To India, where Keir Starmer has met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi to discuss the UK-India trade deal and learn more about the country’s digital ID scheme. But of course the curious matter of the China spy case collapse came up at today’s press conference as questions remain about why the charges against Chris Cash and Christopher Berry were dropped.
Quizzed about whether national security adviser Jonathan Powell or any other minister were involved in the decision to drop the case, Starmer was clear:
I 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 been put before the court on this issue.
He added:
The evidence was the evidence as it then was, that’s the only relevant evidence and that evidence is the situation as it was under the last Tory government, rather than this government… You can only try someone on the basis of the situation as it was at the time of the alleged offence.
This is the PM’s line: that the description of China in the case must be based on the position of the last government – which, on the same day that Cash and Berry were arrested, called China an ‘epoch-defining challenge’. The director of public prosecutions, Stephen Parkinson, also said that while there had been enough evidence to prosecute in 2024, a more recent spy case had raised the threshold. But a number of senior political figures have pushed back on the official explanation – with ex-cabinet secretary Simon Case claiming that intelligence agencies had publicly described the foreign state as a threat for years. The government’s account has also been questioned by the former head of MI6, an ex-chief prosecutor and the UK counter-terror watchdog. Don’t expect this story to go away any time soon…
Comments