Why does our government have so much trouble criticising China? It doesn’t seem to have had a problem calling out Vladimir Putin. But Downing Street – along with the rest of Whitehall – seems determined to do Xi Jinping’s regime’s dirty work.

Over the past ten days we have become used to seeing Matt Hancock as a mad, authoritarian figure determined to lock Britain down during Covid, even when scientific advice did not call for it. Yet it does seem that he was able to consider the prospect that Covid originated in a laboratory in Wuhan. The evidence is not conclusive or overwhelming, not least because the Chinese have used every tactic to prevent scientists finding the truth. The case for and against is put very succinctly in Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19 by Alina Chan and Matt Ridley. But you would have to be very close-minded not to entertain the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 was a variant of the coronaviruses which scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were known to be engineering to further their work. Ironically, the scientists were trying to explore ways to prevent or cope with a future pandemic.

Whitehall behaves as if it is a client state of Beijing. Are we fearful that China will cut us off from importing its consumer goods?

Such closed minds, however, were apparent in the round-robin letter that several eminent scientists sent to the Lancet in February 2020, condemning as a ‘conspiracy theory’ the theory that Covid-19 might not have had a natural origin (although at least one of the signatories, Jeremy Farrar, is now known to have expressed very different views in private). Such closed minds seem to have been apparent, too, deep in the UK government – not least among the Cabinet Office’s sensitivity readers who went over Hancock’s Pandemic Diaries before they were allowed to be published.

As we have now discovered from Hancock’s WhatsApp messages, the former health secretary wanted to expand on his suspicions that Covid began as a laboratory escape. In particular, he wanted to say that China’s explanation that the virus had a natural origin ‘just doesn’t fly’ – pointing out that the bats from which it appeared to have come are based a thousand miles away from the seat of the pandemic – whereas the Wuhan Institute of Virology is just down the road. But the Cabinet Office didn’t want him to go that far, arguing that speculation on a laboratory leak was ‘highly sensitive’ and ‘would cause problems if released’. Hancock was reminded that the government’s official position was that the location of the Wuhan Institute was a mere coincidence. Hancock’s comments were watered down before the book’s release.

Why is the government so determined to do China’s dirty work for it? The US government and its agencies seems to have no such qualms: the director of the FBI declared last week that a laboratory leak is the most likely explanation for the pandemic. Yet on this, Whitehall behaves as if it is a client state of Beijing. Are we fearful that China will cut us off from importing its consumer goods? Are we afraid it will stop investing in Britain? Or that Xi Jinping will take umbrage and invade Taiwan?

China has suppressed the efforts of the World Health Organisation to investigate the origins of Covid-19. That much is obvious – and even the WHO now refuses to go along with China’s stonewalling. Yet our government is still too shy to entertain even the possibility that the pandemic could have been the result of one of the world’s most catastrophic accidents. It would be good to have an explanation as to why. Has anyone got any more ministerial WhatsApp threads which might illuminate the matter?