It’s a relief not to have been pressganged into joining the Prime Minister’s plane-load of business chiefs and reporters bound for Beijing this week. With Sir Keir Starmer are leaders of the likes of Astra-Zeneca, BP, HSBC, JLR and Rolls-Royce, and some billion-pound deals will no doubt be announced while they’re there – agreed in advance on the condition that Downing Street gave the green light for China’s Royal Mint Court mega-embassy-cum-listening-post on the edge of the City.

The Chancellor is on the trip too, perhaps carrying a nice set of hunting prints as a housewarming gift for London ambassador Zheng Zeguang’s new office. But as is routine for senior visitors to China, the delegation will have been advised not to take their laptops and mobiles for fear of hacking, not to do anything embarrassing in bugged hotel rooms and not to say anything provocative about human rights.

If the Daily Mail was cruel to call this a ‘kowtowing’ visit for Starmer ‘on his knees’, the fact is that British companies have invested far more in China than the reverse in recent years. In 2023, the latest year for which data is available, ‘foreign direct investment’ from China to the UK was £3.7 billion, comprising just 0.2 per cent of the incoming total and ranking below Austria in importance. As one Beijing-watcher puts it: ‘China is an absolute minnow in terms of the amounts it contributes to the British economy.’

Ah yes, ministers will say, but we’ll be urging them to invest much more. Keep buying our electric vehicles and solar panels, Beijing will reply, and we might consider it – but while you’re here, we’ll take a close look at any advanced technologies your companies are unwise enough to show us. Instead of that line-up of boardroom suits, perhaps Starmer should have been joined by Tom Hiddleston as Jonathan Pine from The Night Manager to show how smart our own spies can be – and some of those sex-mad cokehead bankers from Industry, as a warning of the temptations awaiting young Chinese ‘diplomats’ in London.

AI vs AI

How is it possible that UK universities have produced (according to the Centre for Social Justice) 700,000 unjobbed graduates who are claiming benefits, a third of them citing health problems as their reason for not working? Is it about ‘Mickey Mouse degrees’ that employers won’t look at, or an epidemic of Gen Z listlessness, or an AI-fuelled crash in vacancies, or all three?

Ben Taylor, managing director of the Give a Grad a Go recruitment agency that places university leavers, tells me that the market has been in steady decline since 2022, particularly in tech-led scale-ups where hiring has almost completely dried up. His firm handles 20,000 applications per month but only the very top echelon find the career path of their choice or dreams.

There are still jobs to be had in financial services and niche sectors such as ‘proptech’. But overall, the best hope is that companies will begin to realise they won’t have good managers in ten years’ time if they don’t hire junior talent now. Meanwhile, it’s a story of ‘more and more grads with less valuable degrees and huge student debts, entering an AI-vs-AI battlefield’: AI software being used both to write applications and to assess them, for jobs that can largely be done by AI anyway. A dismal prospect indeed – but a time to revalue so many other human skills.

Riding for a fall

‘Trump derangement syndrome’ is used by Donald Trump’s supporters to describe opponents’ heightened emotional hostility to everything the US President does. But I suspect history may find a better use for the phrase: the frenzy of foreign policy thrusts, insults and reversals that has characterised his behaviour so far this year will come to be known as the Great Trump Derangement that preceded whatever turns out to be the Trump denouement.

Amid the chaos, you may be wondering whether there are ways to make money out of it. Gold is still an obvious play, despite having already doubled in sterling value in less than two years. If you’re a professional foreign exchange trader, you’ll be tempted to back the pound for a continued run against a US dollar weakened by anti-Trump sentiment: 1.30 in November, 1.37 this week, 1.40 soon. If you’re a fan of Mark Carney – these days the Clark Kent of G7 leaders to Starmer’s Frank Spencer – you might want to pick up some perky Canadian dollars.

But if you’re an armchair punter with a Ladbrokes or Coral account, why not consider a flutter at odds of 10/3 on the Trump presidency terminating before the end of this year – by impeachment, under the 25th Amendment which provides for mental or physical incapacity, or tragically face-down in a platter of Big Macs. Reportedly, that’s the way punters’ money has been pointing.

The odds on him staying in the White House until ‘2029 or later’ are still much shorter, at 4/6 on, as might be expected in the natural order of events. But in every possible sense, where’s the joy in that?

Face-off

A Trump cameo that lingers in mind from the past fortnight was his gangsterish warning to Denmark that America must have Greenland: ‘You can say no and we will remember.’ The sinister glow of his fake tan on that occasion in Davos put me in mind of a recent incident when I was resting between matinee and evening pantomime performances, but expecting an Amazon delivery.

In response to a firm knock, I opened my front door – to an unsmiling woman I’d never seen before, who said assertively: ‘I understand there’s a house for sale here.’ She clearly meant mine, which is attractive but not for sale. ‘Not to my knowledge,’ was my curt reply. ‘Oh yes,’ she insisted, until I stepped into the light. She backed away with a look of horror – and I realised I was still wearing full panto-dame make-up with purple eyeshadow. That might be one way to give the President a taste of his own tactics.