Lies, chicanery, politics and treachery – I reveal all the sordid Chinese whispers in the most comprehensive report anywhere!
BRITISH PATRIOT’S SUBSTACK
The background
In April 2024 two men, Christopher Cash and Christopher Berry, were accused under the Official Secrets Act 1911 of gathering and providing information prejudicial to the safety and interests of the UK, between December 2021 and February 2023. These two men (who both deny the accusations) met when they were both teaching English in China and became friends. Cash left China and became the director of the China Research Group, an organisation set up by Conservative MPs, as well as a parliamentary researcher for the Conservative MPs Tom Tugendhat and Alicia Kearns, while Berry remained in China where he became a “business consultant”, and the claim is that he was recruited as a spy by a Chinese agent known by the pseudonym of ‘Alex’.
The allegation is that Cash gave “politically sensitive information” about government policy to Berry who then wrote 34 reports which he passed to ‘Alex’ and which ended up going to Cai Qi, the fifth-ranking member of the Communist Party’s Politburo and a close ally of China’s president Xi Jinping. However, just before the case was due to go to trial last month, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) announced that it could “no longer proceed to trial” as the evidence “no longer met the test” that was required for there to be a realistic prospect of a conviction. The case was therefore dropped.
The prosecution
Matthew Collins, the civil servant who is one of three deputy national security advisers (make a note of that), wrote three witness statements which he gave to Stephen Parkinson, appointed by Rishi Sunak as the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) and thus the head of the CPS, to provide the case for the prosecution. After initially refusing to publish these, the government has now been forced to do so. The first – the main one – was written in December 2023. The statement makes it clear that China is an aggressive threat to the UK: “The Chinese Intelligence Services … conduct large scale espionage operations against the UK … to advance the Chinese state’s interests and harm the interests and security of the UK”.
We are told that ‘Alex’ asked for specific information which Berry obtained from Cash and then passed on. We also read that Berry met “a senior CCP [Chinese Communist Party] leader” and when Cash learnt of this he responded “you’re in spy territory now”. Nevertheless, Cash continued to provide Berry with information. Saying this was “v v confidential (defo don’t share with your new employer)” seemed to show that he knew who Berry was working for. On other occasions, Cash said things like “Didn’t hear it from me” or “very off the record”, and then saying not to share the information with the Chinese – which made it clear that he knew this was what Berry was doing.
The information Cash and Berry were providing the Chinese was mainly personal details about senior members of the Conservative party – the then party of government. This was information that was not openly known and was what the Chinese wanted, to better gauge how to play the British government. But there was more commercially important information too, such as relating to the British government’s position on Huawei, or sanctions on products from Xinjiang, or the state of Taiwanese/UK relations.
Collins concludes by saying that these activities were “prejudicial to the safety or interests of the UK”. This document seemed perfectly good enough to use in court, and the DPP confirmed this in writing, saying that he was “satisfied that the decision to charge this case in April 2024 was correct … on the basis of where the law stood at that time in relation to the requirements of the Official Secrets Act 1911”. Great. So where did it all go wrong?
Oh dear
In July 2024 the Court of Appeal considered a completely separate case of a group of Bulgarians accused of spying on behalf of Russia, and looked at how the Official Secrets Act 1911 should be interpreted. Now given that this law had been around for over a hundred years you might think this was pretty settled, but every lawyer thinks he’s Perry Mason and every judge wants to make his mark on legal precedent, so the criteria for prosecutions was reviewed and a new ruling made. And this upset the DPP, because he claimed that this meant that “further evidence” was needed to show that China was an “enemy”.
So Collins provided two more statements. The first, in February 2025 (even though the twit dated it 2024!), stated that China “presents the biggest state-based threat to the UK’s economic security” and that its activities included hacking into “a wide range of UK government and commercial targets … with potentially destructive consequences”. So far so good, but for some reason Collins felt compelled to add: “It is important for me to emphasise, however, that the Government is committed to pursuing a positive economic relationship with China”.
