Sir Keir Starmer was elected on a clear promise to end the turbulence that so many voters were tired of under previous Conservative administrations. But nothing seems to be stemming the government’s woes – not even the dramatic exits last month of Angela Rayner as Deputy Prime Minister and then Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the United States.
Suspicions and allegations over dubious donor declarations at Labour Together, the Starmerite think tank, have generated difficult headlines in recent weeks – though the news that they won’t be reinvestigated by the Electoral Commission must have come as a relief.
Now we have a new, multi-pronged scandal burning away over Chinese espionage and influence in the UK.
I warned earlier this year that the new Government was struggling to re-learn the lessons which the Conservatives took far too long to pick up: that while China cannot be ignored in the modern world, it must not be treated as if it were an allied or neutral player; that Beijing seeks to target our politicians, our infrastructure, and critics in this country using espionage and other means; and that it has co-opted its private sector to serve as arms of its security apparatus.
The sluggishness of the Tories to wake up to this reality exposed this country to undue risks. My fear was that Labour were now aggravating that threat by treading the same path from the beginning, rather than learning from the bitter experience of their predecessors.
It’s now clear that my concern should have been even more acute. Consider what we have learned in the last few weeks.
The trial of two men – one a parliamentary researcher – who were arrested in 2023 on allegations of spying for China collapsed in mid-September. The government responded by saying that it was “disappointing that they will not face trial given the seriousness of the allegations,” which had included allegedly gathering information that was “calculated to be, might be, or… intended to be, directly or indirectly, useful to an enemy”.
Understandably, MPs and the Parliamentary authorities were keen to know how on earth this had happened, given the severity of the accusations. The more they dug, the more worrying the story became.
Under fire in public and in the Commons, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) eventually felt forced to defend its reputation by elaborating on its initial bland statement that the case was withdrawn due to a lack of evidence.
The CPS now says the specific issue was not a shortage of evidence of the activities involved but rather that – despite “many months” of requests – the Government refused to provide prosecutors with confirmation that China was an “enemy” or a “threat” to national security, which is a condition for such charges.
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This is explosive. Essentially, it means the CPS were working hard to proceed with the charges on the basis of the evidence they held, but that the Government preferred to collapse the trial rather than put on the record anything to which China’s government might take offence.
It also means that while ministers acted as though the trial’s collapse was a surprise, in truth prosecutors had been chasing their departments for months for the key evidence required for the trial to proceed. Someone, somewhere high up, decided to refuse to provide it.
Notably, the Government has also sought to blame the previous administration for not designating China as a threat at the time the alleged offences occurred – a peculiar argument, and a seemingly weak one given that a raft of former senior officials, prosecutors and securocrats, including the ex-head of MI6, who have taken the rare step of publicly denouncing it.
The longer the scandal goes on, the murkier it becomes. The Government now denies ministerial involvement in this indefensible decision, but is choosing its words increasingly carefully as to whether the Prime Minister’s National Security Adviser, Jonathan Powell, played a part. The Conservative MP Neil O’Brien notes that while one minister has said it had “nothing to do with” Powell, another only asserts that he was not involved with the “substance” of the matter.
Meanwhile, Powell reportedly made the decision this summer not to publish issues highlighted in a cross-Whitehall “China Audit” about Chinese espionage, after the Treasury raised concerns about the risk of economic retaliation.
This all takes place against the backdrop of extraordinary lobbying by the Chinese state for the government to grant permission for the construction of a new “super-embassy” in London, which was held up under the Tories due to concerns about human rights abuses, espionage and even the risk of hacking nearby telecoms infrastructure.
The Sunday Times recently reported that “Jingye, the Chinese owners of British Steel, offered to waive the £1 billion compensation that they claim to be owed by the British government… if the embassy is given the go-ahead.”
In other words, I understated the severity of the problem. How much easier, cheaper and safer it would have been for ministers to learn these lessons from the experience of their predecessors than to have to re-learn them in this excruciating way.
Beijing’s influence is running even more rampant in the corridors of British power than before, and doing so in broad daylight without consequence.
Mark Wallace is chief executive of Total Politics Group
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