“Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue,” said the French moralist, Francois de la Rochefoucauld.

The UK foreign secretary, Lord (David) Cameron, has five deputies, one of whom is Anne-Marie Trevelyan, the minister for the Indo-Pacific.

When the secretary for financial services, Chris Hui Ching-Yu, visited the UK in 2023, he met Trevelyan to discuss business ties, and she has now reciprocated.

On April 19, Trevelyan embarked on a six-day visit to China, with Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin on her itinerary. While in Hong Kong, she said she would discuss “our important trade links”, which sounded positive enough. She also wanted a “constructive and open relationship” with China, which was also promising.

However, she then poisoned the atmosphere with reckless criticisms of her hosts. These were not only regrettable, but also self-defeating, and did not bode well for her mission.

Acting presumably on Cameron’s instructions (he issued a profoundly flawed six-monthly report about Hong Kong on April 15), Trevelyan said that, while in Hong Kong, she would raise concerns over the “erosion” of rights and freedoms after the enactment in March of the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance (SNSO). In Beijing, she said she would “be clear about our right to act when China breaks its international commitments or violates human rights”.

Although such undiplomatic posturing cannot have pleased her hosts, they would not have expected much of one of Cameron’s minions.        

However crass, Trevelyan’s behavior was also revelatory. It showed just how much the West begrudges China’s right to protect its national security and its willingness to leave Hong Kong vulnerable to the types of machinations that almost destroyed the “one country, two systems” principle in 2019-20. And this was not all.

On April 27, in The Spectator, the former director of operations and intelligence at the UK’s secret intelligence service MI6, Nigel Inkster, wrote that neither the British nor the US intelligence agencies “make a secret of the fact that they collect intelligence on China”. Much of this will have been done in Hong Kong (both before and after 1997), but its scope has been greatly reduced with the enactment of the SNSO (which clamped down on spying). This has inevitably irked some foreign intelligence agencies.  

In any event, Hong Kong’s national security mechanisms were none of Trevelyan’s business. If, before her trip, she had bothered to study the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984, she would have discovered that national security was not included in its ambit.

This apart, the UK, on Trevelyan’s watch, enacted its own much-criticized National Security Act in 2023. It not only introduced a battery of offenses covering espionage, sabotage and foreign interference, but also widened police powers and curbed the pre-trial rights of suspects.

Trevelyan’s comments, therefore, were a classic instance of what, in England, they call “the pot calling the kettle black”.

In Beijing, Trevelyan met the vice foreign affairs minister, Deng Li. Like the curate’s egg, the meeting appeared to have been good in parts, and there were some helpful trade discussions. However, she again chose to propagandize, imagining it would play well at home.  

Her spokesman said Trevelyan had “made UK concerns clear on human rights, the implementation of national security legislation and connected cases in Hong Kong, including Jimmy Lai’s ongoing trial” (the Lai reference smacked of an attempt to pervert the course of public justice, a serious offense in both the UK and Hong Kong).  

In another bizarre twist, Trevelyan called upon her hosts to lift Beijing’s sanctions “on MPs and other British nationals”. This was a reference to the measures taken by Beijing in 2021 against several leading British sinophobes (including Iain Duncan Smith, David Alton and Helena Kennedy) who were believed to have been trying to destabilize China by spreading myths about its situation.

As Cameron, on March 25, less than a month before Trevelyan’s visit, had, without due process, slapped sanctions on two Chinese nationals, Zhao Guangzong and Ni Gaobin, her request must have stunned her hosts.

It was fortunate for Trevelyan that she left China when she did, on April 24. She got out in the nick of time, just as the shocking news of her government’s misconduct was breaking. Had she not departed that day, her hypocrisy would have been even more obvious to her hosts than it already was

In any event, as Trevelyan must have known, the UK triggered the sanctions cycle in the first place. On March 22, 2021, in a crude provocation, the then-foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, in response to anti-China lobbying by the likes of Duncan Smith, sanctioned four Chinese officials. It was only after this misstep that Duncan Smith and his cronies faced repercussions.  