Eh?? What?? Why on earth was it “important” for him to “emphasise” this??? Not only was this not relevant to the period during which the spying allegedly took place, but Collins’s first statement, in December 2023, had not finished with such a positive statement. It had, instead, described the “epoch-defining challenge [China] poses to the international order”, and had gone on to say: “We will increase our national security protections where Chinese State (CCP) actions pose a threat to our people, prosperity and security”. This sentence clearly references China’s “threat” to the UK’s “security”.
While it is true that in the December 2023 statement Collins also said that the UK wanted to “leave room for open, constructive and predictable relations”, he explained that “diplomacy is a normal part of state-to-state business, and supports the national interest”. This was therefore a bland statement of how governments work, and it was only the 2025 statement that referred to a “positive” relationship between the UK and China.
The DPP was not satisfied with this second statement and so a third was produced in August 2025. In this, Collins stated that “China’s espionage operations threaten the UK’s economic prosperity and resilience, and the integrity of our democratic institutions”. Because the espionage charges related to the years 2021 to 2023, Collins explained that during this period the (then Conservative) government had “publicly articulated a number of concerns about the long-term strategic challenge that China poses to the UK” and that the government had identified “China as a “systemic challenge” to the UK’s security, values, and interests”.
Once again, however, Collins for some unfathomable reason decided to conclude his statement with a paragraph stating: “It is important for me to emphasise, however, that the UK Government is committed to pursuing a positive relationship with China to strengthen understanding, cooperation and stability. The Government’s position is that we will co-operate where we can; compete where we need to; and challenge where we must, including on issues of national security”.
Why did Collins refer to a “positive” relationship with China in both his 2025 statements but not his 2023 one? What changed between those dates? Very simple: a change of government from Tories to Labour. And with this came a change of attitude. This is most clearly and starkly demonstrated by the fact that the last paragraph of the August 2025 statement is an outrageous copy-and-paste from the 2024 Labour manifesto, which said: “we will co-operate where we can, compete where we need to, and challenge where we must.” To which Collins simply added “including on issues of national security” at the end.
Question number 1
This leads us to the first question that needs to be answered: What pressure did the government put on Collins to influence his statements?
Starmer says that Collins wrote his statements without any government influence, but this is disingenuous. Remember earlier when I highlighted that he was a deputy national security adviser? He has a boss: Jonathan Powell, the national security adviser. And who appointed Jonathan Powell? Keir Starmer! And Powell isn’t just any old Labour appointee – he has a long and shameful history as a Labour loyalist and traitor to Britain. It was Powell who was appointed by Tony Blair (yes, that’s how far back his intimate association with Labour goes!) to surrender to the IRA and draft the Belfast Agreement. And it was Powell who, now working for Starmer, arranged the surrender of our vital military base in Diego Garcia and the rest of the Chagos Islands to the Chinese allies Mauritius.
So we know just how quick Powell is to sell out British interests. And when it comes to China, everyone knows that Labour is desperate to woo China and attract inward investment. In October 2024 David Lammy became only the second foreign secretary in six years to visit China. Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, travelled there (and got humiliated!) just a month before Collins wrote his second statement, and Powell himself went there secretly in July – just weeks before Collins wrote his third statement. The trip was not announced by the British government and we only got to hear about it because the Chinese revealed that Powell had met their foreign minister Wang Yi. These pointless and mentally-retarded visits are continuing, with the permanent secretary at the Foreign Office, Oliver Robbins, due to visit Peking next week and Starmer going next year. And note that Peter Kyle, the Business and Trade Secretary, flew to Peking in the second week of September for the first meeting of the UK-China Joint Economic and Trade Commission since 2018. If the trial had gone ahead it would most likely have led to that meeting being cancelled. Well fancy that – what a spot of good luck for the government then, eh?
