Former British Prime Minister David Cameron’s shock return as Rishi Sunak’s Foreign Secretary has raised further questions about his globalist government’s stance on China and potential conflicts of interest given Cameron’s sordid past of business ties with the authoritarian communist regime in Beijing.
David Cameron, who as prime minister was a staunch opponent of the pro-sovereignty Brexit movement and the author of the so-called “Golden Era” of relations with China which sought to elevate Beijing to Britain’s top trading partner, will once again play a pivotal role in setting the UK’s agenda in the far-East.
The ex-Tory PM was controversially tapped by Rishi Sunak to become his foreign secretary on Monday amid a government reshuffle. The move to resurrect the political career of Cameron means that the UK’s top three Great Offices of State are now filled with men with ties to China, with Chancellor Jeremy Hunt being married to a literal Chinese propagandist and Sunak marrying into an Indian tech elite family with business operations in China.
After leaving office in 2016, in the wake of failing to convince the British people to reject the Brexit referendum he proposed, Cameron sought money-making ventures, including helping to establish a $1 billion UK-China investment fund intended to advance the aims of Xi Jinping’s global domination Belt and Road Initiative.
Cameron’s investment fund was criticised by the Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee which said that the former PM’s involvement could have been “in some part engineered by the Chinese state to lend credibility to Chinese investment.”
In addition to the billion-dollar UK-China fund, Cameron also reportedly lobbied for investment into the Colombo Port City project in Sri Lanka, which is a significant aspect of the Belt and Road Initiative that some have suggested is intended to be China’s answer to Singapore or Dubai or even a future military outpost for Beijing on the Indian Ocean.
Sunak’s decision to tap Cameron as foreign secretary has been widely criticised, including by the executive director of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China Luke de Pulford who said that the CCP will be “rejoicing in Beijing” over Cameron’s appointment as the nation’s top diplomat.
“It’s hard to see who wins from the appointment except Beijing,” de Pulford added. “Cameron is not respected as a strong negotiator in Beijing, he’s known as one of them, somebody who’s very willing to open up critical national infrastructure in the UK.”
LONDON, ENGLAND – OCTOBER 21: China’s President Xi Jinping and Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron attend a joint press conference in 10 Downing Street on October 21, 2015 in London, England. (Photo by Suzanne Plunkett – WPA Pool/Getty Images)
Questions have also been raised by members of Sunak’s own party, including former Tory leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith, who said: “As one of seven sanctioned MPs in Parliament by the Chinese government for exposing the terrible genocide in Xinjiang, and who are regularly attacked online by Chinese ‘Wolf Warriors’ (low-level Chinese intelligence operatives), I’m calling for greater clarity over David Cameron’s financial links with the Chinese government.”
Downing Street has said that Cameron would have made the “normal transparency declarations” before he was appointed a government minister. For his part, Cameron said on Monday: “Today I resigned from all of those things, all of the businesses I’ve been helping and all the other things I’ve been doing… That all stops, I now have one job as foreign secretary of the United Kingdom.”
Nevertheless, the move signals that Sunak, who was essentially endorsed by a top CCP propaganda mouthpiece for prime minister last year, will likely seek closer trade ties with the communist country and perhaps even attempt to strike a post-Brexit trade deal with Beijing.
Sunak will likely face opposition from within his own party, however, amid growing concern over China within the Tory rank and file following the Chinese coronavirus and the brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protest movements in the former British colony of Hong Kong.
“David Cameron will find Parliament has changed a lot when it comes to China,” Alicia Kearns, the Conservative Party chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the House of Commons said. “Relations with China are our foremost challenge and he is going to have quite a challenge getting foreign policy into the place where it needs to be going forward.”