Starmer says no minister involved in collapse of China spy case

Sir Keir Starmer has said no ministers were involved in the collapse of the trial of alleged Chinese spies.

The Prime Minister reiterated that responsibility lay with the previous Conservative administration which was in power at the time of the alleged offences.

It came after two former top civil servants questioned his explanation for the pulling of the prosecution of Christopher Cash, a former parliamentary researcher, and Christopher Berry, a teacher.

Sir Keir has maintained that because the last Tory administration had not designated China as a threat to national security, his Government could not provide evidence to that effect, which the director of public prosecutions Stephen Parkinson said was required to meet the threshold for prosecution.

Mr Parkinson had blamed ministers for failing to provide the crucial evidence needed to proceed.

Former cabinet secretary Lord Simon Case said intelligence chiefs had warned of the threat from China for years, while his predecessor Lord Mark Sedwill expressed puzzlement about why the trial fell apart because Beijing was “of course” a threat to the UK.

But Sir Keir argued that the evidence should focus on the stated foreign policy position towards China of the Tory administration in place between December 2021 and February 2023, when the alleged offences occurred – which was not to call President Xi Jinping’s country a threat.

In the 2023 refresh of the integrated review of defence, published under Rishi Sunak’s premiership and one month before the two men’s arrest, the Asian superpower was described as an “epoch-defining challenge”, but not as a threat.

Sir Keir was asked at a press conference during a trade trip to India whether any minister was involved in the decision not to provide the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) with evidence that, at the time of the alleged offences, China represented a threat to national security.

The Prime Minister, a former director of public prosecutions, said: “The evidence in this case was drawn up at the time and reflected the position as it was at the time. And that has remained the situation from start to finish.

“That is inevitably the case, because in the United Kingdom you can only try people on the basis of the situation as it was at the time.

“You can’t try people on the basis of situation as it now is or might be in the future. And therefore, the only evidence that a court would ever admit on this would be evidence of what the situation was at the time.

“So that’s the base on which the evidence was drawn up, the witness statements were drawn up. And I can be absolutely clear, no ministers were involved in any of the decisions since this Government’s been in in relation to the evidence that’s put before the court on this issue.

“The evidence was the evidence as it then was, that’s the only relevant evidence, and that evidence was the situation as it was under the last government, the Tory government, rather than under this Government.

“It’s not a party political point. It’s a matter of law. You can only try someone on the basis of the situation as it was at the time of the alleged offence.

“You can’t try them on the basis of the situation as it might evolve, weeks, months, years down the line. That’s a fundamental and that’s at the centre of this particular issue.”

Mr Cash and Mr Berry were charged by the CPS in April last year with the offence of spying under the Official Secrets Act 1911 after they were accused of collecting and communicating information which could be “useful to an enemy”.

The case against the two men – who both denied charges – was dropped on September 15.

Mr Parkinson said the CPS had tried “over many months” to get the evidence it needed to show China was a threat to national security, but it had not been forthcoming from Sir Keir’s administration.

Critics have pointed to Sir Keir’s attempts to build relations with the world’s second-biggest economy as a possible reason for the Government’s reluctance to label China an “enemy” or threat.

Lord Sedwill, who served as national security adviser from 2017 to 2020, during which time he was also Cabinet secretary, said he was “genuinely puzzled” about the collapse of the trial.

“The truth is that of course China is a national security threat to the UK directly, through cyber, through spying and so on, and indirectly because of some of their aggressive behaviour in the South China Sea and elsewhere,” he told The Crisis Room podcast.

“I’m genuinely puzzled, to put it politely, about the basis on which this trial has fallen.

“I mean, we introduced the National Security Act because the Official Secrets Act was not fit for purpose. But the idea that you could leak or sell or betray the secrets of this country to anyone who isn’t described as an enemy, and somehow or other that means you couldn’t be prosecuted, I certainly didn’t understand that to be the case under the Official Secrets Act.

“Could you really have taken a whole nuclear deterrent and put it in a newspaper and that wouldn’t be a breach of the Official Secrets Act? So I simply find that interpretation very hard to understand.”