China

In the last five years of his life, when I knew Richard Nixon, nothing described him better than Milton’s “calm of mind, all passion spent.” During the most tumultuous political career in American history he had come back many times, but the greatest comeback of all was in full swing. His enemies had seized control of the puritanical conscience of America to slay him, unjustly, and he was manipulating the same national conscience, which was founded on Plymouth Rock and has survived all the corruption and hypocrisy and violence of American public life, and when aroused, is insuperable. Since his political fall, and later his death, polls increasingly indicate public unease about the treatment of Richard Nixon.

If you rent a cheap Airbnb house in Las Vegas, you might not be altogether surprised to find dead crickets in the garage. But a thousand vials of medical samples in several freezers – and a centrifuge? After the cleaner and one guest fell ill at a property in the city’s Sunrise Manor neighborhood last week, federal agents raided it and found a whole laboratory’s worth of scientific kit of the kind more useful to medical scientists than, say, drug dealers. Curious. Curiouser still, the house belongs to a Chinese national named Jia Bei (Jesse) Zhu. He is currently in prison awaiting trial over a secret laboratory that (it is alleged) he was running in Reedley, California.

Sir Keir Starmer told Xi Jinping it was time for a ‘more sophisticated’ relationship, yet there is very little sign of that in his excruciating performance in China. This was supposed to be the moment the Prime Minister cashed in on a year spent cosying up to Beijing, during which he has been accused of jeopardising national security to avoid causing offence. Yet you do not need to be part of his large entourage of business people to calculate that the returns have been minimal, and the costs potentially enormous. Donald Trump was certainly quick with his verdict. Asked about Starmer’s pursuit of closer business ties with China while attending the premier of a film about his wife Melania, the US President said: ‘Well, it’s very dangerous for them to do that’.