According to his friend, film producer Damon Bryant, one of the first on the scene, the flat was pristine: “He put flowers in every vase. He was as sober as a judge. There were no drugs. He knew exactly what he was doing.”

His funeral about a month later was spectacular, even by Soho’s flamboyant standards. A horse-drawn cortege inched its way around the tight grid of streets. Thousands of mourners followed; among them Sienna Miller, Sadie Frost, Alfie Allen, Noel Fielding, Robert Elms and Jaime Winstone. All of them knew the little man who was lying there, silent, and alone.

Bernie Katz was the man they called the Prince of Soho. For 27 years, he had worked as front-of-house manager of the Groucho Club, the long-established and exclusive private members’ club in Soho where, in the 90s, Princess Diana went to lunch and Bill Clinton once played saxophone: a dizzily decadent playground for the rich, the famous and the not-so-famous.

The term “Prince of Soho” was marked out in flowers on the horse-drawn hearse; his title was coined by the actor and writer Stephen Fry, who was closer to Bernie than most.

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Bernie’s funeral made the BBC News at 6pm; he would have been thrilled, everyone said. As TV and radio presenter Robert Elms put it: “He was the essence of this place. He was preposterous, he was gorgeous, he was five foot nothing and had a heart bigger than this square… Bernie knew everybody. If you were touched by Bernie — and it probably meant he touched your bottom — you stayed touched.” Noel Fielding described him as “always in a leopard-skin jacket, whirling around like a windmill. He was a character. I don’t think those people exist anymore.”

Yes, he was a character — but what kind of character? As a member of the Groucho, I knew him a bit, but not well. One person told me that Bernie was the sort of person who was your friend for 60 seconds — and would then disappear. The circumstances of his death — and the strange events that led to his demise, from the moment he left the Groucho in unexplained circumstances a few months before — are explored in my podcast series, Bernie: Who Killed the Prince of Soho?.

Bernie’s death was a shock to many. But it was also a motif — an acknowledgment of another death; that of old Soho itself.

Nowadays, Soho’s spirit has been sold to the highest bidder; the developers have got their way. Independent restaurants are few and far between — on Broadwick Street, there is now a branch of the Ivy, unthinkable 20 years ago. Berwick Street market, for years an impeccable source of all manner of questionable items has been gentrified. The fruit vendors have made way for stalls selling flat whites and falafels.

These streets were once Bernie’s manor: he had worked in the West End pretty much from the moment he left school. Born in 1967 to a Jewish family in south London, as a teenager he witnessed the murder of his father, a gangster called Brian “Little Legs” Clifford. Bernie would later write of his “gangster father” whose life ended with a bullet in the head: “So used was I to a life of drive-by shootings, I thought nothing of the sound of that gunshot, except that it intruded upon my viewing of the Price Is Right.”

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That murder has never been solved. And neither was Bernie’s own demise. Indeed, the latter, as I discovered, was never properly investigated.

Bernie had joined the Groucho as barman in 1990, just before Cool Britannia when the club was at its drug-fuelled zenith: even though the management had — and still has — a strict zero-tolerance policy of drugs.

The Groucho is the kind of place that is guaranteed to divide opinion; there are those, like me, who are long-standing members, and won’t have a word said against it. Others are less enamoured, dismissing it as pretentious and elitist. (To which members reply: isn’t that the point of a club?)

Founded in 1985, the Groucho began as a club for the media and publishing worlds. By the 90s, it had become an infamous celebrity haunt. Inevitably, some members did drugs; the upstairs snooker room was occasionally known as the “Peruvian Procurement Department”. In 1996, the room was the scene of a furious showdown between actress Patsy Kensit and her then-boyfriend, Liam Gallagher. Glasses and snooker balls were thrown, and Gallagher ended up trashing not just the table but the room itself.

Other moments, too, became Groucho legend: Melvyn Bragg chatting to U2; Friends star Matt LeBlanc propping up the bar alone one Saturday night; Dancer Wayne Sleep once took Princess Diana there for lunch — and handed her the bill. On one memorable night in 1995, Damien Hirst put his £20,000 Turner Prize money behind the downstairs bar.

And throughout it all, Bernie was there. He would sashay from table to table, clad in leopard skin and Cuban heels, soothing the pampered members, dealing with their tantrums, dropping in a witty or caustic remark. The Bernie stories, like the man himself, were outrageous, lurid and always true. He proved his chutzpah by once ejecting Madonna for being rude.

Stephen Fry, a founder member of the Groucho, was closer to Bernie than most. “My first impressions were of a huge, vibrant and outgoing personality,” he told me. “All hugs, grins, extravagant language and wild attire.” But, he went on: “There probably was something sad about Bernie …  It may seem glamorous… but in fact there was a lot of work, very little money and too many temptations into addiction and late nights.”