It was fortunate for Trevelyan that she left China when she did, on April 24. She got out in the nick of time, just as the shocking news of her government’s misconduct was breaking. Had she not departed that day, her hypocrisy would have been even more obvious to her hosts than it already was.

As Trevelyan flew home, Amnesty International, which styles itself “the world’s leading human rights organization”, published its annual global report, and its assessment of the UK’s human rights record was damning. It said Britain was weakening human rights protections both nationally and internationally.

Its UK chief executive, Sacha Deshmukh, explained how Britain was “deliberately destabilizing the entire concept of universal human rights through its appalling domestic policies and politicking”.

Whereas, he said, the UK, in breach of its international human rights commitments, had targeted protesters and asylum seekers, its Public Order Act 2023 had eroded the freedoms of assembly and expression (the very things Trevelyan was prattling away about during her China visit).

Moreover, the UK was also failing on its wider responsibilities, notably in Palestine. Deshmukh explained how “the wheels are coming off the rules-based system” (confirming what many observers already knew), and said the UK had “a particular responsibility to help set this right”. Nobody, however, should hold their breath, given the scale of its irresponsibility.

Deshmukh highlighted the UK’s failure to use its role in the United Nations to prevent human rights violations in Gaza (where over 34,000 people have been killed, mostly Palestinian women and children), its tepid support of the International Criminal Court (which is investigating those responsible for the genocide), and its involvement in weaponizing Israel (about 15 percent of the F-35 warplanes being used by Israel against the civilian population in Gaza contain UK parts or components).

The UK (whose foreign policy is primarily shaped by Cameron and Trevelyan) had, the report concluded, failed “to help prevent civilian slaughter in Gaza”.

Against this background, it beggared belief that Trevelyan had presumed to lecture China on human rights.

On April 9, moreover, Cameron, despite the carnage (including the killing, nine days previously, of seven aid workers, three of them British, by Israeli troops), announced that the UK would not suspend arms sales by British companies to Israel.

However, with the latest revelation of yet another massacre of civilians by Israeli troops in Gaza, Cameron and Trevelyan will hopefully be urgently rethinking their stance.

On April 24, it was revealed that a mass grave containing over 300 bodies had been discovered inside the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, from which Israeli forces had withdrawn on April 7. The victims included women, children, patients and medical staff. According to the UN human rights office spokesman Ravina Shamdasani, some of the bodies were found with their hands tied behind their backs and stripped of their clothes.

Although Cameron is desperate to assist Israel, another US proxy, he must, if he has any humanity left in him, have a bottom line. The UN human rights commissioner, Volker Turk, has pointed out that the “intentional killing of civilians, detainees and others” is a “war crime”, and he and Trevelyan cannot pretend not to have heard him.

Cameron’s duty is clear. He must end UK arms sales to Israel, act to protect Rafah’s civilian population, invoke the UK’s Global Human Rights sanctions regime against the individuals and entities responsible for systemic violations in Gaza, and provide support for the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan KC (a Briton). Khan is currently investigating the war crimes and crimes against humanity being committed by Israel in Gaza, and he needs all the assistance he can get from the UK in determining which Israeli politicians and soldiers should stand trial.

If, however, Cameron refuses to act, Trevelyan’s duty will be clear. If, as she wanted everybody in China to believe, she cares about human rights, she must walk away. If Amnesty International’s report has not opened her eyes, the Gazan massacres should surely have done so.

If, however, Trevelyan does nothing, everybody will see her as a fraud. Far from being the human rights champion she posed as in China, she will, like the egregious Liz Truss before her, stand exposed as just another careerist hoping to prosper by besmirching China.

If the domestic policies of Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government are even half as bad as its foreign policy, it is little wonder, according to the opinion polls, it is facing oblivion in the forthcoming general election.

The author is a senior counsel and law professor, and was previously the director of public prosecutions of the Hong Kong SAR.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.