Whose side are you on?
Finding out that you have been spied on by the Chinese Communist Party feels like a violation, learning that the British government has failed to prosecute, feels like a betrayal.
I keep thinking about the moment they walked into my office. Three people: two from intelligence, one a civil servant. You could read everything in how they moved, in that particular heaviness in the air before bad news is spoken aloud.
I’ve been in enough rooms like that to know the shape of what is coming before anyone opens their mouth. There’s a quality to the silence, a weight to how people position themselves when they’re about to say something that changes how you see the world.
Christopher Cash was going to be arrested. Espionage. China. Official Secrets Act. A body blow.
The strange thing about the feeling of betrayal is how it sits in your body before your mind catches up. There’s a physical recoil, something primitive and instinctive, before the rational part starts cataloguing details and looking for logic.
Christopher had worked with me, been part of the China Research Group. A Scottish GP’s son, diligent, sharp, one of those people you assume will spend their life doing solid public service. The kind of person you don’t think twice about because they seem so utterly reliable, so completely what they appear to be.
And now this.
I remember trying to fit the pieces together afterwards, running back through conversations, looking for seams where the façade might have shown cracks. You always do this when you discover someone may not have been who you thought. You audit your own judgment, replay interactions, wonder what you missed. A kind of involuntary archaeology of your own blindness, digging through layers of what you thought you knew to find where the alleged deception was buried.
But here’s what I didn’t know then: that the sense of betrayal would come twice. That the second would be worse. That it wouldn’t come from an individual accused of choosing the wrong side, but from the very system we’d built to prevent exactly this from happening.
Let me back up, because context matters here.
When I became security minister, I inherited a legal framework that was, charitably, showing its age. The Official Secrets Act of 1911 — you can hear it in the date alone — was written for a world of telegram intercepts and gentlemen spies, not for the systematic, industrial-scale intelligence operations that modern autocracies run against open democracies.
So we did something about it. Two years of cross-party work, granular and tedious and absolutely necessary, led to the National Security Act 2023. New espionage offences, new tools, new powers for prosecutors. We went line by line through the legislation, thinking through scenarios, closing gaps, trying to anticipate how sophisticated adversaries might exploit weaknesses in our defences.
Now here’s the thing: this case was brought under the old 1911 Act, not the new legislation. The director of public prosecutions was confident it would work. The law might have been old, written for a different world, but it was adequate for the job. The prosecutors knew what they were doing. They’d looked at the evidence, assessed the framework and believed they had a winnable case. I was told it was a slam dunk.
Which makes what happened next even harder to accept as anything other than a failure of nerve.
I knew we might not win the next election, so I went out of my way to make sure there would be no gap in the care ministers could offer. Dan Jarvis, my shadow, is a friend of mine. I should say that clearly, because it matters to what comes next, and because I don’t want to hide behind false distance when I’m about to criticise someone I genuinely respect.
I made sure he was properly briefed. Shared the intelligence picture, walked him through the history, so Labour leadership understood the threat landscape. I wanted them ready to understand the seriousness of what we were facing.
I feel this very personally.
Sure, it wasn’t just about me, it was about parliament and our country. But it was my office and my life that found its way to the politburo of the Chinese Communist Party. Despite doing everything I could to keep our country safe by making sure they were ready, this government failed.
Not in some abstract, political-rhetoric sense that gets thrown around in Commons debates, but in the most concrete way possible: they failed to defend the country.
Over 18 months, intelligence officers and police built a case. Methodical, detailed, exactly the kind of patient work that goes into any major prosecution where stakes are high and scrutiny will be intense. The deputy national security adviser (DNSA) gave multiple statements, detailed, documented evidence of how China conducts large-scale espionage operations against the United Kingdom. This was the backbone of the Crown’s case. The police were confident.
Somewhere in that space between preparation and trial, in that crucial period when a case needs commitment to see it through, something changed.
Ministers now tell us there were definitional problems and legal uncertainties, claiming that because the previous government had called China a “systemic challenge” rather than a “threat,” prosecutors lacked the necessary foundation to proceed.
This is complete nonsense.
In the defence reviews of 2021 and 2023, we described China as a threat. I used those words on April 15, 2024 in the House of Commons. Even the DNSA used them in his evidence. It’s a strawman, our very own disinformation campaign.
The government retreated into a fog of excuses and procedural language. The definitions were unclear, they said, though the courts have been perfectly explicit. The DNSA was not giving evidence on his own behalf, but on behalf of the government of the United Kingdom. Ministers had a responsibility, even a duty, to make sure it reflected the government position. They are elected to lead. Civil servants execute their orders.
There are questions here that can’t just be buried under procedural language, questions that deserve answers even if those answers are uncomfortable.
Labour appointed Lord Hermer as attorney-general. Hermer has spent his career acting against the agencies of the state. Built his reputation on it, made his name challenging security services, questioning their methods, defending those accused of working against British interests. There’s a difference between healthy scepticism and reflexive opposition, between holding agencies to account and instinctively doubting their legitimacy.
When the case was dropped, was Hermer consulted by the director of public prosecutions? He must have been. If he wasn’t, that’s a constitutional scandal. If he was, we need to know what advice he gave and on whose instruction.
Why did the CPS wait months for evidence it said it required? Who decided that the DNSA’s testimony should be edited to include words from Labour’s 2024 manifesto? Why did ministers pretend that a formal “designation” of China was required when such a status does not exist and the courts had ruled it was acts not words that counted? And most simply, most directly: who made the final call to let this case die?
The Chinese Communist Party doesn’t trade with us because it admires Westminster democracy or believes in the rule of law. It trades with us because it wants our money, our technology, our markets, and our silence. This isn’t partnership. It’s a combination of predation and engagement, conducted with patience and strategy, with the kind of long-term thinking that democracies with short electoral cycles struggle to match.
The collapse of this case is a signal, whether we intended it or not. To every hostile power: Britain talks impressively, passes clever laws, builds impressive frameworks, and then hides behind them when courage is required. To our allies: we no longer believe enough in ourselves to defend what we’ve built.
Our intelligence agencies did their job. Our police did theirs. Our prosecutors stood ready to argue it in court, confident in the law and the evidence. But at the final moment, when all that professional competence needed commitment to see it through, leadership lost its nerve.
Either this government wanted the trial to fail, or it was too incompetent to make it succeed. There is no third option.
For the first time in a quarter century of service, through everything I’ve seen and been part of, I cannot say with confidence that the people at the top match the courage of the people doing the work. I cannot say that leadership understands what’s required or has the will to see difficult things through.
If a government cannot defend its people or deliver justice, if it fails at the only two things a government must do, then it has forfeited the right to govern. That’s not rhetoric, not political point-scoring. That’s just the truth.
A very chilling read
Tom, please DM me. I would like to reproduce this on my popular geopolitical Substack Guerre and Shalom. Please get in touch. Rgds, Daniel