For the Record. David Cameron

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СКАЧАТЬ rectify that, making Italy a big ally on NATO and on building a more flexible Europe.

      There were four Italian PMs while I was in office, and I was much closer to Enrico Letta and Matteo Renzi, who followed Berlusconi and Mario Monti. But I have to accept that, while Italy was a strong NATO ally and helpful during the Libya intervention, my attempt to put rocket boosters under the Anglo–Italian relationship was an example of an agenda that didn’t get very far.

      Another agenda I hoped would produce real and lasting results was China.

      The country had gone from the world’s eleventh-biggest economy to the second-biggest in just twenty-one years. Eight hundred million people had been lifted out of poverty – all because this communist country had embraced the capitalist principle of liberal economics.

Not that ours was a likely alliance. For them, we were still their oppressors from the nineteenth-century Opium Wars, and awkward neighbours during the years when Hong Kong was a British territory. For us, no matter how liberal China’s economics, it was still a one-party, authoritarian, communist state, with a woeful record on human rights and a tendency to rip off intellectual property, keep its markets closed where we opened ours, censor the internet and spy on just about everyone.

      Yet the advantages of a deeper connection were undeniable. Thousands of Chinese students and tourists flocked to Britain each year. Chinese people loved our history and culture. With a burgeoning Chinese middle class, there was a massive potential market there, and although Labour had made some inroads, it remained largely untapped.

      So, China: opportunity or risk? The coalition was split. Nick had been campaigning on the human-rights issues for years. And William was sceptical about the Communist Party’s intentions. He wrote me a letter during our first month in office with a stark warning about China ‘free-riding on wider global public goods’ – obstructing international action if it conflicted with its own domestic imperatives.

      My stance – and George’s – was more pragmatic. It wasn’t, of course, that I didn’t care about human rights, or that I trusted a party which appointed one ‘paramount leader’ every five years. It was just that I thought there was a longer game to play, and a better way of getting what we wanted.

      Yes, our ambition was largely economic, but an essential outcome of that economic partnership would be the greater political leverage it would give us. In other words, the trust that we could build from doing business together could lead to trust across a whole range of areas.

      Naturally, we would always be vigilant when it came to China. We were hard-headed about the threat it posed, instructing our security services to map and counter the Chinese threat. Only by understanding and guarding against that could we trade with the country.

      This would be the best, the safest, way to bring China into the rules-based international system – through rules on trade, but also rules on climate change, terrorism and human rights. The more it was part of the UN, the WTO, the G20, the more cooperative our relationship would be. We could influence its views on everything from climate change to Burma to North Korea. Which was vital – China would be a linchpin in all these matters.

On my first visit to China as prime minister in November 2010, with four cabinet ministers and forty-three business leaders, I knew I’d have to walk a tightrope, on the one hand trying to strike trade deals and showcase what we had to offer investors, and on the other raising issues around human rights and democracy.

      Nothing was going to stop the Chinese in their pursuit of growth – getting people out of the countryside into the cities, into employment and out of poverty. If you were useful – if you could supply inward investment, exports and scientific knowledge, as we could – then you were considered a partner. ‘Transactional’ is the FCO jargon for that sort of relationship.

      But there was still a tightrope to walk. So, when I went to Beijing University, I decided to make a more wide-ranging speech, focusing on the importance of democracy and the rule of law. Given that you can be locked up in China for so much as criticising the socialist state, going further than most Western leaders in promoting democracy would, I reasoned, more than offset any perceived obsequiousness in our economic dealings.

      I didn’t quite stir a revolution. But I did provoke something when I said: ‘The rise in economic freedom in China in recent years has been hugely beneficial to China and to the world. I hope that in time this will lead to a greater political opening.’ The first question from a student after my speech was about what advice I’d give to the Communist Party in China in an age when more countries were having plural politics. An amazing noise went around the room, half admiration and half shock. I gave a measured answer about our countries having two very different systems. But as I looked around at the sea of faces I thought: is this system really going to last? My conclusion was that, in its current form, it couldn’t. After all, surely this was now a consumer society in which people had increasing amounts of choice over their lives. How could the ruling party frustrate that when it came to politics?

      While my fundamental view hasn’t altered – change, in some form, will come – multiple visits to China have led me to a more nuanced view. The primacy given by both government and people to economic growth. The fierce sense of pride and exceptionalism. The attention given by the nation’s rulers to emerging trends and problems across the country. All these things mean that China’s path to greater pluralism may be a very long one, with a different destination to our own.

Given that so many other countries were trying to align themselves economically with China, this incident, and the unfortunate poppy set-to, which happened on the same visit, weren’t exactly welcome. A three-day visit to the UK by Li Keqiang, who was heavily tipped to replace Wen Jiabao as premier, gave us a chance to up our game. Li, who received red-carpet treatment, made it clear that some of my comments had not been welcome. But despite that we would make real inroads.

      Finally, there is an agenda I really wish I had never started. That was the British bid to host the 2018 World Cup.

      Britain had a strong case: the best stadia, the most enthusiastic supporters, club teams that are followed across the world, and a football-mad culture. We had also learned a lot from our successful bid for the 2012 Olympics.

      The biggest barrier to bringing the tournament home for the first time since 1966 was the notorious world football governing body, FIFA, and its susceptibility to corruption. The bid also pitched us against Russia, a country with a government quite prepared to do whatever it took to win.

      We threw everything into beating Russia – and Belgium and the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain – to host the 2018 Cup. I had the FIFA president, Sepp Blatter, to No. 10. He even got to hold Florence – a privilege reserved for presidents and monarchs, I joked at the time. Looking back, knowing what I know now, it makes me wince.

      Then, in December 2010, I spent three days in Zürich, where the bidding process was taking place for both the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. With Prince William and David Beckham by my side, my confidence grew. We had the best bid – and a dream team to bring it home.

      The process was rather like speed dating, with an allotted amount of time with each voting nation’s representatives to try to persuade them to back our bid. The three of us pleaded with people from Cyprus to Paraguay. America’s representative, a man called Chuck Blazer, was so enormous that as he got up to leave, his chair went with him.

      The corrupt undertones were all there, but, typically British, we gave it our best and got through it with jokes. Vladimir Putin’s approach was classic. He suddenly cancelled his appearance, claiming that the whole competition was riddled with corruption.

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