U.K. prosecutor says a spying case collapsed because the government wouldn’t call China a threat

LONDON — The trial of two British men accused of spying for Beijing collapsed because the U.K. government refused to brand China a threat to national security, the country’s chief prosecutor said.

Former parliamentary researcher Christopher Cash and academic Christopher Berry were charged in April 2024 with violating the Official Secrets Act by providing information or documents that could be “useful to an enemy” and “prejudicial to the safety or interests” of the U.K. between late 2021 and February 2023.

But Director of Public Prosecutions Stephen Parkinson said the case collapsed because no one from the government was willing to testify “that at the time of the offense China represented a threat to national security.”

“When this became apparent, the case could not proceed,” he wrote in a letter sent Tuesday to lawmakers on Parliament’s home affairs and justice committees.

The high-profile case was dropped unexpectedly last month, weeks before the trial was due to begin, sparking allegations of political interference, which the government denies.

Parkinson said his team had tried “over many months” to get the evidence it needed but it had not been forthcoming from Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s administration.

Conservative lawmaker Alicia Kearns, who worked with Cash when she served as chair of Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, urged the government to provide more information about why the case collapsed.

“The government must come clean. Who is responsible for spiking the prosecution?” she said. “Continued stonewalling only invites further concern of concealment or conspiracy.”

The two men deny wrongdoing, and the Chinese Embassy has called the allegations fabricated, dismissing them as “malicious slander.”

Under the Official Secrets Act, prosecutors would have had to show the defendants were acting for an “enemy.”

British intelligence authorities have ratcheted up their warnings about Beijing’s covert activities and Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee labeled Beijing a “strategic threat” in 2023.

The center-left Labour Party government, which took power last year, has used the term “strategic challenge.” It has tried cautiously to reset ties with Beijing after years of frosty relations over spying allegations, human rights concerns, China’s support for Russia in the Ukraine war and a crackdown on civil liberties in Hong Kong, a former British colony.

Britain’s top diplomat and Treasury chief have both visited Beijing in the past year, and Starmer is expected to travel to China next year.

Asked about the spying case, Starmer maintained that the government couldn’t provide the testimony prosecutors wanted because the Conservative Party, which was in office at the time of the alleged spying, had not designated China a threat.

Former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak described China’s growing authoritarianism as an “epoch-defining challenge” — wording that defied many Conservatives’ expectations at the time that he would class China as a “threat” to U.K. security.

“You can’t prosecute someone two years later in relation to a designation that wasn’t in place at the time,” Starmer said. “All the focus needs to be on the policy of the Tory government in place then. That’s the only place that the evidence could be focused on.”

Critics say that explanation was not credible and allege the case was dropped to avoid damaging the relationship with China, a key trading partner.

“This is a clear example of U.K. officials trading away our national security,” said Luke de Pulford, executive director of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, an international group focused on the threats posed by Beijing’s rising power.

The head of the MI5 domestic intelligence agency, Ken McCallum, has named China, Russia and Iran as the leading security threats to the U.K. In 2023 he said in an interview with the BBC that tens of thousands of people in the U.K. had been approached by Chinese spies, saying the espionage campaign was on a “pretty epic scale.”

Lawless and Hui write for the Associated Press.