As a political appointee, Mr Powell is banned under the stupid civil service rules (these really need to be swept away by Reform if they win the next election) from line-managing civil servants, and the prime minister keeps repeating that Powell therefore had nothing to do with what Collins wrote. But there is more than one way to skin a cat, and it would be impossible for Powell to run his department if he genuinely couldn’t give instructions to his staff! Besides which, Collins is a senior civil servant which means he is almost certainly a left-wing Labour arse-licker keen to toady his way into Powell’s and Starmer’s good books.
So Powell need only have stated that the government didn’t want to annoy Peking if at all possible, and Collins will have got the message. Why else would he have inserted into his statements the comments reflecting Labour’s position towards China? After all, as Starmer has said (correctly), Cash and Berry needed to be tried according to the political situation at the time of their alleged offences. This means that what matters is the relationship between the UK and China during that period and not now. So the inclusion of an extract from Labour’s manifesto was utterly irrelevant and pointless. Collins is far too smart to have made such a stupid mistake; he did this 100% in order to grovel to the Labour government.
Question number 2
But the bigger question is this: Why didn’t Stephen Parkinson (the DPP) take the case to court on the basis of the evidence that he had?
The Crown Prosecution Service dropped the charges against Cash and Berry saying the government had failed to provide a statement that “at the time of the offence China represented a threat to national security”. Parkinson explained that the trial could not proceed because although he had tried for “many months” to extract from the government evidence that China was a “threat to national security”, this evidence was “not forthcoming” from Mr Collins’s witness statements and therefore there was an “evidential failure” which meant he no longer had a “realistic prospect of conviction”.
The only problem with this is that Parkinson’s claim that the evidence was “5% less than the evidence threshold that was needed” is utter garbage. The grounds for taking this case to court were more than strong enough.
You will remember that I mentioned earlier how it was the case of the Bulgarians charged with spying for Russia that had thrown a spanner in the works. So we now need to look at precisely what was determined by the Court of Appeal. And this is where we scratch our heads and ask: ‘Is Parkinson a cretin or was he nobbled by the Chinese?‘ Because the Court of Appeal’s judgement did not in any way preclude the the prosecution of Cash and Berry.
In essence, you are in breach of the Official Secrets Act if you do something “for any purpose prejudicial to the safety or interests of the State” and which is “useful to an enemy”. The DPP suddenly became worried about the definition of this word “enemy”. So let’s look at what the Appeal Court said about this.
Funnily enough, the court was actually quite dismissive of attempts to question the meaning of an “enemy”. They clearly say: “We do not think that this term raises a question of any particular complexity”. The courts had previously said that “enemy” included “a potential enemy with whom we might some day be at war” and the Appeals Court agreed this means “a country with whom the UK might some day be at war”. And that it was for the jury to decide this, based on the evidence. The Appeals Court concludes: “There is no reason in our view why the term “an enemy” should not include a country which represents a current threat to the national security of the UK”. And here is the key conclusion: “That formulation may well involve issues of fact and degree which the jury would be well-placed to assess, on evidence.”
So there you have it: it is for the jury to decide, based on the evidence, if they believe a foreign country is a “threat to the national security of the UK”. So the job of the prosecution is simply to put the evidence of what a country has done which threatens our national security before the jury and then let them decide. The key point – and I can’t stress this enough – is that what matters is the actions of the foreign country – NOT the interpretation put forward by the prosecution. So it makes absolutely ZERO difference if the prosecution refers to the foreign country as an “enemy” or not, or says they are a “threat” to our national security or not – because it will be the jury who will make the decision, based on that foreign country’s actions.
After all, Starmer doesn’t say that he likes to bum Ukrainian rent boys – but the evidence is there and we the public jury can come to our own conclusions. It’s not what is said that matters, but what the facts indicate. So when the Telegraph tells us “it was the omission of the word “national” when describing China as a threat to security that sank the prosecution”, I am left shaking my head in disbelief. I cannot find words strong enough to say how moronic this is. The fact that the witness statements did not use the specific words “enemy” or “national security” is utterly irrelevant. So when Parkinson says “notwithstanding the fact that further witness statements were provided, none of these stated that at the time of the offence China represented a threat to national security“ I have to tell you that this is mentally-retarded garbage.