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I talked to dozens of Bernie’s friends, family members and Groucho regulars: all spoke warmly of him, though some were curiously reluctant to go into detail about the last weeks of his life. Others were deeply puzzled. Actress Alison Steadman told me: “Bernie was fun and kind. When he walked in, the room lit up. I have never been able to establish exactly what happened and why… but whatever it was, it was so wrong.”

So what did happen to Bernie? Bernie’s tragedy, his surviving family and friends told me, was that after he left the Groucho, with no regular job, he had begun to succumb to the addictions that had dogged him through his life.

The precise reasons for his departure were never properly explained, though many believe his self-indulgent figure ran counter to Soho’s sanitised new world. Whatever the truth, without that job he lost his own sense of worth. He soon found himself short of money, and ended up taking small loans from friends.

And then, his close friends told me, things quickly escalated. Put bluntly, he got on the wrong side of the wrong type of people — specifically, it was whispered, Albanian gangsters and their constant demands for repayment over drug debts. As one friend said: “He had a lot of debt, and that debt was related to buying cocaine, which there were rumours it was an Eastern European gang. That was being spoken about a lot… thirty grand to the Albanians, or whatever it was.”

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How China bought Britain's universities

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The drug trade in Soho, for most of Bernie’s life, was dominated by Italians and Maltese gangsters. But sometime in the last decade, the Albanians squeezed them out. They were frighteningly ruthless, violent and brooked no dissent. Bernard Clifford Katz — camp, easy-going and sweet-natured — would not have stood a chance.

Certainly by the time of his death, the Albanians had cemented their control in London. Even now, four years after Bernie’s death, they are still at the forefront of the cocaine trade in this country which is worth billions.

Perhaps if the Albanians had stayed out of Soho, just at the time Bernie was working there, he might never have fallen out with gangsters. If he hadn’t been such a gregarious soul, he might have kept his job. And if he’d have kept his nose clean — in every sense of the phrase — he might still be welcoming guests into reception and charging across the room in his Cuban heels.

But that wasn’t to be. For Bernie, Soho was a timeless neighbourhood of decadence and debauchery. Until it wasn’t.

After his death, the Groucho renamed its downstairs restaurant “Bernie’s” in his honour. On one wall sits a beautiful portrait of him; he looks strangely relaxed and at peace — a memory to a golden era of Soho that has since decayed.

Bernie: Who Killed the Prince of Soho is available at now.

There was, however, a small glint on the horizon: a fleet of 31 privately chartered passenger jets that were scheduled to land, regardless of the new restrictions. Their cargo? Some 7,000 students from China — all specially flown in to study at universities in Manchester and the north of England.

After they landed, a handful of Manchester’s leading dignatories lined up to talk about the importance of “links between Britain and China” and “greater cultural understanding”. The socially distanced love-in was cemented by none other than the Chinese Consul General in Manchester, Mr Zheng Xiyuan: “We trust all students will work hard to become not just the backbone of our society but also messengers of friendship between our two peoples.”

Of course, no one would surely deny that it is important to maintain cordial relations with one of the world’s superpowers. But, as those planes touched down on the runway, there was no getting away from the cold reality — even in this time of crisis, even with all scheduled direct flights between China and Manchester cancelled at the time, Britain’s university sector simply could not do without Beijing’s moneybags. And the implications of this extend well beyond the beleaguered souls and balance sheets in the finance departments of our universities. In fact, as other countries across the world are starting to discover, we are not just offering China the chance for a British education; but quite possibly the keys to our nation’s security as well.

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In the UK alone, Chinese students account for almost £2 billion in revenue for the higher education sector. Crucially, nine British universities — many of them members of the Russell Group — depend on Chinese students for more than 20% of their revenue from tuition fees. Take Imperial College London, which gets more than 20% of its tuition fees from China. Without these students, it would face a £73 million black hole; all at a time when its research projects — which include a Covid-19 vaccine trial aimed at targeting the new mutant strains of the virus — could not be more crucial.

But this link between Britain’s universities and the Chinese state is hardly a new phenomenon. For years they have made for an inseparable couple, one whose relationship has longed looked, at the very best, questionable; at worst, potentially criminal.

“I think it’s probably going too far to suggest that we have become a client state of the Chinese,” Nick Hillman of the Higher Education Policy Institute tells me. “But we have certainly been putting too many eggs in the Chinese basket. Inevitably having such dependent relationships with a country such as China — or Saudi Arabia even — is going to bring with it political challenges.”

In light of recent events, however, Mr Hillman’s use of the term “political challenges” seems worthy of a PhD in understatement. Indeed, such is our desperation for foreign investment that one particularly apposite Chinese proverb seems almost too prescient: “In every crisis, you will find an opportunity.” The Chinese state is certainly testing that maxim to its very limit.

