Parliament must hear answers on China spy case, Badenoch tells Prime Minister

Kemi Badenoch has written to Sir Keir Starmer demanding answers in Parliament to questions surrounding the collapse of a case against alleged Chinese spies.

The Tory leader criticised the Prime Minister for travelling to Egypt for a peace summit on Gaza and called for a senior minister to address the Commons about what had happened before charges were dropped.

Sir Keir’s Government is likely to face scrutiny over the abandoned prosecution, in which Downing Street has denied Government involvement, as MPs return to Westminster from conference recess.

The Conservative Opposition is seeking an urgent question on the case, while Tory grandee and China hawk Sir Iain Duncan Smith was understood to have put in for an emergency parliamentary debate.

In a letter to the Prime Minister on Monday, Mrs Badenoch said: “Your Government’s account of what has happened has changed repeatedly.

“Instead of setting out the full facts before the House of Commons today, you are planning to travel to the Middle East.

“If you will not make a statement yourself, will you instruct a senior minister to clear things up once and for all through a full parliamentary statement? The public and Parliament deserve answers and transparency.”

Official Secrets Act charges against Christopher Cash, a former parliamentary researcher, and Christopher Berry, a teacher, were dropped last month, prompting consternation across the political divide.

Britain’s most senior prosecutor has since said the case collapsed because evidence describing Beijing as a national security threat could not be obtained from Sir Keir’s administration.

Mrs Badenoch said ministers must say whether it was “still your Government’s position to claim that it would have been impossible to argue that China was a threat in court”.

She also demanded answers to claims national security adviser Jonathan Powell had discussed the case in a meeting last month.

The Sunday Times reported that the senior aide had revealed the Government’s evidence would be based on the national security strategy, which was published in June and does not refer to China as an “enemy”.

The paper also quoted a source saying a minister was told during a call with a Cabinet minister around six weeks ago that the case was about to fall, with the accusation being “that Jonathan Powell in cahoots with the Treasury had been driving through that decision”.

Speaking to broadcasters on Sunday morning, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson said Mr Powell, a diplomat and ex-chief of staff to Sir Tony Blair, played no role in the decision.

“Yes, I can give that assurance,” she told Sky News’s Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips.

Director of public prosecutions Stephen Parkinson said last week that the Crown Prosecution Service tried for “many months” to obtain the evidence it needed but it had not been forthcoming from the Government.

Mrs Badenoch asked the Prime Minister whether it was “still your argument that no minister knew anything of the Government’s interactions with the CPS” over this time period.

The White House is said to have concerns about the UK’s reliability following the dropping of charges, while two former civil servants have also questioned Sir Keir’s explanation of how the case collapsed.

Lord Mark Sedwill, a predecessor to Mr Powell, expressed confusion about why the trial fell apart because Beijing was “of course” a threat to the UK, while former Cabinet secretary Lord Simon Case said intelligence chiefs had publicly warned of the threat from China for years.

The Prime Minister has blamed the Conservative administration in power at the time of the alleged offences between December 2021 and February 2023, suggesting “the only relevant evidence” would relate to this period.

Sir Keir pointed to the stated foreign policy position towards Beijing of the then-Tory government, which was to describe the country as an “epoch-defining challenge” rather than a threat.

“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,” he said last week.

“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.”