We are at war but our governments past and present do not want to acknowledge it.
~anonymous Whitehall source

When UK foreign secretary Yvette Cooper met her Chinese counterpart on 6 November, she told him that any activity threatening UK national security would not be tolerated. She referred to the Westminster spy case that had collapsed prior to her meeting (more on that shortly), but she could also have referred to the civilian-recruitment headhunter case that followed a few days after. In the latter, MI5 named “Amanda Qi” and “Shirly Shen” as the most prolific of numerous LinkedIn accounts targeting Home Office officials, NATO staff, and policymakers. These accounts were networking as a front for recruitment by the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS). Such cases come thick and fast these days. And despite the foreign secretary’s strong words, the United Kingdom has meekly tolerated all of them.

The British establishment is hopelessly compromised on Chinese issues, and Beijing senses it. Incapable of making a decision on the monitoring of Chinese funding for universities; incapable of dealing with the Communist Party’s industrial levels of espionage in this country; incapable of forming a comprehensive China strategy at all—Whitehall is the West’s weak link. That makes the UK an ideal site from which the CCP can establish a frontline in its ongoing Cold War with liberal democracy. And if all goes to plan, one key physical manifestation of this frontline will be the embassy at Royal Mint Court; the same mission over which Downing Street has dithered for a year. Despite delays in decision-making—first to October, then to December, and now to January—Keir Starmer is still expected to approve construction eventually.

The project has been a high priority for the CCP for a while. Last year, Xi Jinping personally discussed it with Starmer over the phone. Remarkably, steel producer Jingye offered to waive the £1 billion compensation it has been chasing over the Scunthorpe steelworks issue in return for approval of the new embassy. Along with the carrot comes the stick—back at the British embassy in Beijing, the water supply is routinely cut off for hours at a time, making life as uncomfortable as possible for the resident diplomats in order to send a message.

In October, when the UK government’s decision over construction was delayed for a second time, the response from CCP foreign ministry spokesperson Lin Jian was startling. The British government, he barked, must “honour its commitments at once.” This sounded like an order given to an underling. It was followed by a vague threat should the underling disobey: “The consequences arising therefrom shall be borne by the UK side.” Beijing’s mask was slipping.

Most interesting was Lin Jian’s mention of “commitments.” Any private commitments made by the British authorities to the Chinese authorities concerning the planning application would be unlawful. Downing Street rushed out a statement claiming that it did not recognise “any claims of commitments or assurances.” But the Conservative Party scents blood in the water. It has written to the prime minister’s independent ethics adviser and asked for an investigation.

Why would this embassy be so important to the Communist Party? Chinese immigration to the UK has not suddenly increased in recent years, and there is no corresponding inflation in the demand for consular services. My Chinese sources tell me that it won’t actually be career diplomats working there once the mission is built, it will be agents from the MSS. The embassy would be a bridgehead deep within enemy territory; a stronghold in a war that the British establishment still hasn’t realised is happening.

The embassy could house a giant data centre targeting British citizens, while effectively operating as an overseas police station. Beijing has refused to explain the intended purpose of several large underground rooms that appear in the planning documents. Details like these, China maintains, are none of the British government’s business. The UK is expected to “honour its commitments,” stop asking questions, and start obeying orders. And this attitude is hardly a surprise, considering the Party’s multiple successes with British infiltration. 

It’s not that UK authorities are oblivious to the danger. Security sources have been able to flag specific locations in London that are regularly bugged by CCP spies—the Red Lion pub on Parliament Street; the Corinthia hotel near Trafalgar Square; the Raffles on Whitehall. It’s just that serious action is never taken. Consider Christine Lee, the agent identified by MI5 in 2022. She was “a threat to national security” who carried out “political interference activities on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party.” However, her activities were later determined to be under the criminal threshold. While the original MI5 warning was upheld by senior judges in December 2024, no charges were ever brought, and Lee still lives in the UK, continuing her work as before.

In every sphere, it seems, Britain capitulates and accommodates. More than thirty of the nation’s private schools have now been bought by Chinese investors—Thetford Grammar School, Wisbech Grammar, Malvern St James, Ipswich High School, and so on. As one senior government source put it: “China is playing the long game and doing all the things we used to do as an empire. … It’s ideological warfare. These children will grow up and be helpful to the Communist Party.”

Then there are the universities. When MI5 director-general Ken McCallum briefed British vice-chancellors back in 2024, he explained that “hostile states” target British universities, stealing technology to build up their military and undermine British security. He need not have bothered. Following his warning, 23 British universities would go on to sign agreements with at least one Chinese institution thought to pose a significant risk of aiding CCP military research.

Earlier this month, it emerged that Sheffield Hallam University (my own alma mater) had caved under CCP pressure and ordered Laura Murphy, one of its professors, to cease her research into forced labour in Xinjiang. Three state security officers visited Hallam’s recruitment office in Beijing to grill staff members. Hallam got the message—internal communications fretted that critiques of Beijing could lead to a boycott by Chinese applicants. British universities make a loss on every domestic student, which makes them dependent on foreign fees. They are therefore squeamish about offending authoritarian regimes in the countries from which those fees flow.

