This week almost three years after his arrest, during which he has been held in solitary confinement with less than an hour a day allowed for exercise outside his cell, Jimmy Lai has at last come to trial.

Not that this is a trial as we would understand it. Jimmy doesn’t even have a Sue Neill-Fraser chance of avoiding conviction. The National Security Legislation (NSL) is so righteous and fair according to Chinese authorities it has a 100 per cent conviction rate.

They never get it wrong, and they can say that without any sense of Orwellian irony, because in a totalitarian state the very fact of being charged precludes even the slightest assumption of innocence.

It would be laughable were it not so serious.

Seventy-six-year-old Jimmy Lai, looking so much frailer than when I last saw him, is deadset to be convicted and to die in prison.

While the Australian government has been quiet (we wouldn’t want human rights to interfere with the gas, coal and iron ore trade) Britain’s Foreign Minister, David Cameron has taken a much tougher line with Beijing.

“As a prominent and outspoken journalist and publisher, Jimmy Lai, has been targeted in a clear attempt to stop the peaceful exercise of his rights to freedom of expression and association,” Cameron warned.

“I call on the Hong Kong authorities to end their prosecution and release Jimmy Lai.”

Lai is technically a UK citizen as are many Hong Kong residents. Cameron pointed out that HK’s national security law is a “clear breach” of the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984 which guaranteed a high degree of self-rule and freedom of speech under a “one country, two systems” agreement.

With that accord now apparently completely void it is little wonder Taiwan is so nervous.

Of course, Jimmy Lai could see this coming. I first met him just before the 1997 British “handover” of their Hong Kong Crown colony to what was then a much more moderate China.

Xi Jinping was still years away from the presidency, but China watchers could already detect a growing frostiness.

So, Lai always hoped for the best but was bravely prepared for the worst. “For Hong Kong to remain a free democracy will require either the strongest support from other democratic nations or a change of regime in Beijing,” he told me.

“I owe everything to the people of Hong Kong. I have had a wonderful life and if I end up in prison, I will just have to see it as a kind of redemption.”

I was once a frequent visitor to Hong Kong both for work and pleasure. My wife and I holidayed there when the city seemed so free and easy. A capitalist entrepot for socialist China, every bank in the world was represented there as was every form of international business and indeed every global news outfit.

I don’t go there any more for obvious reasons. Most media companies now report on China from Taiwan or from Singapore which is rapidly becoming the new Hong Kong.

And the same with commerce. As David Cameron warned the Chinese government, “Actions that stifle press freedom and restrict the free flow of information – as well as Beijing’s changes to the Hong Kong electoral system — have undermined Hong Kong’s democratic institutions and harmed Hong Kong’s reputation as an international business and financial hub.”

Pretty soon Albo’s Wine and Lobster Shop might be the only foreign business on Hong Kong’s famous old Pottinger Street.

Many of the bankers who once treated journalists there to famously delicious, deep-fried oysters, have now relocated to Raffles Square in Singapore, where there aren’t armed soldiers on every street corner.

But don’t take my word for it. If you don’t have a beef about democracy, human rights and free speech, by all means go to Hong Kong and look for yourself.

After the handover many prescient and rich Chinese fled to places like Sydney and Vancouver.

But Jimmy Lai, brave or foolhardy, stayed on in the city into which as a child he had smuggled himself from mainland China.

“I was alone, a penniless 12-year-old who sneaked into town by night in a leaking fishing boat.”

He told how his first job as a child-labourer in the unregulated 1960s workplace earned him $8 per month.

That was the tale which made him the archetypical Hong Kong success story. He went on to build a billion-dollar fortune in the clothing business, but journalism was his passion and in the end his undoing.

Though, sadly these days that salutary tale of loss of freedom has also become an archetypal Hong Kong story.

Ten years ago, Jimmy should have taken his money and run.

He could have bought the Sydney Chinese Daily and livened it up a bit.

When I first met Jimmy Lai his Apple Daily was HK’s most popular Chinese language tabloid. He reminded me of a younger Rupert Murdoch and his paper, a Chinese version of The News of the World.

At the time I defined it as lurid, populist, sensational and fiercely pro-freedom. Of course, it was only the last little bit that made the regime dislike Jimmy Lai.

Preposterously he is now charged with “collusion with foreign forces” and of seeking to destabilise Hong Kong.

And he will be found guilty. As a barrister on Lai’s international legal team which is disallowed from representing him in Hong Kong, said this week, “The fundamental principle of the rule of law is eroded.

Everyone knows there’s only going to be one result- it’s absolutely plain.”

I liked Jimmy Lai. I hope I told him so.

Had he not been so stubbornly brave, had he not wilfully refused to read the lessons of history, there would certainly have been a most valuable place for him in Australian journalism.

But now all we can do is remember him.

Charles Wooley is a Tasmania-based journalist.