London | In a week where the British media was consumed with whether or not Prime Minister David Cameron took part in a sordid initiation ceremony involving a deceased pig during his university years, you may have missed the news that Britain is close to becoming the first Western nation to greenlight the construction of a Chinese-designed nuclear power.
Speaking in Beijing at the start of a week-long tour, Chancellor George Osborne signalled that Beijing would play a key role in building and operating the next generation of nuclear plants in Britain, worth tens of billions of pounds. 
An agreement struck between the British government, the publicly owned nuclear company EDF and two Chinese state-owned enterprises means Beijing will help pay for the delayed Hinkley Point project in Somerset and a nuclear reactor in Suffolk. In return, the Chinese will build and operate a proposed Essex plant, the first of its kind in the West.
Australia does not have nuclear power-generating facilities. But it is extremely unlikely that work of a similar sensitivity or scale would have been awarded to a Chinese firm.
After all, this is the country where the government blocked Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei from working on the National Broadband Network after Australia's intelligence agency warned national security could be breached. Similarly, it would almost certainly not happen in the United States, where President Barack Obama took the unusual step of blocking a Chinese company in 2012 from acquiring four wind-farm projects in Oregon, which were located in or close to restricted airspace.
Yet in Britain, the announcement was not regarded as particularly controversial. What debate there was mainly focused on the economics of the plants and the appropriateness of bolstering the country's nuclear generation capacity. National security was seemingly a second-order issue.
Britain's relaxed attitude towards Beijing should come as no surprise. China already holds significant stakes in Britain's strategic infrastructure, including Heathrow Airport, Thames Water and its busiest port - Felixstowe in Suffolk. There is no NBN in Britain, but Huawei has won big contracts from the privately owned BT to build its broadband network.
This push to create even stronger commercial links with China - while downplaying the national security risks - was underlined by Osborne's remarkable five-day tour of the Middle Kingdom, which ended on Thursday.
Osborne did not just compliment his hosts. Britain's likely next prime minister used what was effectively his debut on the international stage to heap praise on China every chance he got. "My message is that Britain can't run away from China," he said on his first day when he met Premier Li Keqiang. "Quite the opposite, we should run towards China."
"Let's stick together to make Britain China's best partner in the West," he later said at the Shanghai stock exchange, a symbolically important venue given its central role in the Black Monday market meltdown. Calling for a "golden relationship with China that will help foster a golden decade for this country", he declared "our two great cultures" have "arguably done more to shape the world than any other".
Osborne, who visited the sensitive Xinjiang region, where the local Uighur people have long complained about state repression, earned praise from Chinese media for not stressing human rights during his visit.
Britain is no different to most Western powers which must balance their desire to profit from China's transformation into an economic superpower with their fears about its long-term strategic goals. But Osborne's unabashed enthusiasm - or "grovelling behaviour", as former BP executive Nick Butler put it - has become a source of concern for some of its allies.
Worried about Britain's move to become a founding member of the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank earlier this year, US officials privately complained that 10 Downing Street had become too accommodating towards Beijing. While Australia became a shareholder of the AIIB despite US and Japanese concerns, sources told The Australian Financial Review that Canberra shared some of the broader anxiety about Britain's China stance.
It would be wrong to overstate the magnitude of these Australian concerns. "It is nuanced, something that exists around the margins," one source said. "It is certainly not expressed on an official level." However, Britain's drive to sell as many Range Rovers and Rolls-Royce aircraft engines as possible to China could potentially affect the delicate strategic balance in the Asia-Pacific region.
One obvious area of concern to the US and Australia is the contested areas of the South China Sea, where China's territorial ambitions have been the source of geopolitical tension.
Britain may have been overtaken by the US, but it remains a powerful Western democracy. It has a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council and retains at least some of its old diplomatic influence. Yet while new Australian officials, including Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, have attempted to put pressure on Beijing for "pushing the envelope" of acceptable behaviour, their British equivalents have been reluctant to criticise China.
Hints of underlying frustration about the different approaches to China on the South China Sea disputes, and other key security issues, are unlikely to put any genuine strain on the Anglo-Australia relationship. But they do serve as a reminder that the British government has decided on a different path to the US.
When national security concerns have been raised in the past by British intelligence services or defence officials, the economic arguments for building closer ties with Beijing and encouraging investment have always won out. With Britain's unapologetic attempts to ingratiate itself with China already paying dividends - Britain is the top European destination for Chinese money by a long way - this won't change any time soon.
James Chessell is The Australian Financial Review's European correspondent.