THE Government is once again prioritising China’s trade over Britain’s security. To this end, anonymous sources claim, Sir Keir Starmer’s administration scuttled a spy case. Jonathan Powell, Sir Keir Starmer’s aide, is accused of blocking the prosecution of two men charged with spying for China after MI5 gathered evidence against them.
Unreported so far is the Government’s replay of a conspiracy from 2019: using the National Security Council to press nominally independent public servants to give up security measures that China could use as excuses for disinvestment, and even to suppress and mislead elected representatives.
Starmer plans to visit China next year. The last time a British premier visited China was February 2018. The premier then was Theresa May, who was doubling down on David Cameron’s prioritisation of Chinese investment. Cameron in turn had doubled down on Tony Blair’s.
In 2019 May confirmed Cameron’s (and Blair’s) permission for Huawei to lead Britain’s 5G infrastructure. Huawei was a company that the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand had already banned at the point from their public sectors, which the US government had indicted for espionage, which governments from Europe to Africa had publicly outed for spying since the 2000s. The company employed on its British board former civil servants involved in the approvals of Huawei going back to 2G in the 1990s.
As I reported in 2019, May’s administration was putting the economic value of Huawei ahead of the risks.
May even used the ‘administrative state’ (‘deep state’) to bypass democratic opposition. As the number of backbench rebels grew, and as her Defence Secretary and former chief whip Gavin Williamson undertook his own review, she elevated civil servants to the National Security Council in order to outvote dissenters. She instructed the National Security Adviser (an under-specialised but compliant civil servant) to investigate the Defence Secretary as a leak, which prompted his resignation.
Later in 2019, Boris Johnson succeeded May and won a landslide election. In 2020 Johnson confirmed May’s decision to allow Huawei into 5G, even after the US government banned Huawei from operating in America and restricted intelligence-sharing with Britain, and after the Government admitted that Huawei is a ‘high-risk vendor,’ and that high-risk vendors should not be involved in British telecommunications.
Fortunately, British opposition and American pressure exploded and it was sufficient to force the Government to U-turn: it committed to exclude Huawei – but on a schedule that won’t be completed until 2027.
Meanwhile, China escalated its espionage in other channels. In 2022, Liz Truss declared China a ‘threat.’ Rishi Sunak repeated the coding in 2023.
Also in 2023, police arrested Christopher Berry, an academic from Oxfordshire, and Chris Cash, a parliamentary researcher for the (anti-)China Research Group, among other largely Conservative consumers, for passing official secrets to China since 2021.
The Government publicly warned Britons that Chinese spies are targeting the political, defence and business sectors.
In 2024, MI5 warned Parliament (and thence the public) that an alleged Chinese agent, Christine Lee, had developed sources in Parliament, including by funding a Labour MP.
In March, the Government told Parliament of a series of cyber-attacks on public institutions, including Parliament itself.
In December, the government revealed that it had banned a Chinese businessman, Yang Tengbo, for espionage.
Meanwhile, Starmer’s administration courted Chinese investment, with ever more desperation as its budget deficit ballooned and Western investors emigrated.
Starmer’s administration dragged its feet on an audit of China’s influence which had started in July 2024.
A year later, Foreign Secretary David Lammy told the Commons the Government had confirmed that China is a ‘sophisticated and persistent threat’ given its ‘espionage, interference in our democracy and the undermining of our economic security’.
Yet Lammy paraphrased Blair’s duplicity. In spite of promising that the Government would ‘never compromise on our national security’ . . . ‘we will co-operate where we can and we will challenge where we must’. By calling this policy ‘progressive realism’, he just added to the sense of contradiction.
Subsequently, the Starmer administration’s review of national security downgraded China from ‘threat’ to ‘geostrategic challenge’. That was at the end of August.
A couple of weeks later, the Crown Prosecution Service dropped the case against Cash and Berry just weeks before trial. The CPS said that the ‘evidential standard for the offence indicted is no longer met’.
The CPS is either incompetent or corrupted.
Starmer’s minister for security, Dan Jarvis, admitted that ‘many Members [of Parliament] will be as extremely disappointed as I am that there will now not be a trial. The decision not to proceed with this prosecution is an independent one for the CPS to make’.
Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Speaker of the House of Commons, complained that the CPS action contradicts the CPS’s prior confidence, which he had relayed to the House. He reminded the House that the case had dragged for more than ‘two years, and it’s taken until today for somebody to withdraw this case. That is not . . . good enough.’
The Home Affairs Select Committee and the Justice Select Committee co-operated in a joint complaint that the CPS’s statement ‘falls some way short of the level of detail that is acceptable for a case of this seriousness and one that has a bearing on the ability of Parliamentarians to perform their duties’.
Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp expressed concern that charges of ‘what appears to be extremely serious espionage’ had ‘all of a sudden and with no explanation been dropped’.
Shadow Foreign Secretary Alicia Kearns, who had employed Cash, described the Government’s claim of independence as ‘preposterous’.
Sir Iain Duncan Smith, whose criticisms of Huawei and the persecution of Uighurs and Hong Kong dissidents resulted in sanctions from China, accused Starmer’s administration of leaning on the CPS to drop the case in the hope of investment.
And now we know.
Anonymous officials told the Telegraph that Starmer’s National Security Adviser called an extraordinary top-secret meeting days before the CPS dropped its case.
Jonathan Powell is the scruffy Blairite who holds that job. Powell was Blair’s chief of staff. His only claim to expertise in national security is civil service in the Foreign Office, and Blair’s bizarre selection of him to negotiate peace in Northern Ireland. While Blair and Powell spun peace, they actually achieved a partial peace, with all sorts of fudges that are now breaking down. Powell has written three books arguing, un-empirically, that all terrorism ends by negotiation – which, I have proven empirically, is false. Now Starmer’s administration is intent on repealing the law protecting British soldiers and officials from prosecution for official activities in Northern Ireland, thus renegotiating the peace that Powell claimed to have negotiated.
Powell is the man Starmer selected, inappropriately, to travel almost monthly to Beijing since his appointment in December to pave the way for Business Secretary Peter Kyle to prepare an economic reset that would be necessary to Starmer’s visit in 2026. Powell is the man who led the review that downgraded China from ‘threat’ in August. Powell is the man who chaired the review of the prosecution of Cash and Berry in September.
This is a breach of the separation of powers between executive and judiciary and of political authority from unelected appointees to elected representatives. The CPS is supposed to be independent of politics in its decisions to prosecute or drop cases. The Security Minister claims that the CPS made an independent decision. But the Telegraph’s sources say that the NSC influenced the decision.
Powell chaired a meeting specifically to discuss the diplomatic and security consequences of prosecution. Powell said that the administration’s downgrade of China from ‘threat’ to ‘geostrategic challenge’ disables the prosecution’s argument that China’s espionage breaches the Official Secrets Act 1911. Powell’s deputy, Matthew Collins, had agreed to make this argument as a witness for the prosecution. An anonymous source claims that Collins could have cited the Home Office’s (i.e. primarily MI5’s) estimates that would have made ‘very clear that China met the definition of what the legislation requires’.
Let’s be clear: we are accumulating evidence of a conspiracy by the executive to influence the judiciary and to mislead Parliament and the public in favour of foreign investment.
This is a scandal that I expect Parliament and journalists to expose fully.
