Richard Spencer (Extracted from "Protesters and pomp awaiting China's man of mystery", Daily Telegraph, 8 November 2005)

"The Queen will today personally welcome the Chinese leader Hu Jintao on his first state visit to Britain, with all the pomp and ceremony the monarchy has to offer. After the Princess Royal and her husband, Rear-Adml Timothy Lawrence, have met Mr Hu and his wife at Heathrow, the Queen will greet them on Horse Guards, before accompanying them in a carriage procession up the Mall to Buckingham Palace."

[Ed: Hu Jintao will actually process -- at modest speed no doubt -- in a carriage up the Mall to Buckingham Palace. This is much more dignified than driving at high speed in an armoured car with numerous gun-toting outriders as President Bush did when he visited in 2004. But President Hu will undoubtedly be aware of protesters who, knowing little or nothing of a Chinese civilisation that has been immeasurably superior to Europe's for most of the last three thousand years, wants him to inject our notions of democracy and electoral showmanship as though by a hypodermic syringe. Before they read Chinese history, such human rights people might also read a little British history, too, and realise that democracy took at least two hundred years to establish here and only then after the industrial revolution had brought prosperity and political consciousness to the ordinary workingman first.]