We are living in strange and treacherous times. Times when things that would once have detonated Westminster like a ton of Semtex now pass with the faint pop of a damp party balloon.
Times when the words “we may have Chinese operatives inside the British Government” would once have triggered DEFCON 1, and yet today barely earn a shrug from Keir Starmer’s grey-suited politburo.
Because make no mistake: this is the kind of weapons-grade scandal that, in more normal times, would bring down a government. Yet it barely even causes a raised eyebrow when Starmer’s mob are involved.
The China Syndrome
Let us recap. Two men, Christopher Cash and Christopher Berry, were accused of spying for China. They were said to have collected information about China-sceptic MPs and government policy, passing it merrily along to high-ranking officials in Beijing. Proper Cold-War stuff. Seriously so.
But then, in a move that would make even Kafka blink, the trial collapsed. Why? Because the Labour Government refused to provide evidence that would show China was a threat to national security. You heard that right: the British state couldn’t prosecute alleged Chinese spies because the Labour Government refused to disclose key evidence that could have secured a conviction under the Official Secrets Act 1911.
Meanwhile, the Crown Prosecution Service, no nest of Tory hawks by any stretch, even went so far as to say Labour deliberately failed to help the case. Stephen Parkinson, the Director of Public Prosecutions, wrote in black and white:
“Efforts to obtain that evidence were made over many months… none of these stated that at the time of the offence China represented a threat to national security.” Translated from the bureaucratese: we asked, they stalled, the spies walked.
Starmer’s Smokescreen
Now, what does the Prime Minister say? “Oh, well,” says Sir Keir, brushing invisible dandruff off his moral shoulders, “you can’t prosecute someone two years later in relation to a designation that wasn’t in place at the time.”
That’s the same Keir Starmer, by the way, who once ran the CPS himself. A man who knows the law inside out… and knows exactly how to hide behind it.
So now his own successor as DPP is publicly accusing his Government of failing to cooperate in a national security case. That’s not Westminster tittle-tattle. That’s the country’s top prosecutor effectively saying Downing Street obstructed justice in a Chinese espionage case.
And who’s sitting in the middle of this honey-trap-mess? Jonathan Powell, Starmer’s National Security Adviser. A man who has reportedly held private meetings with figures close to the Chinese Communist Party, and who now finds himself accused of blocking evidence that might have shown China is a threat.
And this isn’t Powell’s first strategic calamity. Powell was also the key architect of the UK’s disastrous Chagos giveaway. It was Powell who helped engineer the handover of our strategically vital military base in the Indian Ocean, a linchpin of Western defence, to China’s ally, Mauritius. But the folly doesn’t end there. By gifting Chagos to a state bound by the Pelindaba Treaty, which bans nuclear weapons from passing through its territory, Powell’s plan effectively disarms the US and UK in a critical maritime corridor.
And to add insult to injury, Starmer’s government is sweetening this act of strategic self-sabotage with £40 billion of British taxpayers’ money. If this were a film, you’d call it too obvious. Too on-the-nose. Too Beijing-by-numbers.
Surely when Powell finally falls on his sword over the espionage trial scandal, the Chagos deal must be reversed… torn up, voided, and consigned to history as the worst act of geopolitical vandalism since Suez.
The Great Cover-Up
Even MI5 has said it in plain English. Back in 2023, Director Ken McCallum warned of Chinese espionage on an “epic scale.” Twenty thousand people targeted for recruitment. Twenty thousand. Yet here we are in 2025, with a Labour Government that refuses even to describe Beijing as a national security threat, while its own prosecutors shout, “For heaven’s sake, of course it is!” It’s the diplomatic equivalent of spotting an arsonist and handing him the matches.
Conservative MP Alicia Kearns says Labour “crippled our prosecutors in a desperate effort to appease Beijing.” She’s right. This Government is too frightened of losing face, or losing Chinese investment, to stand up for Britain.
Starmer’s crew have become the useful idiots of the CCP: fluent in moral relativism, paralysed by political globalism, and drunk on their own sanctimony. One has to ask… are certain people also being rewarded for this appeasement? Because it certainly looks less like incompetence and more like collaboration to me.
The Super Embassy Scandal
And let’s not forget the Super Embassy fiasco, the proposed mega-complex in London that would have made George Smiley spill his tea. Plans drawn up for what critics called a “spy hub with basement cells”, rammed through by Angela Rayner and Steve Reed despite the entire world saying, “Don’t be ridiculous.”
This, from the same Government that’s now refusing to call China a security threat. The same Government presiding over Chagos, the collapsed trial, the censorship crusade, the £20bn black hole, the Islamophobia-definition wheeze to shut down debate.
They call dissent “far right.” They call scrutiny “hate.” They call surrender “strategy.”
The Great British Sleepwalk
Starmer increasingly resembles Lord Halifax, the well-meaning but disastrously naïve architect of appeasement. Like Halifax with Hitler, he mistakes diplomacy for deterrence and caution for courage. Both men cloaked weakness in the language of reason, believing that engagement would tame aggression. Halifax refused to call Nazi Germany a threat; Starmer now hesitates to say the same of Beijing. Each chose trade over truth, hoping that moral compromise might buy peace. It never does. Appeasement doesn’t prevent confrontation… it merely postpones it, on worse terms. Britain learned that lesson once at ruinous cost; it must not learn it again under a Labour government that seems intent on repeating it.
But here we are, being sleepwalked into dependency and delusion by a party that once promised forensic precision and now delivers forensic cowardice. The bottom line is Starmer cannot be trusted on China, on security, or on truth. The CPS says one thing; Number 10 says another. The only thing Labour agree on is that the British public mustn’t ask too many questions.
But the questions will come. Because if it looks like infiltration, sounds like infiltration, and behaves like infiltration, then perhaps, just perhaps, we already have Chinese operatives in government. And if so, that’s not xenophobia. It’s called national self-preservation.
As Luke de Pulford put it: “The Government’s ‘three C’ China strategy was supposed to be: ‘challenge, compete and cooperate’. More like: ‘cave in, cover up and cash out’.”
Exactly so. Britain has been sold cheap… and the receipts are written in Mandarin.
By Chris Bullivant