What is really amusing is that while Parkinson’s comments are a direct criticism of the failure of the Labour government to provide the statements he wanted, Starmer is using exactly the same false and stupid arguments about how the previous government defined China in order to pin the blame on the Tories! So Sky News reported that “Sir Keir Starmer insisted the decision to brand China a threat would have to have been taken under the last Conservative administration. The prime minister said: “You can’t prosecute someone two years later in relation to a designation that wasn’t in place at the time.” The PM said: “What matters is what the designation [of China] was in 2023, because that’s when the offence was committed and that’s when the relevant period was”.”
Collins’s three statements did say that China’s hacking and espionage threatened the UK, and if the DPP wanted a stronger case it is this aspect – the hacking and espionage – that should have been gone into in greater depth, with additional information statements provided by the likes of MI5 and/or SO15.
Robert Peston, the ITV journalist, reported on the meeting between Parkinson and senior MPs. When he told them he wanted “5%” more evidence than Collins had provided they asked why he didn’t just go to another witness to get this. Here is Peston’s account: “The MPs … asked why Parkinson did not get a second expert witness, to fill in the small gap left by Collins. The DPP in essence said that is not the way the CPS operates. He was also pressed by the MPs about why he would not take the risk of putting the case to a jury. He claimed he did not believe a judge would let it get that far. The MPs were not convinced. One said: “he was just a bit wet about the whole thing. He should have taken the risk of prosecuting and have let a jury decide.””
Have you ever heard anything more retarded?? “That’s not the way the CPS operates”! It’s like saying ‘yeah, I saw the child drowning in the river but jumping in and saving him isn’t the way I operate, so I just walked on by and let him die‘! Since when has your usual way of doing things been more important than flexibility in order to be successful??? Parkinson is a cretin. And then he said that he didn’t just take the case forward and see if it was successful because “he did not believe a judge would let it get that far” – but how would he know unless he tried?? Parkinson is a cretin.
But is it really possible that Parkinson’s failure to prosecute this case was solely down to him being a complete mong? Or is there more to it? Could it have been partly due to a fear of the humiliating egg on face prospect of losing? After all, he is an extremely arrogant man. He sneers at any barrister who doesn’t have experience of prosecuting. He described Starmer, for instance, as “an average DPP”, saying: “He had no in-depth experience of prosecuting . . .he was a defence and human rights lawyer.” This may well be true, but it also suggests that maybe he didn’t want to risk losing in case it gave Starmer a chance to criticise him.
Or maybe he was nobbled by China? Or maybe he is just very supportive of China anyway and was only too happy to let the case fail, and then blame Starmer’s government by saying they failed to provide the necessary evidence. We know from the prosecutions of patriots protesting against the immigrant invasion and the muslim paedophiles and rapists that the CPS is an extremist left-wing and anti-British organisation, and that comes from the top. So maybe Parkinson is just a far-left, Britain-hating, piece of shit? You decide!
Question number 3
The third and final question is this: Given that Parkinson was so adamant that he wanted stronger evidence that China is a threat, why didn’t the government just give this to him?
Starmer has (after a lot of prodding!) admitted that he found out the case was collapsing two days before it did, but won’t say how he found out. However, we know that Parkinson informed the Attorney General Hermer of his intention to drop the prosecution, so this is one way (though there are others) this information could have got to the prime minister. But however he heard of this, why didn’t he step in to stop the case from being dropped? The prime minister’s spokesman said “it was not for him to intervene in the case”, adding“it is for the DPP or the CPS to make a decision on a criminal case.” So here once again we see that the defence is ‘that’s the procedure, guv, and I’m not going to change it, even if it means complete failure‘. We are ruled by absolute fucking imbeciles!
