Lord Cameron has said that he has no regrets about his backing for a port development project in Sri Lanka with links to China.

The Foreign Secretary was grilled by MPs about links to the Port City Colombo project in Sri Lanka, which is being built by a Chinese company.

Only a few months before taking on his Government role, Lord Cameron spoke at an investment event in support of the development.

It comes amid concern in the West about China’s global infrastructure strategy, the belt and road initiative.

Taking questions from Commons Foreign Affairs Committee chair Alicia Kearns and fellow member the SNP’s Brendan O’Hara, the former prime minister said he backed the project “as a friend of Sri Lanka”.

“Like many former prime ministers, I worked with Washington Speaker’s Bureau and this opportunity came up.

“When this opportunity came up, I thought it was a sensible thing to do.”

Lord Cameron, who praised the merits of projects that seek to follow the model of the Dubai International Financial Centre, denied he was actively promoting Chinese investment.

He said it was a decision he “made when asked via Washington Speaker’s Bureau and the event as organised by an accountancy firm based in Sri Lanka”.

Asked specifically if he regretted his decision, he said: “No.”

Labour has previously pressed Lord Cameron to reveal the extent of his links to the project, following his surprise return to frontline politics.

The Intelligence and Security Committee warned last year that it was possible that Lord Cameron’s ties to China-UK investment “were in some part engineered by the Chinese state to lend credibility to Chinese investment, as well as to the broader China brand.”

Pressed on this by Mr O’Hara, Lord Cameron said: “It might, if it had ever happened… But there was no fund, it never got going, it never started. And it never happened.”

He said it was a bit like a “blind man, in the dark room, looking for the black cat that isn’t there”.

More broadly, the peer defended the need for a “dialogue” with China to discuss pressing issues such as climate change and AI.

“It is challenging, because there a lot of issues between us at the moment, but that is what diplomacy is all about,” he told MPs.