At the heart of the Chinese spy drama currently gripping Westminster is a simple question that successive British governments seem to have found remarkably hard to answer: does Beijing pose a threat to the UK’s national security?
Senior Conservatives argue that it is the failure of Keir Starmer’s government to label the country a clear threat that is responsible for the recent collapse of the criminal trial of two British men accused of spying for China (an allegation which both men continue to deny). Starmer says the blame lies with his conservative predecessors’ failure to do the same. In fact, both parties have a long history of tap-dancing around the issue once they get into power. So, for the avoidance of doubt – and whether any British prime minister is prepared to say so, or not – here it is: yes, of course, China represents a real, and growing threat to British national security.
This does not mean there is a need to panic and embark on a hysterical course of decoupling from China, one of the UK’s largest trading partners and a major force in the global economy. But it is important to be clear-eyed about the nature and degree of the threat China poses, particularly with the next chapter in this saga already looming into view with the pending decision from Starmer’s government over Beijing’s proposed new “super-embassy” on the site of the old Royal Mint in central London. That decision had been due to be announced today (21 October), but has now been delayed until 10 December, prompting fury from the Chinese foreign ministry, which has warned that the UK will “bear all consequences” if permission is denied.
“Common sense tells you that China is a threat,” said Charles Parton, a former British diplomat and China scholar who was due to give evidence for the prosecution in the espionage case before it collapsed. The nature of that threat ranges from China’s extensive intelligence operations against the UK, including sophisticated hacking campaigns, influence operations, and the theft of corporate secrets, to the country’s growing dominance of industrial supply chains, particularly when it comes to renewable energy technology and rare earth minerals, over which it currently has a formidable chokehold. Then, there is China’s clear support for Russia’s war on Ukraine – the bloodiest conflict in Europe since the Second World War – without which Vladimir Putin would almost certainly have had to abandon his assault. Nato has designated China a “decisive enabler” of that war, noting its “no limits” partnership with Moscow and ongoing transfer of dual-use technology, including vital components and raw materials needed to make Russian weapons.
“It doesn’t hold water to me that the government should say, well it’s nothing to do with us, it’s the Conservatives who are responsible [for the case collapsing],” Parton said. “Because surely the national security adviser, or his deputy, or someone in government has the wit or the ability to say, yes, in our opinion China was a threat in March 2023, just as it is now. That’s not difficult.” And if the government witness statements were not deemed sufficient, “there are plenty of experts who would have given evidence on the question, so the jury could decide.”
Those witness statements from the deputy national security adviser Matthew Collins were made public on 15 October after Starmer took the extraordinary step of releasing key testimony in the case to prove that his government had nothing to hide.
Until then, the conventional explanations as to why the espionage case against Christopher Cash and Christopher Berry had collapsed ranged from government ineptitude to cowardice, or, if you believed Kemi Badenoch, a high-level cover-up designed to conceal secret Labour sympathies for Beijing. Cash, a former parliamentary researcher who worked alongside Conservative MPs such as Alicia Kearns and Tom Tugendhat as part of the hawkish China Research Group, and Christopher Berry, a teacher and researcher previously based in China, were arrested in March 2023 under the Official Secrets Act. In April 2024 they were charged with espionage offences, accused of gathering and providing information to China. Both men have always maintained their innocence, pleading not guilty in October 2024. They had been due to stand trial at Woolwich Crown Court this month. But in September the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) announced that the evidence it had gathered did not meet the threshold to go to trial. The case fell apart.
The director of public prosecutions Stephen Parkinson explained that while the decision to charge the men in April 2024 had been “correct”, a ruling in an unrelated espionage case meant that they now needed further evidence. In that other case, which involved six Bulgarians who were subsequently convicted of spying for Russia in the UK, the Court of Appeal ruled on the definition of an “enemy” in the archaic language of the Official Secrets Act. (The act had been drafted in 1911 ahead of the First World War.) The court ruled that the definition did not apply solely to countries with whom Britain was currently at war or could conceivably be at war in the near future. Instead, the “enemy” designation could also apply to a “country which represents a current threat to the national security of the UK.” Prominent legal experts have argued this actually lowered the bar for the prosecution, which now only needed to show that China was considered a threat to British national security. But the CPS seems to have been unable to get the government to say those magic words.
“Efforts to obtain that evidence were made over many months,” Parkinson explained in his letter to the Home Affairs and Justice committees on 7 October. “But notwithstanding the fact that further witness statements were provided, none of these states that at the time of the offence China represented a threat to national security, and by late August 2025 it was realised that this evidence would not be forthcoming.”