Only yesterday it was revealed that Oxford University has agreed to re-name its Wykeham Chair of Physics as the Tencent-Wykeham Professorship — after Tencent, a Chinese software firm with links to the Communist regime’s intelligence services, offered a £700,000 donation in return. Meanwhile, on Monday it emerged that almost 200 British academics are being investigated by HMRC on suspicion of helping the Chinese Government build weapons of mass destruction. They have not been accused of spying per se, but unwittingly passing intellectual property to the Chinese authorities and thus violating strict laws on exports.

The British government is yet to send enforcement notices to the staff, who teach at more than dozen universities. Yet its warning certainly lends a sense of urgency to a report, published by Civitas this week, which alleges that 20 British universities have dealings with 29 Chinese institutions, as well as nine companies that have military links, including weapons conglomerates. It warned that UK research sponsored by Chinese organisations could have an “inadvertent dual use” in a military capacity — including hypersonic technology and research into Graphene which is used by the Chinese military in helicopters.

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Yet Britain’s universities seem more concerned with the economic fall-out from than pandemic than with any unseemly political or security repercussions. Perhaps this is hardly surprising when, for example, Manchester University has more Chinese students — they make up roughly one in eight of its student body — than any other university in Europe. That may explain why, when the pandemic first hit last year, Britain’s higher education sector was struck by a sense of impending doom. One minister reportedly said last summer that officials were “shitting themselves” at the prospect of a Chinese brain drain.

All of which raises an obvious question: how has Britain got itself into this mess? After all, there is nothing new about the Government’s security concerns over Beijing inveigling its way into our higher education sector. Even two years ago, the academic world was warned that “hostile state actors are targeting UK universities to steal personal data, research data and intellectual property, and this could be used for their own military, commercial and authoritarian interests.” University staff were also told that they “may also be targeted by an academic institution to undertake research which is of strategic benefit to that country”.

In fact, GCHQ had by 2019 already counted 500 Chinese military scientists attached to British universities who were working on technology platforms with a number of military applications, including missiles, supercomputers and fighter aircraft. And it’s all too easy to see how this research could end up being used as part of Beijing’s ever-expanding toolbox of state repression. Only last week, Manchester University was forced to cancel a contract with a Chinese company after it was warned that the software it supplied was being used by Beijing in its mass surveillance of Uighur Muslims.

Nor is that an anomaly. As recently as last summer, some UK universities were testing a new online teaching link which could prevent students based in China from remotely accessing material deemed unfavourable to or critical of the Communist regime. Moreover, a recent report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) on the infiltration of our universities by China lists, among others: Cambridge University’s links with a Chinese military institution already blacklisted by the US Government; a recruitment drive by Imperial College at the Harbin Institute of Technology, whose scientists work for the PLA and which is one of only eight Chinese universities with access to classified weapons research; and a laboratory funded jointly by Manchester University and a Chinese developer of intercontinental ballistic missiles.

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For their part, the universities insist that due care and diligence is in place. In the wake of the ASPI report, Manchester University put out a back-covering statement: “We take all necessary measures to assure ourselves that our research is not used beyond its agreed application.” But whatever steps are being taken — both by universities and the security services — it may be too late.

Last year, a report by the Henry Jackson Society found that 900 graduates of Chinese universities allegedly linked to the PLA were enrolled in postgraduate studies at 33 British universities. And while we are yet to experience the full repercussions of such folly, we need only look across the Atlantic to see what could be in store for us.

Just a few weeks ago, the US attorney’s office announced the arrest of Gang Chen, a mechanical engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), for “failing to disclose contracts, appointments and awards from various entities in the People’s Republic of China to the US Department of Energy.” It came just a day after Meyya Meyyappan, NASA’s Chief Scientist for Exploration Technology, pled guilty in New York for lying about his participation in a Chinese government recruitment program.

But not all such American investigations have proved so fruitful. Last year, the FBI issued an arrest warrant for Boston University student Yanqing Ye, who was unmasked as a lieutenant in the PLA. She was charged with being an agent of a foreign government, accessing US military websites and sending classified material back to China — but is now believed to have fled back to her home country.

In Britain, meanwhile, we continue to turn a blind eye to such threats. No doubt this is an inevitable consequence of the unseemly lengths our universities go to in order to secure funding from China. But it’s worth noting that Britain’s begging bowl has been in place for some time, and not just in the higher education sector. Indeed, it seems not so long ago that David Cameron spoke so enthusiastically about the “golden era” of Sino-UK relations.

This new relationship was sealed by Cameron and President Xi Jinping over a pint at the Plough, a pub near Chequers which, like all drinking spots in Britain, it is now firmly locked down. Locals, however, have every confidence that it will have the wherewithal to open again when the pandemic restrictions are finally lifted. The reason? The Plough was bought up by Chinese investors almost as soon the Supreme Leader downed his pint.