Yvette Cooper has claimed that she wanted alleged Chinese spies prosecuted when she was home secretary in charge of MI5, but said her hands were tied.
The case against 30-year-old Christopher Cash, a former parliamentary researcher, and 33-year-old Christopher Berry, a teacher, collapsed last month after the government did not provide evidence that Beijing was a threat to national security.
But a row has exploded after shadow home secretary Chris Philp claimed that Sir Keir Starmer’s team had access to “multiple” documents that proved China was a national security risk before the collapse of a spying trial.
The shadow home secretary claimed the government could have handed these papers over to prosecutors, but they “chose not to”, accusing ministers of having “destroyed the prosecution” of two men accused of spying for Beijing.
Speaking on the BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme, Ms Cooper, who is now foreign secretary but was in charge of MI5 at the time, said she wanted the case prosecuted and was “deeply frustrated” when it collapsed.
But she added that ministers were “not involved in any of the evidence that was put to the Crown Prosecution Service … because this was a criminal case”.
It comes as a senior Whitehall source has told The Independent that “we don’t have national security, we have something much more dangerous, the illusion of national security.”
The source claimed that the “UK is at war but neither this government nor Rishi Sunak’s were prepared to go on a war footing.”
They claimed that the spy saga was just a small part in an axis of China, Iran and Russia, which has the UK and Western allies under attack.
And the role of national security adviser Jonathan Powell is under scrutiny with allegations that “he sold out the country for a trade deal”.
Sir Keir has maintained that because the last Conservative administration had not designated China as a threat to national security, his government could not provide evidence to that effect, which the director of public prosecutions (DPP) Stephen Parkinson said was required to meet the threshold for prosecution.
But the collapse of the case has raised questions about Britain’s willingness to confront China as Sir Keir’s government looks to build closer ties with the country.
Mr Parkinson had blamed ministers for failing to provide the crucial evidence needed to proceed, saying the CPS had tried “over many months” to gather material.
Writing in The Times, Mr Philp said: “The DPP is calling out the government. Keir Starmer’s excuse is that the previous government did not publicly categorise China as a threat to national security.
“There is no delicate way to say this: what the prime minister said is totally untrue – and anyway it is not the legal test.”
Mr Philp, who was a Home Office minister between October 2022 and July 2024, added: “The government has multiple internal documents and reports on the threat China posed to national security in the 2021-23 period.
“Starmer’s government could have disclosed these documents to the CPS, in private if needed. It chose not to.
“It instead destroyed the prosecution by refusing to disclose the evidence the CPS needed – evidence the government has in its possession – and instead provided unhelpful witness statements.”
Meanwhile, crossbench peer Lord Sedwill, who served as national security adviser from 2017 to 2020, during which time he was also Britain’s most senior civil servant, said he was “genuinely puzzled” about the collapse of the trial.
“The truth is that, of course, China is a national security threat to the UK directly, through cyber, through spying and so on, and indirectly because of some of their aggressive behaviour in the South China Sea and elsewhere,” the former Cabinet Secretary added, speaking on The Crisis Room podcast.
Jonathan Hall KC, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, has said he is “investigating” the episode.
“I know quite a lot about it now and I don’t think that the public explanation that’s been given so far is at all adequate,” he told LBC.
But speaking at a press conference in India on Thursday, Sir Keir said he “can be absolutely clear, no ministers were involved in any of the decisions since this government’s been in, in relation to the evidence that’s put before the court on this issue”.
He said: “It’s not a party political point. It’s a matter of law. You can only try someone on the basis of the situation as it was at the time of the alleged offence.
“You can’t try them on the basis of the situation as it might evolve, weeks, months, years down the line. That’s a fundamental and that’s at the centre of this particular issue.”
Meanwhile, Ms Cooper told the Today programme: “As the prime minister has set out, this was also about not just the law that was in place at the time of the offences, but also the government stance that was in place at the time of the offences, and it was not for us to say in retrospect what that should have been.”
The foreign secretary added: “Let’s be really clear, the activity that was alleged in this case absolutely should be illegal and should face prosecution, and that’s why we supported changing the law since then, which makes it easier to prosecute cases like this.”
But in a rare intervention on Thursday, Simon Case, who served as cabinet secretary between July 2020 and December 2024, challenged Sir Keir’s assertion that the government’s hands were tied by the previous Conservative government’s stance on whether China was officially a threat.
“Going back over years, we have had heads of our intelligence agencies describing in public the threat that China poses to our national and economic security interests,” he told The Telegraph.
