The China spy affair is rolling into its second week and doesn’t seem to be going away. The last few days have seen a series of major developments. Here is the anatomy of the scandal so far.
The case centres on Chris Cash, a parliamentary researcher for a hawkish anti-China caucus of MPs, and Christopher Berry, a teacher who spent time in China.
Both were arrested in March 2023 on suspicion of spying for China since 2021. They were then charged with offences under the Official Secrets Act in April 2024. They strenuously deny these charges, and the CPS dropped the case against the pair in September.
Stephen Parkinson, the Director of Public Prosecutions, said the case had collapsed before trial because the Crown Prosecution Service could not obtain sufficient evidence from the government to call China a national security threat.
That evidence was key because legal precedent dictates information gathering must be done for a state or organisation that is a “threat to national security” for it to meet the threshold for the offences the pair were accused of.
Disquiet about the collapse of the case turned to outrage in the past two weeks, with claims and counter-claims blaming figures from this Labour government and the last Conservative one.
There was aggressive briefing against Jonathan Powell, the national security adviser, who has previously argued for closer UK relations with China.
The suggestion is that Powell, a rare political appointment to the NSA role, may have used his influence to soften the government’s language around China in witness statements, therefore leading to the collapse of the case. No substantive evidence for this has yet been produced.
The government has put the blame for any potential fault in its evidence at the door of Powell’s subordinate Matthew Collins. He is a civil servant whose position as a deputy national security adviser predates the last general election.
Collins submitted three witness statements to the CPS to be used in the spy case. The first and most substantial was sent in late December 2023, under the previous government. Two shorter supplementary statements were supplied in February and August of this year, under the Labour government.
The Prime Minister has blamed the previous Conservative government for the collapse of the case. He said in the House of Commons yesterday: “What was on issue in the trial is not the position of the current government, but the position of the last government”.
His argument is that the case was charged under the previous government and substantive evidence was provided under the last government, whose policy at the time was not to call China an enemy. Therefore, Starmer says, any fault is theirs. He also said that no ministers or advisers from the Labour government were involved in the further submissions of evidence made by Collins this year.
There have also been mutterings in government about the role of Parkinson, the DPP, and these might grow louder. Some are talking of “scapegoats”.
Following the political pressure of the past week Starmer agreed to release the three statements written by Collins. They have now been released. But they raise perhaps more questions than they answer.
The first submission of 2023 ran to 12 pages and detailed alleged espionage by Cash and Berry, coordinating with a supposed handler, codenamed “Alex”.
The later submissions, made in February and August of this year, both ran to under three pages.
But they included new references to a “positive relationship” and “positive economic relationship” with China. Collins wrote that it was “important” for him to “emphasise” this. References to such a positive relationship were not in the first and most substantive submission. It has given new ammunition to the Tories, who say again that the case has been weakened by the Labour government and that Starmer is responsible for the collapse.
To compound the trouble, the third submission also ended with a paragraph describing the current government’s approach to China which directly lifted a line from Labour’s 2024 election manifesto: “cooperate where we can, compete where we need to and challenge where we must”. Few are convinced by the government line that such a baldly party-political slogan could have found its way into a civil servant’s statement without encouragement from political figures.
And so the line seems to have changed again today. The PM’s spokesperson told lobby journalists this morning: “Civil servants are rightly expected to reflect the policy of the government today in their work, and this is no different, but it provides context to earlier witness statements.” So was it all the fault of the Tories because of their position on China, or not?
The Tories smell blood and won’t let up. They want to know why the Prime Minister didn’t intervene when he was told, two days before it was announced, that the trial was about to collapse. They refuse to believe the government’s story that a civil servant acted alone in providing supplementary witness statements in such a high profile case.
It has been pointed out that they have simultaneously and perhaps contradictorily accused the government of wrongdoing because:
a) political figures intervened in the case (the Powell allegations and the questions over whether Collins really acted alone)
b) there was insufficient political intervention in the case (their questions over what the PM did to prevent the collapse of the case).
It may be incoherent but it doesn’t matter. There is so much written in black and white about this case now that to keep it going the Tories just have to tease out any major inconsistencies and get No 10 panicked so that government figures start eating each other.
As the scandal rolls on, what seems remarkable is that this originally began as an internal row, with political figures inside the government briefing to the right-wing papers blaming Powell for the collapse of the case weeks after that collapse was initially reported.
Now it has blown up, perhaps with a higher yield than those sources had anticipated. There is speculation about who in government might have wanted to publicly trash Powell in this way and what their motive might have been.
[Further reading: Jonathan Powell and Tony Blair at the court of Donald Trump]
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