Dan Jarvis, the security minister, said Matthew Collins had been given “full freedom to provide evidence without interference”, and Starmer has said: “Under this government, no minister or special adviser played any role in the provision of evidence”. Well, why the hell not?? Why on earth was Collins given complete freedom to do and say whatever he wanted with zero supervision or government input?? Collins was, after all, giving the view and position of the government, so why shouldn’t the government help him with this? And if you say that he was referring to the position of the previous government (in office when the alleged offences were committed) then why couldn’t or shouldn’t he have consulted and been helped by the ministers of that period?
When he was asked if the government knew that he wanted some more, and more strongly-worded, evidence, Parkinson told the MPs: “Well, they must have known because we kept asking for it.” He also said that Matthew Collins had made it clear to the Crown Prosecution Service he was not going to provide the additional “5%”. So we are being asked to believe that Collins knew perfectly well that he was not providing the CPS with what they wanted in this high-profile spying case, and yet didn’t tell Powell, his boss, and was never asked about it. Sorry, but I find this literally unbelievable.
Jarvis told MPs that neither ministers nor Jonathan Powell were privy to the evidence that Collins had given in his witness statements to the CPS. And yet, and yet … In early September, before the CPS dropped the case, Powell convened a top secret meeting of senior Whitehall officials at which he discussed the potential diplomatic and security consequences of the trial. Most revealingly, however, he explained that Collins would only testify that China was a “challenge” and not an “enemy”. Although the prime minister’s office originally denied this a meeting took place, they have now been forced to admit that it did. One attempted cover-up after another! But here’s the real question: how did Powell know what Collins would say if – as Jarvis and Starmer maintain – he had no involvement in preparing for this case? Collins must have discussed this with Powell. It’s obvious that the government is lying to us, once again.
The simplest way to try and determine the truth would be to order Collins to appear before a parliamentary committee (either the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy or the Intelligence and Security Committee) and answer some questions. Civil servants are asked to appear before these committees all the time, so this is perfectly normal, but it seems our MPs are either too stupid or are complicit in hiding the truth. You might, of course, suspect that Collins would lie, so here’s an alternative that any decent journalist could adopt: ask Baron Barrow of Penrith in the County of Cumbria. Who he? That’s the ennobled name of Tim Barrow. If you are still none the wiser then I will tell you that Tim Barrow was Jonathan Powell’s predecessor, and the man who was Collins’s boss when he wrote the first statement. Baron Barrow is now a crossbench peer so is free to speak and has no reason to lie. Just ask him if Collins consulted him over the first statement. Come on you stupid journalists – do your bloody job!
An interesting clue as to why Powell might be so reluctant to attack China comes from the Daily Mail, which reports that Powell “is listed as a ‘fellow’ of the 48 Group on its website”. If you have not heard of this organisation you need to know that the ‘48 Group’ is one of the most prominent pro-China lobbying organisations in Britain. In addition, we are told that in 2011 Powell founded a ‘conflict resolution’ think-tank called Inter Mediate and has made several trips to China to meet with the ‘Grandview Institution’. Oh yes – the further down this rabbit hole we go, the murkier it gets! Because the ‘Grandview Institution’ is considered a front for China’s main foreign intelligence agency, the Ministry of State Security (MSS). Some of Grandview’s senior fellows either worked as MSS intelligence chiefs or were in the People’s Liberation Army.
According to the Sunday Times, Jonathan Powell collapsed the trial by saying that the government would not say in public that China was an “enemy” of the UK, in order to maintain good relations with China. And the Telegraph reports that the previous (Conservative) government had told the CPS that a senior civil servant would give evidence to establish that China was an enemy of Britain, and that intelligence officials would testify in a closed court to protect their identities. However, after Labour took office ministers told the CPS they were no longer willing to describe China as an enemy in court and the witness was withdrawn.
All the evidence points to Powell sabotaging this case by refusing to allow the use of information from our security services that China is a threat to the UK. This has been confirmed by The Times, which reports that former ministers have said that the security services had prepared “a dossier of evidence with “hundreds” of examples and case studies that proved China was a threat”. The document remains classified but is understood to have included “intelligence about Chinese digital and conventional espionage activities targeting Britain’s critical national infrastructure. This was in addition to “hundreds” of accounts of cyberattacks, theft of intellectual property, theft relating to critical infrastructure and secret police stations set up by Beijing to spy on Hong Kong dissidents in the UK”.
