How to buy influence in Britain

Like all hacks, I sometimes wonder whether I should just screw my self-esteem, do a Jonathan Freedland and start writing trashy novels for cash. As I fill the pages with every cliché, I can at least console myself by thinking of the wonderful piles of lucre about to come my way.

Were I to make this career change, my first ‘shocker’ would involve a Chinese spy called Fang Fang. She would be a sexy, enormously seductive femme fatale. As she works her way through the American political scene, she would entrap male members of Congress with startling ease, finding out juicy secrets along the way which she then reports back to Beijing.

Alas, I would soon be done for plagiarism, because that plot has already been written. It happened in the 2010s when Fang Fang (otherwise known as Christine Fang) managed to get close to a number of US legislators. And when I say close, I do not mean it metaphorically. At least two mayors in the Midwest fell into her sinuous arms. So, reportedly, did the Democrat congressman Eric Swalwell, who was sitting on the House Committee for Homeland Security at the time (a position he bafflingly then was re-appointed to). Naturally, the headlines wrote themselves. Or they would have done if the US press had any sense of fun. Most of it is far too po-faced to have the kind of enjoyment our headline writers would have had about ‘Chinese penetration’ and the like.

As it happens, our own China ‘spy’ story is a more mundane affair. This week we learned that two people – one of them a researcher who worked in parliament – have been arrested for allegedly spying for China.

It’s not the first time such a thing has occurred. In 2010 it was alleged that a Russian spy was operating in parliament. The comely 25-year-old Katia Zatuliveter found an interesting weakness in our system. You might say she found a soft underbelly, if that isn’t too graphic. Specifically, she ended up shagging the Liberal Democrat Mike Hancock, MP for Portsmouth and a member of various Russia and foreign affairs-related committees. I don’t know whether the randy 64-year-old ever wondered what exactly the hot young Russian researcher might see in him. But although Hancock’s career was harmed, it was Katia I felt sorry for. A life in espionage should hold out more promise than occasionally being lain on by a bearded Lib Dem in the hope of extracting some state secrets during pillow talk. Imagine poor Katia’s reports to her handler. ‘Yes, Pavel, it is I, Katia. It appears that Chris Huhne may move to the agriculture portfolio.’ So much for Russian penetration.

Westminster’s latest spy scandal may be less sexy, but it is vastly more serious. The researcher denies being a spy, but there are already questions about how he might have got a parliamentary pass, though not security clearance. The specific problem is that he was allegedly put in the proximity of pretty much every MP with a critical stance towards the Chinese Communist party (CCP). This includes Tom Tugendhat, who is now security minister, and Alicia Kearns, the chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee.

Of course, if true, this is audacious. It is also very sensible of the CCP to gather information on those who might be critical of it. After all, there is a fight within the Conservative party, as in almost all western political parties, about what to do regarding China. The Foreign Secretary, James Cleverly, said during his recent trip to Beijing that disengaging would not be ‘credible’. And that itself is suitably vague. After all, everybody wants a piece of the economic action. But everybody at this point has also been stolen from, had their companies ransacked for data and much more. No closer engagement – if not disengagement – is roughly where the current median is landing. But it is worth noting something else at this delicate juncture: not only how vulnerable our institutions are, but how cheap it is to infiltrate them.

Some 15 years ago, I published a report into the foreign funding of British universities. Of all the buying up that was going on, by far the most extensive came in the form of the ‘Confucius Institutes’ that had sprung up at numerous UK universities and clearly acted as propaganda wings of the CCP.

Since then, the scandal of these institutes has received more attention. But what struck me back then was how low the donations required to set them up were. Most were merely in the six figures. Again and again, I marvelled that British universities would let themselves play host to a foreign actor for a few hundred thousand quid. When I have my breakout success as a thriller writer, perhaps I shall splash the cash by setting up Douglas Murray Centres for Peace and Under-standing at all major places of learning.

It is even cheaper with the British parliament. A data-harvesting operation in DC will cost you. But Westminster is filled with underfunded MPs who desperately need staff support. It is filled with committees that cannot afford a secretariat. Most of the researchers and assistants are paid rock–bottom wages because the young staff believe it will look good on their CV and give them good access. I reckon you could provide a ‘researcher’ for just north of £20,000 a year and everyone would feel jolly grateful. It goes without saying that if you leverage in a sympathetic person and have the resources of China, you can get a remarkable amount for very little money.

Inevitably, people will now be asking why one of the men arrested was allowed into parliament in the first place. There will be questions about why security screenings – including, presumably, by MI5 – did not occur, or did not flag him up. There will almost certainly be recriminations. But I wonder whether the larger lesson will be learned. Which is that when it comes to China, we really are not dealing with a benign foreign power. It’s a regime with quite a lot of bite. And a lot of Fangs.