Michael Sheridan

Of all the gestures calculated to provoke the Chinese government, protesters in Hong Kong chose one particularly bitter insult this week. The old British colonial flag, one quarter of it occupied by a splendid Union Jack, was draped across the furniture of the city’s legislative council as masked, helmeted activists smashed the place up and sprayed slogans demanding freedom. One can see why the average Communist Party cadre might not like the flag very much. Apart from the emblem of an imperialist foreign power, it is adorned by a rather charming coat of arms which shows a lion and a dragon, a crown, a fortress and two trading junks in sail on a tranquil sea. Serene and proud it is.

For many years, a framed cover of The Spectator looked down, like a silent reproach, on the drinkers in the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents' Club. Its cartoon showed Britannia and the British lion on a barren rock, bent in a kowtow towards a distant, unseen overlord. The title read: Our Betrayal of Hong Kong. It was published when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister and the Tiananmen Square massacre had just taken place in Beijing. The editorial, two whole pages of eloquent indictment, did not please the woman who had signed the Joint Declaration with China by which the rights of Hong Kong were to be guaranteed for fifty years after the handover in 1997. There were, as we know, other things on her mind late in her premiership.