Let’s look this pair of gift pandas in the mouth

The Chinese are doing their panda thing again, buying international goodwill by depositing one of these doomed and slightly sinister creatures with any country which might otherwise have an objection to their foreign or domestic policy. Worried about human rights and prisoners of conscience? ‘Ere you go, mate, have a panda and shut your gob. Top-quality panda this is, ten years old, one previous owner, runs on bamboo, very eco-friendly. Shove it in a zoo and watch the kiddies pour in. We do a sideline in panda mugs and panda toys — all manufactured by kiddies, as it happens — and we’ll bung you some of them too for a pony.’

It usually works, the so-called panda diplomacy, no matter how many people the Chinese government might be arresting or shooting at any particular moment. It worked a treat, for example, on Edward Heath — who perhaps felt a certain concord with a baleful, solitary and endangered creature incapable of sexual intercourse. The Chinese bunged him Chia Chia and Ching Ching after he’d been on a state visit in 1974 and for a while news reporters and the Blue Peter crew were camped outside their cages at London Zoo, anticipating frenzied sexual activities and the birth of a likkle baby panda cub.

But pandas, by and large, do not mate, which is the principal reason they are so endangered. Apparently only 40 per cent of male pandas ever exhibit any form of sexual desire — a bit like Ukrainians. And those are figures culled from wild pandas (please don’t ask me how); the libido of captive male pandas is still more stunted and forlorn, registering somewhere in the region of 82 per cent who feel themselves, perhaps for progressive social reasons, alienated from the coercive act of sex.