The clear inference was that it was the current government’s reluctance to designate China a threat that had torpedoed the case. Many speculated that Starmer’s national security adviser Jonathan Powell had given the direction, as the UK sought to deepen trade ties with Beijing to bail out the faltering economy. (Powell took part in a meeting about the case in Whitehall on 1 September, but Starmer has insisted this was focused only on the implications of the case, which the government hoped would proceed.) A political firestorm duly ignited, with Badenoch, who has previously argued against labelling China a “foe,” accusing Starmer of being “too weak to stand up to Beijing on a crucial matter of national security.”
Far from clearing up the issue, Collins’s testimony only deepened the intrigue. Over 16 pages of written testimony in three separate documents – the longest submitted in under Sunak in December 2023, the other two under Starmer in February and August 2025 – Collins addressed the allegations against Cash and Berry, and how such actions could have helped Beijing.
In his first statement, Collins detailed the topics a suspected Chinese intelligence agent named as “Alex” allegedly sought information about. Topics include: the activities of MPs associated with the China Research Group in parliament; whether Tom Tugendhat, who had been sanctioned by Beijing in 2021, was likely to join the cabinet; the UK’s stance towards Xinjiang, where China has been accused of perpetrating genocide against the Uyghur Muslim minority; and meetings between Taiwanese and UK officials in London in 2022. After Christopher Berry allegedly met with a senior Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official in Hangzhou, China, in July 2022, Cash is said to have responded, “you’re in spy territory now”. (Again, both men deny any wrongdoing. In a statement on 16 October Cash said that he had been placed in an “impossible position” by the release of the documents, which were “devoid of the context that would have been given at trial”.) Collins concludes that, if proven, these alleged activities would have been “prejudicial to the safety or interests of the state.”
Collins’s second statement describes China as “the biggest state-based threat to the UK’s economic security” and details sophisticated hacking attacks by groups linked to China’s Ministry of State Security against a “wide range of UK government and commercial targets”. These include the 2021 attack on Microsoft Exchange servers, which the government attributed to “Chinese state linked actors” with the intent to “enable large-scale espionage.” Collins also goes into further detail about the “senior CCP leader” Berry is alleged to have met. While Collins does not name him, the accompanying biography suggests that the official is Cai Qi. Cai Qi was promoted to the Politburo Standing Committee, the CCP’s seven-man top decision-making body, in 2022, and currently serves as the director of the party’s general office and a de facto chief of staff to Xi Jinping. (Berry denies ever meeting Cai Qi.)
Collins’s final statement said that China’s espionage operations “threaten the UK’s economic prosperity and resilience, and the integrity of our democratic institutions.” He noted the “increasing Chinese espionage threat posed to the UK.” Again, he detailed specific examples of “malicious cyber activity” by Chinese state-linked groups “targeting democratic institutions and parliamentarians”, including the attack on UK Electoral Commission systems in 2021-2022 and “reconnaissance activity against UK parliamentarians’ emails” in 2021.
The net effect was a political Rorschach test. For Starmer and his allies it was definitive evidence that the government had not deliberately tanked the case, with Collins delivering a clear indictment of Beijing’s actions. For the Conservatives it was evidence that the government’s key witness had not been prepared to go far enough in declaring China a clear threat. The newly published documents also raised new questions for the CPS.
It is true that Collins does not explicitly say that China represents a threat to the UK’s “national security”. But it will be for Parkinson and the CPS to explain during the forthcoming parliamentary inquiry why they did not believe they could argue to a jury that economic security is a crucial component of national security, particularly when combined with the clear pattern of attacks on British parliamentarians and democratic institutions. Prosecutors could also, presumably, have drawn on evidence from expert witnesses and other key officials to make the case that China was a threat. Ken McCallum, the head of MI5, for instance, gave a public speech on 16 October, the day after Collins’s testimony was released, arguing that the UK had entered a “new era” of state-based threats from countries including Russia, Iran and China. Asked directly whether China posed a threat to British national security, McCallum replied: “Do Chinese state actors present a UK national security threat? The answer is, of course, yes they do, every day.”
Perhaps the problem for the prosecution was Collins’s equivocation. Both his 2025 statements stressed that the government was committed to pursuing a “positive” relationship with China. Language included appears to be taken verbatim from Labour’s 2024 election manifesto in his August statement, wherein the UK will “co-operate where we can; compete where we need to; and challenge where we must, including on issues of national security.” The Court of Appeal ruling in the Bulgarians’ case last year found that “friendly powers” would fall outside the definition of an “enemy” in the Official Secrets Act, so it is possible that the warmer language in Collins’ latter statements was judged to complicate the issue, but still it seems remarkable that the question could not have been put before a jury. Equally remarkable is the fact that, according to this definition, it seems to have been legal to spy in Britain for more than a century, as long as it was on behalf of an ally. The new legislation replaces the outdated term “enemy” with “foreign power,” but was not in place at the time of the alleged offences (between 2021 and early 2023).
