Starmer only read China spy witness statements this morning, No 10 says, as Cleverly accuses PM of misquoting him – as it happened

Starmer only read China spy case witness statements this morning, No 10 says

Here are the main lines from the NO 10 post-PMQs lobby briefing.

The PM’s spokesperson explained why the government was publishing its China spy case witness statements now, when yesterday officials were saying the CPS were opposed to this. The spokesperson said:

Prior to last night, the CPS had made clear that witnesses have an expectation that their evidence will not be publicly discussed in those circumstances.

The CPS had also advised that to do so, or to do so in some cases, but not in others, would likely affect the confidence of witnesses in coming forward and hamper the interests of justice.

However, given the CPS has now greenlit the publication, we will release the three statements from the DNSA (deputy national security adviser Matt Collins) after a short process. We will release the fullest version possible.

The spokesperson said three witness statements would be published. The first substantive witness statement was submitted by Collins under the previous Conservative government in December 2023, and two additional ones were provided by him in February and August this year.

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Badenoch says Starmer should have intervened when he learned CPS about to drop China spy prosecution

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Dominic Cummings claims ‘everybody in Whitehall’ knows threat from China far worse than government admits publicly

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Early evening summary

For a full list of all the stories covered on the blog today, do scroll through the list of key event headlines near the top of the blog.

Keir Starmer during PMQs today. Photograph: House of Commons/PAShare

The Conservative party have launched an online petition urging the government to “Release the China files”.

The party says it is calling for “the publication of all communications between the government and the CPS, the minutes of all Government meetings discussing the China spy case, and the correspondence and minutes surrounding planning permission for China’s new embassy and Jingye’s financial implications”.

Jingye is the Chinese company that still technically owns British Steel. One allegation is that it has offered to drop a claim for £1bn compensation in return for the UK agreeing to allow the proposed Chinese super-embassy in London to go ahead.

Campaigns like this rarely achieve their political goals. But they do enable political parties to harvest email addresses for people who might be minded to support them.

Cummings right about China, says former Tory security minister Tom Tugendhat

Tom Tugendhat, the Tory former security minister, has backed up what Dominic Cummings told the Times (see 4.17pm) about China compromising the government system used to transmit vast amounts of secret data.

In an interview with LBC’s Tonight with Andrew Marr, asked about the story, Tugendhat replied:

I don’t want to go into the details, but the gist of what Dominic Cummings has put on out is correct.

Tugendhat said it would be “very, very serious” if Keir Starmer misled MPs at PMQs today when he said that Matthew Collins, the deputy national security adviser, did not discuss his witness statement to the CPS for the China spy case with Jonathan Powell, the national security adviser, or ministers.

He was referring to this exchange

Badenoch said:

On Monday, the security minister repeatedly told the house that ministers did not take decisions and that it was the deputy national security adviser who had full freedom. Are the government seriously saying that only one man—the deputy national security adviser—had anything to do with this failure? Is the prime minister seriously saying that the deputy did not discuss with the national security adviser, the home secretary or anyone in Downing Street? Is the prime minister seriously saying that?

And Starmer replied:

Yes, and let me explain why. First, the case was charged under the last government, according to the evidence submitted under that government, who set out their policy position. What was on issue in the trial is not the position of the current government, but the position of the last government. They carefully avoided describing China as an enemy because that was their policy at the time. As far as the position under this government is concerned, no minister or special adviser was involved. I will double-check this – this is important. After the charging decision, the prosecution were very careful about who would then see the witness evidence. I will double-check exactly what instruction was taken, but I can be absolutely clear that no minister was involved, no special adviser was involved in this. I am as assured as I can be that the prosecution was saying that it would be the witnesses only who would be involved in short updates to the evidence that was submitted under the previous government.

Hansard has a full account of the PMQs exchanges here.

