Sam Cooper

Alleged political meddling in a collapsed espionage case targeting Starmer’s China-critical opponents sparks crisis of confidence in Whitehall’s independence.

Keir Starmer’s government is undergoing a credibility crisis over national security, with the Prime Minister himself facing mounting questions about whether he wielded political influence to have Whitehall’s independent prosecution service abruptly drop a rare Official Secrets Act case alleging a China-directed political-intelligence network inside Parliament — one that reportedly targeted Starmer’s opponents critical of Beijing.

Two men — parliamentary researcher Christopher Cash and academic Christopher Berry — had been due to stand trial this autumn, accused of gathering sensitive political research from Westminster between late 2021 and February 2023, including on the China Research Group of Beijing-sceptic MPs, and funnelling it onward to a senior figure in the Chinese Communist Party.

The geopolitical echoes of this case resonate far beyond Westminster. A similar pattern has unfolded in Canada, where Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government — also perceived as favouring trade and engagement with Beijing — was accused of turning a blind eye to intelligence warnings that China’s Ministry of State Security was gathering information on Conservative MPs critical of Beijing, including Michael Chong, who incurred China’s wrath by sponsoring a motion recognizing the CCP’s repression of Uyghurs as genocide.

Multiple outlets have reported that British intelligence believed the information gathered on Conservative MPs critical of China inside Whitehall was destined for Cai Qi, China’s fifth-ranking leader, a Politburo Standing Committee member and confidant of Xi Jinping. The Guardian’s reporting of Cai’s alleged role underscores the extraordinary level of authority to which information targeting British parliamentarians may have been directed. The China Research Group itself included high-profile MPs such as Iain Duncan Smith, Tom Tugendhat, and Neil O’Brien — all sanctioned by Beijing for their outspoken positions on Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and broader human-rights issues.

In Canada, a similar pattern emerged when Conservative MP Michael Chong was likewise sanctioned by China and later revealed as a target of Ministry of State Security intelligence-gathering. Justin Trudeau and his staff were accused of failing to alert Chong to Canadian intelligence reports forwarded to the Prime Minister’s senior officials, which detailed Beijing’s targeting of Chong and his family in Hong Kong.

The emerging evidence of parallels is striking: in both countries, during the same 2021 time period, legislators sanctioned and vilified by Beijing were simultaneously subjected to covert information-collection efforts — suggesting a coordinated strategy by the Chinese Communist Party to identify, monitor, and neutralise its most vocal democratic critics.

At the centre of the growing political storm in Whitehall is an allegation that echoes Justin Trudeau’s reported downplaying of threats against his Conservative opponents. In London, the claim is that Downing Street’s top security adviser, Jonathan Powell, decided the government would not permit China to be described in court as an “enemy” — language prosecutors believed was essential to meet the statute’s threshold. After that decision, the Crown Prosecution Service declared it could no longer proceed for “evidential reasons,” and the case collapsed. If accurate, the intervention would represent an extraordinary instance of political calculation colliding with the operational demands of counter-espionage.

With new reporting from Britain today, Starmer is coming under scrutiny for a potential motivation behind what would amount to improper meddling in an independent prosecution — driven, critics say, by Labour’s desire to sweeten relations with Beijing for economic reasons.

Downing Street’s official response to the dropped prosecution has only fuelled the political fire. The Prime Minister’s spokesperson said it was “extremely disappointing” that the CPS decision meant Cash and Berry would not face trial, insisting the decision was “made rightly independently of government.” That claim of independence, however, now looks increasingly hollow in light of Times and Telegraph reporting that the decisive instruction on the “enemy” wording originated from Starmer’s own national-security team.

The move — and the CPS’s refusal to explain why it could present no evidence — has triggered outrage across party lines. Former Conservative security minister Tom Tugendhat, joined by four other MPs, has written to Director of Public Prosecutions Stephen Parkinson demanding a full account of the decision to drop the case and clarification of any communications between the CPS, No. 10, and the Cabinet Office.

The legal explanation for the collapse of this explosive case is technical: the wording of the 1911 Official Secrets Act, which criminalised acts “useful to an enemy.” Prosecutors reportedly determined that to meet the statutory threshold, China would need to be explicitly designated an enemy — a label the current government refused to authorise.

The National Security Act 2023, which replaced the century-old statute, eliminates that outdated “enemy” clause and creates broader offences for “foreign interference” and “assisting a foreign power.” But the new law came into force only in December 2023 and cannot be applied retrospectively to alleged conduct that occurred between 2021 and 2023, according to several legal experts.

In Canada’s Foreign Interference Inquiry, Trudeau faced questioning on his government’s lack of response to CSIS’s “Targeting Paper” — a high-level intelligence document that described how Beijing collected information to classify which Canadian MPs could help China and which could hurt it, in apparent efforts to guide Beijing’s election interference and political influence campaigns.

Trudeau and his senior aides claim he was never informed of the explosive report. Drafted in 2021 and circulated to a small number of public servants in 2023, the Targeting Paper “named names” and outlined how Chinese diplomats categorised Canadian parliamentarians into three groups: those friendly towards Beijing, those neutral or persuadable, and those deemed antagonistic due to their criticism of China’s human-rights record, particularly on issues like the Uyghurs and Hong Kong.

Echoing the allegations now confronting Starmer’s government, Trudeau’s national security adviser and senior bureaucrats reportedly refused to adopt Canadian intelligence’s view that Beijing’s targeting of MPs represented a serious national-security threat that could undermine Canada’s sovereignty, testimony from Ottawa’s inquiry suggested.

In the hearings, Trudeau’s former senior officials Jody Thomas and Janice Charette defended their decisions not to escalate two high-impact 2022 intelligence reports on Chinese interference — including the Targeting Paper — to the Prime Minister.