go ahead unless the embassy was approved. MI5 chief Ken McCallum observed last week that it was not possible to ‘wholly eliminate’ the risks posed by the giant facility.

The decision was meant to be a ‘quasi-judicial’ planning matter, with ministers acting in a legal, rather than political role. But Sir Keir was caught on camera last year telling president Xi he had ‘taken action’ over the stalled embassy application – a comment that is likely to form part of a judicial review against the plan.

Luke de Pulford, of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, said Sir Keir had made ‘huge concessions … for this visit to happen. First a collapsed spy trial and now a colossal fortress in the heart of London.

‘Beijing wants to make us more dependent and less able to stand up to Xi’s increasingly totalitarian behaviour,’ he said. ‘We are walking into it.

‘Pitching this visit as a revival of the ‘golden era’ shows this to be less the ‘clear-eyed’ approach the Government promoted, and more the starry-eyed naivety of 20 years ago. ‘

So why go at all? And why now?

The answer lies in Britain’s sluggish growth rate – and Ms Reeves’s desperation to breathe life into the economy following two botched Budgets.

The Chancellor paved the way for the PM’s trip last year, making the case for reviving trade and investment links which have atrophied in recent years.

In a speech to the Lady Mayor’s Banquet last month, the PM said ‘the scale of the opportunity in China is immense. Our task is to help British businesses win their share of that opportunity in a way that is safe for our country’.

The PM acknowledged Beijing ‘poses real national security threats to the UK’ but said it made no sense to continue with an ‘ice age’ in relations. The absence of engagement in recent years was a ‘dereliction of duty’, he added.

But there are limits to how far he can go. This week, Donald Trump threatened to impose 100 per cent tariffs on Canada after Mark Carney announced a ‘strategic partnership’ with Beijing following a trip to see president Xi. Toronto was forced to clarify that there was ‘no pursuit of a free trade deal’ with Beijing.

Any move to cosy up to the regime could put further strain on the already damaged relationship with Washington.

Sir Keir has shown he is willing to kowtow – and that he has got the hang of the technique. But he may find even this is not enough.