What is clear is that the political fall-out from this saga is far from contained. The Conservatives are determined to depict Labour as soft on China. Labour is adamant that the problem is the previous Conservative government’s weak line. Starmer and Badenoch are left pointing at each other, like the famous Spider-Man meme, insisting that the other is to blame. In truth, there is plenty of blame to go around when it comes to the national reluctance – among cabinet officials at least – to risk calling China a threat. Rishi Sunak’s preferred formulation in 2023 was “epoch-defining challenge”, while the National Security Strategy released under Starmer this summer defines China as a “geostrategic challenge.”
Starmer is expected to travel to Beijing early next year, following visits by the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, in January, and Jonathan Powell in July. He would hardly be the first British prime minister to weigh the merits of taking a tougher line on Beijing against the potential harm to the economic relationship with the UK’s fifth largest trading partner. But Charles Parton argues this is a false choice and not supported by the facts, noting that British exports to China continued to increase despite Beijing’s outrage over the Dalai Lama’s visit to the UK in 2012 and actually fell during the so-called “golden era” of UK-China relations proclaimed by David Cameron and George Osborne in 2015.
Rather than prostrating itself before Beijing in what he calls a “pre-emptive kowtow,” Parton believes British interests would be better served by the government demonstrating that it is not prepared to be pushed around. “Diplomacy is rather like the school playground,” he told the New Statesman. “If you’re being bullied and you don’t stand up to it, you get more. That is the message that will be taken away.” If this case had gone ahead, he said, China would have protested that the charges were outrageous, but it would likely have been a “two-day wonder” because, as the CCP leadership well understands, “they spy, we spy, everybody spies.” Instead, precisely the opposite has happened. More than a month after the decision to drop the case, the headlines are still dominated by lurid claims about Chinese espionage in the UK. “What a masterclass in ineptitude.”
Starmer might want to keep those principles in mind as he weighs the next major decision in the UK-China relationship – whether to grant permission for Beijing’s new embassy in London, or not. Xi Jinping has already made clear that he is taking a personal interest in the case, raising the issue directly with Starmer during their first call after he became prime minister last year. The British prime minister told Xi at the G20 summit in November 2024 that his government had taken over the decision from the local planning authority, which seems to have been intended to placate the Chinese leader, but means he is also now likely to be held responsible for the outcome by Beijing.
For critics, including Donald Trump, the new embassy, which would be the largest such diplomatic complex in Europe, is an unacceptable security risk because of its close proximity to key communications cables and data centres in the City of London. Human rights groups have also warned that greyed-out areas within the official plans could conceal detention facilities and other capabilities to target dissidents within the UK.
The domestic politics of the embassy decision have now been considerably complicated by the Chinese spy scandal and the accompanying accusations that the embattled Labour government is weak on China. The global outlook is also darkening. The US and China resumed their trade war in recent weeks and the superpowers are now once again engaged in a dangerous cycle of escalation and brinkmanship that threatens the global economy. Washington would be angered by a British decision to approve the Chinese embassy, and Beijing would be angered by a rejection. Starmer may feel himself in an impossible position, attempting to navigate between the world’s two rival superpowers. But the current volatility could present an opportunity. At a time when China is locked in intensifying confrontation with the US, it is unlikely to relish a simultaneous trade war with the UK.
“I just don’t understand why it’s so difficult,” Parton said, audibly exasperated. “Why hasn’t the government made a quick, clear decision? Is it because they don’t want to offend China because the decision is going to be negative?” In that case, he suggested, as anyone who has ever put off going to the dentist can attest, the associated pain is unlikely to improve over time. “Far better to get it over with.”
Maybe it is unfair to single out the Starmer government. Successive British leaders have been similarly reticent to stand up to China. But it is worth asking how well that approach has actually worked, and bearing in mind Lenin’s famous maxim about probing with bayonets, which Xi seems to be adopted. “If you find mush, you push,” the former Soviet leader counselled. “If you find steel, you withdraw.” So far, when it comes to the UK, it seems China is encountering quite a bit of mush. Perhaps it is time to try some steel.
[Further reading: Britain needs to see the bigger picture on China]
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