SIR Keir Starmer’s alleged plot to sell national security for Chinese yuan, as my report on Monday was titled, is the snowball that keeps rolling.
On Tuesday, Starmer said the Government could not state that China had been a national security threat when Chris Cash and Christopher Berry were arrested in 2023, on allegations they had gathered intelligence for China while researching in Parliament going back to 2021.
The Prime Minster told reporters: ‘Now that’s not a political to and fro, that’s a matter of law. You have to prosecute people on the basis of the circumstances at the time of the alleged offence . . . So all the focus needs to be on the policy of the Tory government in place then.’
Starmer said the Government could draw on only the previous government’s assessment, which dubbed China an ‘epoch-defining challenge’.
This is a lie.
In fact, as I reported on Monday, the previous administration did describe China as a ‘threat’ and so did Starmer’s administration.
In 2022, Liz Truss declared China a ‘threat‘. Rishi Sunak repeated the coding in 2023.
In late June this year, the then Foreign Secretary David Lammy told the Commons that Starmer’s administration confirmed, following an audit soon after election in July 2024, that China is a ‘sophisticated and persistent threat’ given its ‘espionage, interference in our democracy, and the undermining of our economic security’.
Subsequently, towards the end of August, the Starmer administration’s review of national security concluded with a downgrade of China from ‘threat’ to ‘geostrategic challenge’.
This was the excuse, according to anonymous sources, for the National Security Adviser, Jonathan Powell, to call an extraordinary meeting to deny the prosecution’s argument that China’s espionage breaches the 1911 Official Secrets Act.
Matthew Collins, Powell’s deputy, had agreed to make this argument as a witness for the prosecution.
On Tuesday evening, Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) Stephen Parkinson said the Crown Prosecution Service tried to obtain further evidence from the Government ‘over many months’ but witness statements did not meet the threshold to prosecute. I take this latter part of his statement as referring to the Government’s procrastination about sending Collins to testify that China was and is a threat.
An anonymous source claims that Collins could have cited the Home Office’s (ie primarily MI5’s) estimates that would have made ‘very clear that China met the definition of what the legislation requires’.
On Wednesday, Simon Case, who served as Cabinet Secretary until last year, confirmed this anonymous source’s claim, and my coding of the assessments.
He said: ‘Going back over years, we have had heads of our intelligence agencies describing in public the threat that China poses to our national and economic security interests.’
This scandal is not the first case of the Starmer administration trading British security for Chinese pleasure, while denying the influence of China or the threat from China.
Within months of taking power, it decided that Britain has an international legal obligation to give Mauritius sovereignty over the Chagos Islands, and to lease the British military base on the island of Diego Garcia for 99 years at a cost of almost £35billion. This cost was admitted in August, after a Freedom of Information request, though in May Starmer had told Parliament that the deal would cost £3.4billion over 99 years.
And don’t forget that Starmer was DPP when his underlings were hiding exculpatory evidence from men accused of rape at a time when his organisation had a politicised mandate to raise rape convictions. Somehow, he claims, he was unaware.
On Wednesday, Kemi Badenoch used her final speech at the Conservative Party Conference to claim that Starmer’s administration ‘deliberately collapsed the trial’ because ‘the Prime Minister wants to suck up to Beijing’.
On Thursday, the Daily Telegraph published an opinion titled ‘The scandal that could bring down Keir Starmer.’
I hope so.
It appears there is sufficient 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. Once it is fully exposed (confirmed with the authority of a Parliamentary investigation), Starmer should resign.
