Real reason China spy case collapsed revealed in bombshell new evidence | Politics | News
The country’s top prosecutor admitted he is “disappointed and frustrated” the China spy case collapsed because Labour wouldn’t call Beijing an enemy.
Director of Public Prosecutions Stephen Parkinson believed the Government could provide evidence the Communist state was an active threat “fairly easily”.
But Deputy National Security Adviser Matthew Collins refused, delivering a fatal blow to the case against suspected moles Christopher Berry and Christopher Cash.
Mr Parkinson said: “We felt that we had a good enough case to prosecute and we obviously spent a whole lot of effort getting the case to the point that we did.
“We felt there should be no difficulty in answering the question that we posed — was China a threat to national security at that material time?
“We thought that evidence could be given fairly easily, but it proved to be a sticking point.”
And the prosecution’s lead barrister, Tom Little KC, said Mr Collins told him “he would not say that China posed an active threat to national security at the material time” which “brought this case effectively to a crashing halt as far as that was concerned with that witness”
Mr Little told the Joint Committee on National Security Strategy (JCNSS) he met the witness and “the witness was clear to me that he would not say that China posed an active threat to national security at the material time”.
Mr Little added: “That was in answer to what I regard as the million dollar question in the case, and once he had said that the current prosecution for those charges was effectively unsustainable, that’s my carefully reflected position.
“I didn’t jump to that immediately. I advised on the 22nd of August, having reflected over it. As far as those charges were concerned.
“There were other discussions then about alternative charges.
“But I don’t think anyone should misunderstand the effect of what the witness had said, that would have been disclosable, and it brought this case effectively to a crashing halt.”
The evidence provided by Matt Collins in his second statement said China was “a threat to economic security” and the “question wasn’t answered in terms”, Mr Parkinson said.
“The issue wasn’t so much the statements that we were given, it was what was missing, and the key question which would have been posed in cross examination was the question that we posed in June: was China an active threat to national security at the material time?” he added.
Lawyers for the defence could have made a submission there was “no case to answer” if “any element of the offence is not satisfied”, Mr Parkinson said.
He added: “If the judge concludes that no reasonable jury properly directed could reach that conclusion, then he will stop the case, and the conclusion that was reached by Mr Little (the First Senior Treasury Counsel) and by our team was we were in that place, so this case would not have got to a jury, because our professional assessment was that we were unable to satisfy that then.”
Asked whether the inclusion of a statement that the Government was pursuing a positive trading relationship with China meant he could not prove Beijing was a “threat”, Mr Parkinson told the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy: “No.
“To be clear, the problem has always been that those three witness statements were insufficient to enable us to prove the case.
“We needed that extra element which couldn’t be satisfied.
“So I’m not criticising the content of the witness statements. The point that I made from the outset is that we needed more, and what was missing was a critical element.”
Dame Emily Thornberry, a senior Labour MP and former barrister, challenged the chief prosecutor as he argued that the Roussev case, involving a group of Bulgarian nationals spying on behalf of Russia, had changed case law around how an enemy country was defined.
She told the committee: “What changed it, you say, was Roussev. But don’t you agree that the Court of Appeal said that it wasn’t going to – this is in the case of Roussev – that they weren’t going to establish a new meaning of enemy, that the term ‘enemy’ should be approached in a ‘common sense way’.
“Now we lawyers know ‘common sense way’ means that’s why we have juries, because juries have so much more common sense than the lawyers. Frankly, we need to get the jury to have a look and decide whether or not someone is an enemy.”
Mr Collins, explaining his hesitance to label China a threat, said: “In all of my statements, what I was trying to do was to demonstrate the range of ways China poses threats to our national security.
“In the first witness statement, I set out the range of espionage threat, in the second and third statements I set out the cyber threats, the economic security threats and the threats to our democratic institutions. What I didn’t do was to define or label China as a threat in a generic term.”
He added: “When I started this process, I was always clear that I would need to be in line with government policy at the time.
“I’ve quoted extensively the range of government policy documents at the time, and the government at that time did not go so far as to label China a threat in the generic sense.”
Mr Collins acknowledged this was “a fine distinction”.
But the senior civil servant told the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy admitted he was “surprised” the case collapsed.
He said: “I always knew it was going to be a challenge. When we discussed it with my team and with operational partners way back in ’23, it was always going to be more of a challenge in this case than the other case that I gave a witness statement to.
“That’s because of the nature of the actor and the nature of the incidents in question.
“But throughout the period from the submission of that first witness statement until I was informed that the intention was to drop the case, I was trying to ensure that we could support a successful prosecution.
“And so I was somewhat surprised when I was told on September 3 that the intention was to drop the case.”
The Deputy National Security Adviser suggested his belief that China is a threat to the UK’s “democratic institutions” ran through all three of his witness statements in the spying case.
A meeting was held on September 1 involving a range of different civil servants and operational partners “to discuss a range of China issues, including the handling of this case” and there were “at least four lawyers in the room who ensured that there was no discussion about the evidence that was going forward in the case”, the committee heard.
Asked whether they discussed if the case went forward if it would affect adversely the relationship with China, Matt Collins told the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy: “It discussed a range of different scenarios and how we would handle them.”
Asked if they talked about whether or not to describe China as an enemy was something that they needed to say to make the case work, Mr Collins said: “No, as I say, there was no discussion about the substance of the evidence in that meeting.”
Cabinet Secretary Sir Chris Wormald said: “The meeting was exactly as Mr Collins described. It was to discuss different scenarios and how they would be handled.
“It was not to discuss the evidence in the case, as Mr Collins has described and we’ve also described in our written evidence, lawyers were present to ensure that the discussion stayed where it was supposed to be, which was, how would we handle different scenarios in our relationship to China, as a number of people around this table will and on screen will know, holding meetings within government that discusses different scenarios and what government’s response would be to different things happening is completely common, both within the national security world and within other types of policy.”
