Britain’s top diplomats will leave their posts next week to descend en masse on Beijing less than four months before it hosts the Olympic Games.

Our men in Washington, Paris, Moscow, the United Nations and the European Union will join the Ambassador to China on Monday and Tuesday for what, on the surface, looks a fairly mundane mission but which away from the public gaze may turn out to be decidedly more delicate.

The high-level encounters with members of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs come after China’s presence in Tibet was given world prominence by the public relations disaster of the Olympic torch relay.

The Foreign Office was at pains last night to reject any suggestions that the British diplomats are in Beijing to teach the Chinese diplomacy before the arrival of tens of thousands of spectators and journalists for the Games. That was despite one British source having told The Times that he thought Britain’s use of multilateral diplomacy around the world would be an area for discussion.

Their mission, on the contrary, is to follow through Gordon Brown’s initiative on reforming the world’s leading institutions, Foreign Office officials said last night.

But it would be surprising if, with China’s human rights record again under ferocious scrutiny, the Chinese diplomats did not seek the views of their visitors on how to react to embarrassing criticism while the Games are proceeding. It would also be surprising if the British did not raise issues such as China’s support for the Mugabe Government in Zimbabwe and the Khartoum regime over Darfur.

— President Sarkozy of France criticised Chinese conduct in Tibet last night, saying that he had not decided whether to carry out his threat to boycott the opening ceremony of the Olympics. “I cannot accept what happened in Tibet,” he said in an interview. “I was shocked and I said so to the President of China.”