The Spies That Won’t Go Away

When national security becomes national secrecy, truth is the first casualty.

Two men, Christopher Cash, a former parliamentary researcher, and Christopher Berry, were charged under the Official Secrets Act in April 2024. Both have consistently maintained their innocence. They were accused of gathering and providing information “prejudicial to the safety and interests of the state” between December 2021 and February 2023.

Now, the so-called “China spy case” has collapsed in spectacular fashion. And with it, the credibility of the government’s own narrative on national security.

Last week, the head of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), Stephen Parkinson, confirmed the charges were dropped because the government failed to produce vital evidence, specifically, proof that China was officially designated a “threat to national security” at the time of the alleged offences.

It’s a legal technicality, but a revealing one. The CPS had spent “many months” pressing for witness statements from the government, including from Matthew Collins, the deputy national security adviser. Yet those statements, we now know, are claimed to have fallen below the threshold required to prosecute.

That’s the official story. But unofficially, questions multiply.

Why was the government unable, or unwilling, to clarify its position on China when the case was first brought? Why pursue charges so serious under the Official Secrets Act without a coherent national security designation in place? And who decided, at the eleventh hour, that the evidence should never see the light of day?

Senior civil servants, including Chris Wormald, are said to have concluded that publishing the evidence outside a courtroom would be “inappropriate.” The CPS insists that decision rests with the government. The government insists the CPS made the call. In the end, nobody takes responsibility.

Former DPP Lord Macdonald called for Attorney General Lord Hermer, the government’s chief legal adviser, to appear before MPs when Parliament returns to explain what had happened.

“You simply cannot have a serious national security case collapsing without some proper explanation being given to the public,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

“What really surprises me about all of this has been the willingness of Number 10 and the Home Office and others to brief against the prosecutors,” he said.

He added that perhaps there was a feeling the DPP had been “a bit over-fussy here in requiring the government to make a statement in open court, which would be embarrassing in some ways to British national interests”.

“Of course China is a threat to the UK’s national security,” he said.

“One can understand why the prosecution, why the government might not want to state that publicly, but the prosecution could have proved it simply by demonstrating the recruitment of British citizens as spies for China, and I don’t understand why they didn’t just do that.”

In 2023 the head of MI5 Ken McCallum said there had been a “sustained campaign” of Chinese espionage on a “pretty epic scale”.

And a report by Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee published in July 2023, external said China had penetrated “every sector” of the UK’s economy.

Meanwhile, Tory leader Kemi Badenoch seized on the fiasco to accuse Prime Minister Keir Starmer of a “cover-up,” claiming Labour ministers are now too compromised to protect Britain’s security. Starmer hit back that the key events took place under the Conservatives’ watch, when China was still being wooed as a trading partner, not branded a threat.

The result is the usual Westminster pantomime: a blame game where the plot vanishes behind the smoke.

Both sides have a point, and both sides are avoiding the real one. The deeper issue is not who mishandled this particular prosecution, but how easily “national security” is used as a curtain to shield political embarrassment. When governments decide which truths can be shown and which must be hidden, justice becomes optional.

Downing Street now says three statements from Matt Collins will be released “after a short process.” Whether they’ll clarify anything is doubtful. What we’ll see is likely to be sanitised, redacted, and stripped of the very context that matters most.

The public, meanwhile, is left to guess what really happened between December 2021 and February 2023, and why two men’s lives were upended for a case that collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions.

Starmer’s spokesman insists the Prime Minister only learned of the case’s collapse “a couple of days” before the court was informed. He adds that Starmer had “not seen the witness statements until this morning.” Convenient timing.

The line between incompetence and concealment grows thinner by the day.

The Official Secrets Act was written to protect the state from espionage, not to protect governments from scrutiny. But once again, the machinery of secrecy has done what it does best, bury the truth beneath process and blame.

Here’s the Kicker… When justice depends on what the government is willing to disclose, democracy depends on what it dares to hide.