A parliamentary researcher has just been arrested on suspicion of espionage. A man in his late twenties, with reported links to the security minister and the chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, is accused of spying for China and may have had access to sensitive secret documents. A second suspect has been collared in Oxfordshire. It’s said to be the worst Westminster security breach in years: ‘We haven’t seen anything like this before.’

I’m sure you were as surprised as I was to find out that the Chinese are spying on us. Gobsmacked. Flabbergasted. Probably nearly as surprised as the Prime Minister. And to hear his spokesman tell it, Rishi Sunak wasn’t just surprised but jolly cross about it too.

So-called China hawks would like us to take a cooler approach, but Rishi has already ruled that out

So cross, in fact, that he tore up his plan for the G20, which had involved no meeting with the Chinese prime minister, to confront the fellow directly, mano a mano. We’re told that he ‘conveyed his significant concerns about Chinese interference in the UK’s parliamentary democracy’. Nothing like conveying significant concerns to put an aggressor back in his box, is there? I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that he’d conveyed these concerns in no uncertain terms.

What exactly do you suppose was said? What could have been said? No retaliation that we know of has been offered. No threats that we know of can have been made. The most we can hope for will have been words to the effect of: ‘Look here, Mr Li, it really isn’t on to go about spying on us like this, so I’m going to need you to pinkie-promise there’ll be no more of these shenanigans or… well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Really, I’m jolly cross. Make no mistake about that.’

I half suspect that the main purpose of asking for the meeting will have been so that the UK press could be briefed that a stern ticking-off was being issued. Damage limitation.

It would have been much easier from Mr Sunak’s point of view, knowing that China’s influence and espionage operations are all over our economy and public life whether we like it or not, if they hadn’t caught the mole: it only embarrasses him by underlining how little we can do about it. In July the Commons Intelligence and Security Committee warned us that China targets the UK ‘prolifically and aggressively’, that they had ‘successfully penetrated every area of the UK economy’, and that our government had neither the ‘resources, expertise or knowledge’ to do anything about it.

It makes you long, a little, for the good old days of the Cold War, when everyone knew the drill. We spied on the Soviet Union, they spied on us. Every now and again, the odd one was caught and the ritual dance cranked up: they expelled a few from your embassy there, you expelled a few from their embassy here. Face was saved, and honour satisfied, and business as usual recommenced.

Well, I say ‘business as usual’, but business is most of what makes the difference. The USSR had plenty of hard power but we weren’t tied to its economic apron-strings in the way we increasingly are to China. As it happened, back then the USSR needed the West (since foreign exports were the only thing keeping its economy afloat) rather more than the West needed them.

But China is in no such position of dependence – if their trade with the UK froze it’s the UK (especially now we’re out of Europe) that would suffer. Their espionage programme is even bound up with their economic might: stealing Western intellectual property, notoriously, has been a contributor to the Chinese miracle. And thanks to the Belt and Road initiative, Chinese money has bought it political sway all over the world, which is laundered back into economic advantage.

So-called China hawks would like us to take a cooler approach, but Rishi has already ruled that out on grounds of pragmatism: ‘I don’t think it’s kind of smart or sophisticated foreign policy to reduce our relationship with China – which after all is a country with one and a half billion people, the second biggest economy, and member of the UN security council.’

Fair enough. Perhaps being not so subtly spied on is just the price of getting by. Everyone wants China’s cash, and nobody wants, for that matter, to risk encouraging it in any more sympathy for Vladimir Putin’s war on the West. So when we catch them with their fingers in the file marked ‘Top Secret’, we just have to suck it down.

There is a moment in the matchless 80s comedy Planes, Trains and Automobiles in which the mild-mannered Steve Martin character, driven to distraction by the latest in a long series of transport-related cock-ups, finally loses his rag with an unhelpful car hire guy. Does his moment of assertiveness, his mouse-that-roared access of bravery, pay off? It does not. The guy puts him on his back with a straight punch to the nose, and the following scene finds Martin and Candy rolling down the highway with the latter remarking: ‘I’ve never seen a guy picked up by his testicles before.’

This has always struck me as what some call a teachable moment. Bullies aren’t always cowards. Standing up for yourself doesn’t always pay the dividends that a sense of natural justice would lead us to hope. And I’m rather afraid that in this version of the story, Rishi knows that he’s Steve Martin, Li Qiang is car hire guy, and the rest of the world is John Candy.