The London Times asked "Who are the other boys in blue?"

The unanswered question yesterday was: just who were the Chinese minders who formed a protective ring around the torch?

Lodged between the torchbearers and officers from the Metropolitan Police, a group of Chinese officials shadowed the flame along the route.

Wearing blue and white Beijing 2008 tracksuits, the eleven men were officially described as "flame attendants" responsible for the safe passage of the torch on its journey around the world. They ran in symmetry and remained in touch via earpieces.

Organisers said the men were employees of the Beijing Olympic Organising Committee (Bocog). They landed with the flame at Heathrow on Saturday on a chartered Air China flight from St Petersburg and will go on to Paris.

Ministers said that they had no knowledge of their diplomatic status. Bob Broadhurst, the commanding officer for the Met's £1 million security operation, said: "They are from Bocog. What their status beyond that is, I don't know. Their prime role is to look after the torch and keep the flame alive."

He cited the precedent of the Tour de France, which started from London last summer and involved about 80 French police officers on motorcycles managing the peloton and the support vehicles.

And the UK Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/apr/07/olympicgames2008.china3 described the latest UK-China export trade. The UK sent away human rights; China sent them secret police:

Thirty-seven people were arrested and, long before Ellen MacArthur took the flame on its final journey across the Thames, security concerns meant that the runners carrying it were obscured behind a phalanx of police and Chinese security guards provided by Beijing.

Before the torch arrived police circulated among Tibetan demonstrators ordering them to remove T-shirts and confiscating Tibetan flags in an apparent breach of a promise from Met commanders that police would not intervene to prevent embarrassment to Beijing.

Yonten Ngama, a Tibetan who has been resident in the UK for four years, was ordered to remove a T-shirt scrawled with three slogans, 'China Stop the Killing', 'No Torch in Tibet' and 'Talk to the Dalai Lama'. "They didn't tell me why, they just said I couldn't wear it," he said. Police on the ground declined to comment on the reasons for confiscating the T-shirt.