In a move that has sent tremors through the Foreign Office's gin supply, His Supreme Excellency Kim Jong-un will host President Xi Jinping for a rare bilateral chinwag in Pyongyang next week. British diplomatic sources, speaking through clenched teeth and fortified with double espressos, are bracing for what they euphemistically term 'provocations.'
Let us not mince words. This is not a state visit. This is a summit of the Pyongyang-Peking axis of awkwardness. Two men who between them have more nuclear buttons than a haberdasher's nightmare are getting together for a chat. And what do they discuss? The weather? The price of ginseng? No. They discuss the dismantlement of the post-war order, the utter humiliation of the United States, and probably how to make Boris Johnson’s hair stand on end from 5,000 miles away.
British sources, ever the masters of understatement, have expressed 'deep concern.' This is Foreign Office code for 'we have absolutely no idea what to do, so we will release a strongly worded statement and hope for the best.' They are bracing for provocations, which is diplomatic speak for 'please don't launch a missile while the Queen is having her tea.'
But let us examine this theatre. Xi goes to Pyongyang. Why? Because Kim is the only leader on Earth who makes Xi look like a moderate. Also because China needs a buffer state that hates America almost as much as they do, but with better haircuts. Kim, meanwhile, gets to parade his latest rocket-shaped phallic symbol down Juche Tower boulevard, while Xi claps politely and tries not to inhale the fumes of state-sponsored idolatry.
What can London do? Absolutely bugger all. We have no embassy in Pyongyang. We have no leverage. We have a few elderly diplomats who remember the Korean War and a lot of very nice china. So we brace. We brace for provocations, for tests, for the inevitable statement from the North Korean foreign ministry calling us 'bastard vassals of the Yankee imperialists.' We brace, and we drink.
The real question is not what Xi and Kim will discuss. The real question is what they will not discuss. They will not discuss human rights. They will not discuss denuclearisation. They will not discuss the plight of the North Korean people who subsist on a diet of kimchi and state propaganda. No. They will discuss how to keep the world on edge, how to extract maximum concessions from the West, and how to ensure that no one ever asks them to account for their crimes.
So brace, Britain. Brace for the headlines. Brace for the pundits on the BBC pretending they understand East Asian geopolitics. Brace for the inevitable leak that someone in the Foreign Office said something 'unhelpful' and now we have to apologise. And most of all, brace for the moment when a man with a mushroom haircut and a man with a Mao suit shake hands and the world holds its breath, wondering if this time, there will be fireworks.
I, for one, will be watching from a bar in Soho, drinking a martini (shaken, not stirred, because I am a Bond villain now) and muttering darkly about the end of days. Cheers.