The shadow home secretary, Chris Philp, who was a Home Office minister before Labour took office, told the Times that the dossier included “multiple internal documents and reports” that showed the threat posed by China to national security. Starmer’s government “destroyed the prosecution by refusing to provide the evidence the CPS needed – evidence the government clearly has in its possession.” Even without access to this secret dossier we know that, in 2021, Sir Richard Moore, then head of MI6, described China as the biggest of the “big four” threats facing Britain, alongside Russia, Iran and international terrorism. In 2022, Sir Ken McCallum, the head of MI5, stated: “The activities of the Chinese Communist Party pose the most game-changing strategic challenge to the UK.” GCHQ has branded China a “highly sophisticated and capable” cyberthreat to the UK. And the National Cyber Security Centre said in its annual report that China continues to pose a major threat to a wide range of sectors and institutions in the UK and is using AI to increase the efficiency, effectiveness and frequency of attacks.
Or take Dominic Cummings, who has said that when he was working in Downing Street he was briefed about “vast amounts of data classified as extremely secret and extremely dangerous for any foreign entity to control was compromised” as a result of Chinese spying. He also told the Times that “the degree of penetration in espionage, in all kinds of operations, penetration of critical national infrastructure, theft of intellectual property, the whole range of things is absolutely extraordinary. A hundred times worse than it is in the public domain.”
Dirty fingerprints …
When it comes to government treachery you must always remember that it is too simplistic to just point the finger at one man and say it’s all his fault. Continuing today’s legal theme, government is what lawyers call a ‘joint enterprise’ – in other words it is a joint criminal activity where everyone has the same aim and everyone is guilty regardless of how big or small their role. And this is the case here.
So we have seen that Collins wrote weak statements and, as soon as Labour were elected, he started crawling up their arse and adding their policy stance even though it was utterly irrelevant and even counter-productive. We have seen that the DPP refused to take this case forward and allow a jury to decide, using false legal arguments. We have seen that Powell is a Sinophile and an Anglophobe and a treacherous piece of shit. We have seen that Starmer is a weak, disingenuous, traitor. We have seen that Jartvis is a filthy liar. And even more fingerprints can be found on this treasonous crime. We now read that the Treasury have joined in too, lobbying Powell and Lammy (when he was foreign secretary) to censore details about Chinese espionage in the Foreign Office’s China audit, in order not to damage Chinese trade and investment. As a result, Lammy refused to give any information about Chinese espionage to MPs. Oh yes, they are ALL guilty!
You know things are bad when you have former cabinet secretaries like Lord Sedwill and Lord Butler lining up to say that yes, of course China is a threat, and yes, of course the trial should have gone ahead. These were the most senior mandarins of their day, with the highest security vetting, and know exactly how government is supposed to work. Obviously they are not nationalists – they are the very definition of ‘the establishment’ – so if even they are attacking this Labour government then it’s clear that things are worse than they have ever been!
Britain is broken. The government is our enemy. We must all fight back. It’s now or never.
———–
If you liked this article then please share it on Facebook, Twitter/X, and by email to your friends.
Spread the word!!
And SUBSCRIBE NOW – it’s FREE!
Thank you 🙂
—-
Links (for those who like to read the source material):
First statement:
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/68f0022ca8398380cb4ad140/Statement_1.pdf
Second statement:
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/68f0024082670806f9d5e131/Statement_2.pdf
Third statement:
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/68f002502adc28a81b4ad149/Statement_3.pdf
Katrin Ivanova & Ors v R:
https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ewca/crim/2024/808?query=%5B2024%5D+EWCA+Crim+808
This article (THE CHINESE SPY CASE FIASCO: THE FACTS, THE TRUTH, THE SCANDAL) was created and published by British Patriot’s Substack and is republished here under “Fair Use”
Featured image: Silver Fox Hot Takes
Leave a Reply