Updated at 19.16 CEST

GB News viewers more likely to wrongly believe net migration to UK rising, study finds

A larger proportion of people who frequently watch GB News wrongly believe that net migration to the UK is increasing than those of other major channels, according to a study examining public attitudes to broadcasting impartiality. Michael Savage has the story.

PPE Medpro, the company linked to Baroness Michelle Mone, has not met the deadline to pay back almost £122m to the government, the health secretary has said.

The department for health and social care successfully sued PPE Medpro, a consortium led by Lady Mone’s husband Doug Barrowman, earlier this year over claims it breached a deal for 25 million surgical gowns during the coronavirus pandemic.

In a ruling earlier this month, Lady Justice Cockerill found that the company had breached the contract as the gowns were not sterile, and ordered it to pay back £121,999,219.20 by 4pm on Wednesday.

After the deadline passed, Wes Streeting said that PPE Medpro “has failed to meet the deadline to pay” and that interest on the sum was “now accruing daily”.

At a time of national crisis, PPE Medpro sold the previous government substandard kit and pocketed taxpayers’ hard-earned cash. We will pursue PPE Medpro with everything we’ve got to get these funds back where they belong – in our NHS.

You can read my colleague David Conn’s analysis on the uphill battle the government faces in recovering the funds here:

Updated at 18.50 CEST

Badenoch says Starmer should have intervened when he learned CPS about to drop China spy prosecution

Kemi Badenoch says Keir Starmer should have intervened when he learned the CPS was about to drop the China spy prosecution. Referring to a line that emerged at the post-PMQs lobby briefing (see 2.15pm), she said:

There we have it. The Prime Minister KNEW the China spying case was about to collapse and did NOTHING because he’s got no backbone. He’s too weak to stand up for our national security.

A shameful dereliction of duty.

Starmer’s argument is that politicians should not intervene in CPS decisions. (See 12.54pm.)

The Spectator has a cover story this week by Tim Shipman, its political editor, about the threat to the UK from Chinese spying. His report backs up what Dominic Cummings told the Times (see 4.17pm) about the problem being far more serious than the government acknowledges. Shipman says:

Four highly credible sources in the upper echelons of the last government, both political figures and officials, have revealed that far worse scandals [than the one involving the two alleged spies passing on information from Westminster] have been hushed up. One said: ‘There were two very serious cases, one involving China and one Russia, which were swept under the carpet. There was a serious loss of technical data.’ The case involving Russia was suppressed, the source claimed, to avoid embarrassing a former prime minister.

Shipman also says that Matthew Collins, the deputy national security adviser who wrote the government witness statements for the China spy prosecution that was dropped, thought he had given the Crown Prosecution Service what they needed.

To muddy the waters further, friends of Collins say he did provide evidence which would have been sufficient and he ‘doesn’t understand’ why the case was dropped. ‘He provided all of these evidence statements. He was told by the CPS that this was exactly what they needed, and then at the last minute they said they were not pursuing the prosecution.’ This individual added: ‘The guilty men and women are in fact in the CPS. They’re the ones who’ve dropped the ball.’

But Shipman claims No 10 was at fault too.

In truth, both No. 10 and the CPS are at fault. The judgement in the recent Bulgarian spying case showed that there was no need to prove China an enemy, only to convince a jury China was a threat – so the CPS could have pressed on. Sources close to the PM insist Collins couldn’t contradict the Tory policy towards Beijing at the time, which designated it a strategic competitor rather than an enemy. But Labour could equally well have chosen the legion of quotes from the strategic defence and security review, from Tory ministers and intelligence chiefs, that China was a ‘threat’. They chose not to.

The full article should be available here shortly.

UK sanctions Russia’s largest oil firms in latest pro-Ukraine measures

The government has sanctioned Russia’s biggest oil producer Rosneft as part of its latest set of measures targeting Russia’s economy amid the war in Ukraine, PA Media reports. PA says:

Foreign secretary Yvette Cooper announced Rosneft, along with Lukoil – two of the world’s largest energy companies – would face restrictions from the UK.

