Britain’s former national security adviser has become the latest senior civil servant to raise questions about Sir Keir Starmer’s explanation for the collapse of a case against two alleged Chinese spies.
Lord Sedwill, who held the post between 2017 and 2020 and has also served as cabinet secretary, said he found the prime minister’s position “very hard to understand”.
He said “of course China is a national security threat to the UK”, directly, digitally, through espionage and through the country’s “aggressive” behaviour in the South China Sea.
“I’m genuinely puzzled, to put it politely, about the basis on which this trial has fallen apart. We introduced the National Security Act because the Official Secrets Act was not fit for purpose,” he told The Crisis Room podcast.
Another former cabinet secretary, Simon Case, who was Britain’s top civil servant when Sir Keir became prime minister, has also questioned the government’s stance.
Lord Case told The Telegraph: “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.”
Their comments come after the director of public prosecutions, Stephen Parkinson, said this week that a trial involving two men – a former parliamentary researcher and an academic – accused of spying on behalf of China collapsed after the government refused to brand Beijing a threat to national security.
And Sir Keir has said the government’s hands were tied by the previous Conservative government’s refusal to officially designate China a threat.
Mr Parkinson said the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) had tried “over many months” to get the evidence it needed to carry out the prosecution, but this had not been forthcoming from the Labour government.
Asked about the case on Thursday, Sir Keir said: “The evidence in this case was drawn up at the time and reflected the position as it was at the time, and that has remained the situation from start to finish.
“That is inevitably the case, because in the UK, you can only try people on the basis of the situation as it was at the time.”
He said “no ministers were involved” in any decisions around what evidence to hand to the CPS, but refused to say whether his current national security adviser Jonathan Powell was.
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.
Luke de Pulford, the head of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, told The Independent the government’s failure to provide evidence deeming China a threat to the CPS “looks very much as if it was motivated by a desire not to upset China”.
In the latest intervention piling pressure on the PM over the collapsed case, Lord Sedwill said: “The idea that you could leak or sell or betray the secrets of this country to anyone who isn’t described as an enemy, and somehow or other, that means you couldn’t be prosecuted, I certainly didn’t understand that to be the case under the Official Secrets Act.
“Could you really have taken the whole nuclear deterrent and put it in a newspaper and that wouldn’t be a breach of the Official Secrets Act?
“So I simply find that interpretation very hard to understand. But it’s clear that’s partly why we had to introduce the new legislation so there was no ambiguity about that.”
