Who bears the blame for the collapse of the China spy trial? Confronted by the charge that the answer is Jonathan Powell, the national security adviser and Tony Blair’s former chief of staff, ministers are fighting a rearguard action to insist otherwise.
“The national security adviser made no decisions about the content of any evidence relating to the case itself,” Dan Jarvis, the security minister, told MPs last night. “This was a matter for the deputy national security adviser [Matthew Collins], a hugely experienced, highly capable senior official who provided evidence under the previous administration.”
That’s a statement that has prompted consternation from opposition parties: former Tory security minister Tom Tugendhat has accused the government of “throwing Matt Collins under the bus”; the Liberal Democrats have derided “attempts to duck scrutiny and scapegoat a single official”.
Labour’s wider contention is that the case, which began in April 2024, was thwarted by the Conservatives’ refusal to officially designate China as a “threat to national security”. And it’s true that while Rishi Sunak flirted with this classification, he resisted backbench pressure to introduce it (the 2023 Integrated Review instead described China as “an epoch-defining challenge”). The government’s critics maintain that there was sufficient evidence for the case to proceed, merely an absence of political will.
Expect this row to run and run: the Lib Dems have called for all correspondence between the deputy national security adviser and the crown prosecution service to be published, while Powell is set to appear at a private hearing of the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy on 24 November.
These legal skirmishes have become a proxy for a political question: what should the UK’s relationship with China be? After Labour entered power, it consciously broke with what it regarded as the Tories’ haphazard approach. As foreign secretary, David Lammy argued that our distant relations with China, an economic superpower, had made Britain an outlier in the G7. In giving up on what David Cameron and George Osborne heralded as a “golden era” of relations, it had forgotten the necessity of basic diplomacy.
Lammy, who told cabinet colleagues that there was no contradiction in him being the “biggest Atlanticist” in government while also visiting China, adopted an approach guided by “three Cs”: cooperate, compete and challenge (a US-inspired framework which Yvette Cooper, his successor, intends for now to maintain).
But as a decision looms over whether to approve a new Chinese “super-embassy” in east London – one raising eyebrows in Washington DC – some are pushing for a recalibration. “Powell and Peter [Mandelson] always had a view that you could ride both horses. Ultimately I think that is wrong,” one minister says of relations with the US and China.
A familiar charge is now being levelled against Starmer’s government: that it too often uses process to disguise political choice. Unlike a Conservative administration that was focused on “backbench management”, one senior Labour source argues, the party has been able to pursue a “national interest foreign policy”.
In other words, though defining China as an enemy may generate a political thrill, this will ultimately prove self-defeating. But as critics inside and outside of government push for a more hawkish posture, this is a case that ministers will soon need to make more openly.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
[Further reading: Thatcher-land]
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