The Foreign Office said the two firms export 3.1m barrels of oil a day. Rosneft, Russia’s largest firm, is responsible for 6% of global oil production, and makes up nearly half of Russian oil produced.

Other action was taken against the so-called “shadow fleet”, which allows Russia to export oil.

The sanctions stop UK businesses and individuals from trading with the named Russian entities.

On Monday Steve Witkoff paid tribute to the “incredible” role played by Jonathan Powell, the PM’s national security adviser accused by the Tories of sabotaging the China spy prosecution, in getting the Middle East peace process agreed. In the New Statesman cover story this week, looking at the role played by Powell and Tony Blair in that negotiation, Freddie Hayward explains what sets Powell apart.

Here’s an extract.

As one figure who knows Powell well put it to me, he is an “Elizabethan privateer” by inclination, distrusted by Whitehall for his independence – “the Institute for Government’s worst nightmare” – but also unusually effective and circumspect in his dealings …

Britain’s influence – such as it was – came largely through personal relationships: Powell with Witkoff and, before the reshuffle, David Lammy with Gulf foreign ministers. Powell worked closely with Witkoff to clarify the final agreement, bringing the three plans together in what one senior British official described as a “Venn diagram”. It was this work, behind the scenes, that explains Witkoff’s public thanks to Powell on 13 October as Trump landed in Israel. “This is sofa diplomacy,” one trusted British diplomatic adviser put it to me. “Powell can operate in this world. If it wasn’t for him, we’d be irrelevant.”

Dominic Cummings claims ‘everybody in Whitehall’ knows threat from China far worse than government admits publicly

Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s former chief adviser, has said that the word “threat” does not even begin to describe how much damage China is doing to Britain.

In an interview with the Times, he said that China has been accessing UK government state secrets for years and that the situation is far worse than people realise.

He also 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.

Cummings, who also told the Times that he was warned when he was in No 10 that he would risk prosecution if he revealed secret information, said it was “ludicrous” that the China spy prosecution could not go ahead because the government would not provide evidence saying China was an enemy.

He told the Times:

Anyone who has been read in at a high level with the intelligence services on China knows that the word threat doesn’t even begin to cover it.

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.

Everybody who has been briefed on the critical analyses of these things from the intelligence services knows this is true. The idea that it is somehow a difficult semantic question of whether to define them as a threat, or how much of a threat, is absolutely puerile nonsense. And everybody in the heart of Whitehall knows this.

Cummings also said that for years British governments have played down the security threat posed by China because they have decided to prioritise the economic relationship.

Gerry Adams says he is considering legal action to stop UK passing law stopping him getting compensation for internment

Yesterday the government published its Northern Ireland Troubles bill, and it confirmed that the legislation will include provisions to block Gerry Adams from receiving compensation over being interned in the 1970s.

Today Adams, the former Sinn Féin president who is widely regarded as having been a leading IRA figure during the Troubles (even though he has always denied this), said he is considering court action to stop this.

He said:

I have instructed my legal team that it is my intention to pursue legal action against Keir Starmer’s decision to retrospectively change a law which a Conservative government broke over 50 years ago …

In 2020 the British supreme court determined that I was wrongfully interned for a period in the 1970s. The decision by the Court was explicit. Interim custody orders not authorised and approved by the secretary of state were illegal. It is believed that upwards of 400 other internees are similarly affected.

The British government, which knew it was in the wrong at that time, knowingly broke its own law.

In January Keir Starmer made it clear that he would look at ‘every conceivable way’ to ensure that I and others impacted by this did not receive compensation.

Yesterday the British government produced legislation which upholds the quashing of the convictions but denies compensation. This is clearly discriminatory. Once again the British state changes the rules to protect its security personnel while denying others equality of treatment.

That an Irish government would collude in this is disgraceful …

The British want to close the door on their past actions. Like many others I will be speaking to my legal team in the next few days to examine what options here and within Europe are open to us.

Updated at 16.52 CEST

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