Every winter for the last decade, Huawei has hosted a concert at the Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank. The event, in aid of charity, has been an opportunity for bosses to gather partners and politicians for an evening of canapés and pop-classical from the likes of Bryn Terfel and Katherine Jenkins.

It is the type of gentle exercise of soft power many large corporates use to thank their allies and collect new ones, even if Huawei’s budget has always seemed bigger than most.

As Huawei has been engulfed by a global crisis that last week led to US allegations racketeering and theft on a grand scale, however, it has made more aggressive efforts to make friends and influence policy. Huawei has spent heavily to recruit a phalanx of consultants to help underpin its case and argue it more forcefully.

For instance, The Telegraph can reveal Huawei has been working with Flint Global, a consulting firm founded by Ed Richards, former Ofcom chief and Sir Simon Fraser, the former head of the Foreign Office that has been providing advice to Huawei on key government matters.

Until 2018, it employed Robert Hannigan, the former boss of GCHQ, who last year wrote an article in The Financial Times opposing a full ban on Huawei. Hannigan’s friends say he has done no work for Huawei and intended to defend an existing system of security checks that he played a role in developing.