Does life get any better than this? You step off your private jet in Rio de Janeiro, you step into your limousine and almost within a matter of seconds, the world’s most powerful man is doing exactly what you told him to do, which is to read out your weird meaningless soundbites, for the benefit of the invited media.
But, sadly for Sir Keir Starmer it only lasted two minutes before it all went wrong. He was taking part in the first UK bilateral meeting with Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, for six years on the fringes of the G20 summit. And not one of those weird, cutesy ones either. He hadn’t done a Cameron, and dragged Xi to a country pub and made him