Medical assistants pose after returning to Zhejiang province from Wuhan, where they had been fighting coronavirus

More than 80 per cent of Britons want Boris Johnson to push for an international inquiry into China’s handling of the initial coronavirus outbreak, according to a poll.

The survey also revealed that 71 per cent of the public wanted ministers to sue the Chinese government for damages if it became evident that President Xi’s administration had breached international law in its response to the coronavirus.

The poll, commissioned last week by the Henry Jackson Society, a British neoconservative foreign affairs think tank, showed that 74 per cent of the UK public thought that China was to blame for allowing Covid-19 to spread.

Last week Downing Street for the first time explicitly named China as the source of the virus. Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary,