MI5 Chief Dismayed by China Spy Fiasco
The head of MI5 has said he was frustrated by the collapse of the Chinese spy case as he warned that Beijing poses a threat to the UK “every day”. Sir Ken McCallum said the Security Service worked “very hard” to make convictions possible, “so it’s frustrating when they don’t happen”.
As the row over the abandonment of the spying trial escalated, Sir Keir Starmer faced questions over how a sentence from the Labour Party manifesto ended up in a key prosecution witness statement.
The Conservatives, who have accused the Government of scuppering the trial to pander to Beijing, believe the insertion of Labour’s policy on China into the document is evidence of political interference.
Sir Keir, his national security adviser Jonathan Powell and Mr Powell’s deputy Matthew Collins, who wrote the witness statement that prosecutors have blamed for the collapse of the case, could now be forced to give evidence in public after two parliamentary committees announced inquiries into the fiasco.
Stephen Parkinson, the director of public prosecutions, is also facing questions over why the Crown Prosecution Service dropped the case, which he blamed on insufficient evidence that China represented a threat to the UK at the time of the alleged spying offences.
Sir Ken made the rare intervention into government affairs the day after three witness statements written by Mr Collins were published into the case of former parliamentary aides Christopher Cash and Christopher Berry, who have been accused of passing classified information to Beijing.
Sir Ken described Mr Collins as “a man of high integrity and a professional of considerable quality”, saying: “Of course I am frustrated when opportunities to prosecute national security threatening activity are not followed through, for whatever reason.” The spy chief, who was making his annual address as director general of MI5, added: “I would invite everyone to not miss the fact that this was a strong disruption in the interest of the UK’s national security.”
Asked directly whether China presented a national security threat, he said: “Do Chinese state actors present a UK national security threat? The answer is, of course, yes they do, every day.”
Sir Ken also revealed that the security service had thwarted a threat from China in the past week.
The Chinese embassy in London retaliated by describing the allegations as “pure fabrication and malicious slander” in its first comments on the diplomatic row. An embassy spokesman said: “China never interferes in other countries’ internal affairs and always acts in an open and above-board manner. As a Chinese saying goes, ‘While the superior man is at ease with himself, the inferior man is always anxious.’ The attempt by some British politicians to smear China is doomed to fail.”
On Wednesday night, the Government published three witness statements made by Mr Collins that revealed how his evidence in the spying case changed over the course of two years.
Mr Collins’s final statement ended with a reference to how the UK wanted to “cooperate where we can; compete where we need to; and challenge where we must”, which was lifted word for word from the 2024 Labour Party manifesto.
The Tories say this weakened the case against the spies as it was less robust than language in Mr Collins’s first statement.
Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the Opposition, said that instead of giving the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) what it needed to prosecute the case, the Government had provided “a lovely statement about how great China was. That’s an embarrassment”.
Mr Collins, who wrote his main witness statement in 2023 when the Conservatives were in power, was asked by the CPS to make two further witness statements to “amplify” some of the points he had previously made. However, Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, argued that two subsequent statements made by Mr Collins after Labour came to power “appear weaker” than his first one.
Mr Philp wrote to Mr Parkinson requesting the urgent publication of all correspondence between the Government and the CPS over the case.
Mr Parkinson also received a letter from the chairman of the home affairs committee demanding a “fuller explanation for the dropping of charges to be provided”.
The prosecutor previously said that he asked the Government for more evidence to back up the case but that insufficient evidence was provided and that was why the trial was scrapped. Mr Cash and Mr Berry have always maintained their innocence.
Lord Macdonald, the former director of public prosecutions, said the decision to scrap the trial was “difficult to understand”.
He said: “The very fact that China was prepared to, in the Crown’s case, recruit two UK citizens to spy against the UK in China’s interests would suggest very strongly that China is a threat to national security, which is the test required for prosecution.
“Secondly, Matthew Collins’s third statement makes it very clear that China has been acting in a way that is deliberately hostile to our economic interests. It’s axiomatic in law that economic interests are an intrinsic part of national security … in those circumstances, it’s quite difficult to understand a decision not to prosecute.”
Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, agreed, saying that the decision “looks awfully like appeasement” by the Government.
Dame Emily Thornberry, who chairs the Commons foreign affairs committee and was briefed by Mr Parkinson on the collapse of the case, said he did not need to scrap the trial and should have “shown more backbone” by going ahead with the prosecution.
She said: “If the stumbling block was really whether China was a threat to national security then a) I don’t understand why the DPP had any problem proving it and b) I don’t see a jury would have had any problem deciding China was a threat. I am afraid I really wasn’t impressed by the reasons he gave us.”
The Government had been due to announce a decision next week on whether to allow China to build a “super embassy” on the former site of the Royal Mint in London, but announced on Thursday it had delayed the announcement for two months. Dominic Cummings, former chief adviser to Boris Johnson in No 10, told ITV News that MI5 and MI6 had both told him the embassy was “a dreadful idea” because “spy dungeons” would be built in the basement.
The Telegraph can also reveal that Prince Andrew met the senior Chinese official at the centre of the Beijing spy case at least three times.
The Duke of York held meetings with Cai Qi, one of the most senior members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and a close ally of Xi Jinping, China’s president, in 2018 and 2019.
Mr Cai is understood to be the final recipient of sensitive information that Mr Berry and Mr Cash allegedly passed to China.
On Thursday night, Mr Berry broke cover and made his first public statement since the case collapsed.
He insisted his reports for a Chinese company concerning economic and commercial issues “contained no classified information”.
Mr Berry said: “I do not accept that, in so doing, I was providing information to the Chinese intelligence services, nor is it tenable that the provision of such material could, in any sense, be considered for a purpose prejudicial to the safety or interests of the state. This would have been one of many issues raised with the jury during a trial.”
He claimed he was now “caught in the middle whilst various groups seek to use the case to their political advantage”.
Tom Tugendhat, the former security minister, suggested that Britain was no longer a democracy as the Government had tried to claim that all of the decisions over the spying case were made by officials and were out of ministers’ hands.
He told the House of Commons: “Given that the Government’s position is that the bureaucrats run the Government, the bureaucrats are in charge of everything, may we dissolve this House and save the taxpayer the money? Because clearly, this isn’t a democracy any more.”