But the Westminster spy case may offer a faint ray of hope. Back in 2023, two British nationals were charged with spying for China. Parliamentary researcher Christopher Cash and economics teacher Christopher Berry were accused of communicating information that would be directly or indirectly useful to an enemy, contrary to section 1(1)(c) of the Official Secrets Act. A Chinese intelligence agent had commissioned a total of 34 reports from the pair, before passing the information up to Cai Qi, Xi Jinping’s chief of staff and China’s fifth most senior official. As a result, Cai had been privy to such details as MPs’ individual hotel room numbers during a foreign-affairs committee delegation to Taiwan in November 2022.

For such charges to have been brought in the first place, we would expect a high degree of confidence in a successful prosecution. Cash and Berry’s messages were certainly incriminating, and Berry had even been stopped at Heathrow with a suitcase containing £4,000 in cash—money from his Chinese handler. But espionage is not illegal when it concerns an ally. And so the incumbent Conservative government told the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) that evidence would be provided by Matthew Collins, deputy national security adviser, showing China to be an enemy of the state.

Britain’s Golden Slumber

The British establishment’s China policy resembles a man periodically waking only to fall asleep again.

QuilletteAaron Sarin

In September, however, after two long years in limbo, prosecutor Tom Little told the Old Bailey his team would offer no evidence against Cash and Berry. Collins was withdrawn as witness and the case collapsed. Cash and Berry walked free. Parliament, said the Speaker of the Commons, had effectively been exposed to Chinese espionage. Even while discussing the collapsed spy case, MI5 Director-General Ken McCallum revealed, in a casual aside, that the intelligence service had uncovered yet another major Chinese espionage threat “just in the last week.”

Gross incompetence or something more sinister? Starmer said the CPS made the decision to drop the case independent of any pressure from ministers. He blamed the previous (Conservative) government for not labelling China a threat to national security: “You have to prosecute people on the basis of the circumstances at the time of the alleged offence. And so all the focus needs to be on the policy of the Tory government in place then.” According to the Conservatives, China was indeed described as a threat during Tory tenure. Perhaps, party leader Kemi Badenoch suggested, the spy case was deliberately forced to fail because the Prime Minister just “wants to suck up to Beijing.”

Starmer may have wanted all the focus to be on the Tories, but Stephen Parkinson, director of public prosecutions, soon turned the spotlight back on to Labour. Parkinson insisted that the CPS originally had enough to charge Cash and Berry. After new case law was established by a High Court ruling, which defined “enemy” as “a threat to the national security of the UK,” the CPS had requested the necessary evidence to show that China meets the new definition. Downing Street refused to provide that evidence, which is what caused the case to collapse.

If Labour hoped the case would be forgotten, the next few weeks must have been frustrating. New details emerged every day. On 9 October, the Telegraph reported that Jonathan Powell, the prime minister’s national security adviser, had prevented the publication of a major government report on Chinese spying in the UK. Powell turns out to be a fellow of the 48 Group Club, a networking organisation whose stated mission is to “connect China to the world.” He also has close and potentially compromising links with Beijing think tank Grandview Institution. It’s useful idiots like Powell who may be pulling the strings in Britain: “If Powell and Rachel Reeves tell Keir [Starmer] to do something,” one minister told the Times, “he does it.”

Under pressure, the government finally published witness statements from Matthew Collins. The details were telling: Berry’s Chinese contact would regularly request information “as a matter of urgency,” indicating the likelihood, in Collins’s opinion, that it was “used to inform real-time decision making.” Of most relevance to the current debacle was a description of China as “the biggest state-based threat to the UK’s economic security.” Collins frankly stated that the CCP’s 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.”

On China policy, there is a schism in the British establishment. The Treasury, Foreign Office, and Business Department side with Starmer, seeking a thaw in Sino-British relations. Meanwhile, the Home Office, Ministry of Defence, and intelligence community are sceptical. MI5, MI6, GCHQ, and the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) were actually prevented from submitting evidence to the government about the national-security risks posed by the CCP. According to Dominic Cummings (chief adviser to the prime minister during the Boris Johnson administration), MI5 and MI6 told him that the proposed Chinese mega-embassy in the heart of London was a “dreadful idea”—and they wanted him to persuade Johnson to “kibosh” it.

The Cash and Berry case made this schism public, and forced a delay in decision-making until December. Labour did not want to approve what many saw as a spy hub right in the middle of a spy scandal—those optics were just too embarrassing. But since the second delay, the publicity has only grown, and the embarrassment along with it. Starmer’s decision could face a judicial review, especially since Lord Banner, one of the country’s top planning lawyers, has stated that approval of the embassy could be unlawful.

There is a precedent for an abrupt change of direction: think of the mess over British Steel earlier this year, when negotiations broke down between the UK government and Chinese company Jingye. The government passed emergency legislation to ensure control of the last British plant producing virgin steel. China was no longer welcome in Britain’s steel sector. Something similar happened with respect to Huawei. The CCP-compromised telecom company once had grand plans for the UK, but following a technical review by the National Cyber Security Centre in 2020, it was decided that Huawei would be removed from Britain’s 5G networks. For all the UK’s dithering, the right decisions have occasionally been made eventually, even at considerable cost.

A rejection of the mega-embassy would not curtail CCP espionage in the UK. It would, however, reset Sino-British relations in a way that the Jingye and Huawei cases did not. The Party does not expect defiance. If Britain can muster the resolve to reject something so important to Xi Jinping, it will cease to be the pushover it has allowed itself to become in recent years.