4 hours ago
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It’s all as clear as mud. If Keir Starmer thought that releasing the three witness statements of the deputy national security adviser (DNSA) Matthew Collins late on Wednesday night was going to make the China spy case row go away, then he was in for a big disappointment.
There was no way MPs were going to let a story like this out of their clutches. This was their moment to take centre stage. When they could bathe in their own importance. When they could believe that they and national security were one and the same thing.
There again, whatever Starmer had put into the public domain would never have been enough. Even a letter from the director of public prosecutions (DPP), Stephen Parkinson, falling on his sword and admitting he had taken his eye off the ball, would have been dismissed as irrelevant.
When it comes to a choice between cock-up and conspiracy, most MPs naturally gravitate to conspiracy. So much more exciting. Life’s too dull when it’s just some unelected apparatchik doing a job badly.
As the facts change, MPs merely change their conspiracy theories to fit the new evidence. In her embarrassing tirades at Wednesday’s prime minister’s questions, Kemi Badenoch had insisted that Starmer was at the centre of a major cover-up. That he had personally leant on Collins to get him to change his evidence. That he was basically a Chinese spy himself, doing the bidding of his masters in Beijing. Punching the air in triumph as the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) collapsed the trial.
Come Thursday morning, that particular narrative appeared dead in the water. There was just no evidence to support it. But not to worry. Because another conspiracy theory was at hand. One that was the polar opposite of the previous one. In this exciting new version, it was Starmer’s lack of involvement, his failure to nobble Collins that was compelling proof the prime minister was a Chinese stooge.
A true red, white and blue patriot would have done whatever it took to secure a conviction. Stopped at nothing. Putting a gun to Collins’s and Parkinson’s heads. Doing nothing was simply unforgivable. As one door closed for opposition MPs, another one opened. Not that there was any recognition that the terms of reference for the conspiracy theory had just done a U-turn. On days like these politicians imagine themselves to be a tabula rasa. Yesterday doesn’t matter. It never happened. All that matters is what happens today.
So it was almost inevitable there would be an urgent question in the Commons to give MPs a platform to air their new theories that had been developed overnight. You can generally gauge how much trouble the government reckons it is in by the minister it sends out to answer a UQ. Get a cabinet minister and the government is supremely confident of its position. So the appearance of Chris Ward, the most junior of ministers in the Cabinet Office making his first ever outing at the dispatch box, on the government frontbench, told you all you needed to know.
And, to be fair, Ward did about as well as could be expected under the circumstances. He didn’t die on his arse and only had to endure a modicum of faux pity from opposition MPs. It’s just that he would much rather have been anywhere than in the Commons at 10.30 on a Thursday morning.
It wasn’t so much that he had nothing much to say – which he didn’t really – it was more that he knew nothing he did have to say was going to make much difference. Try telling a UFO convention that UFOs don’t exist will only make the audience even more convinced they do. Because the establishment would say that, wouldn’t they?
Poor Chris. All he could do was stand up and read the words in front of him. The DNSA had made the witness statements without any interference from government. He wasn’t entirely sure why Collins had added a line from the Labour manifesto about China being an economic opportunity. Presumably to give context that Labour’s line on China was not that much different to the Tories. And you’d have to ask the DPP why the CPS had dropped the case.
Then the onslaught, First from shadow minister for policy renewal, Neil O’Brien. The CPS had said they were just 5% short on the evidence they needed to get take the case to trial. Why hadn’t the government done whatever it took to get the case over the line? To a layperson, this sounded very much like expecting the government to fabricate new evidence if the existing material was insufficient. But maybe spy trials don’t count. There again, surely the Met could have knocked something up. They are old hands at that sort of thing.
Labour MPs were equally bewildered. Emily Thornberry couldn’t work out why the CPS had not just backed off and let a jury decide on the guilt. Matt Western, chair of joint committee of national security strategies, announced he would be starting an inquiry of his own. Barry Gardiner raised doubts about the quality of information the spies had provided. Careful Bazza. Careless talk cost lives. Just because the spies passed on information freely available elsewhere and gossip picked up in the coffee queue in Portcullis House, this didn’t mean it was any less serious. This was MPs we were talking about. Nothing is more important than that.
Tory Tom Tugendhat, one of the two MPs targeted, begged the prime minister to come to his rescue. How could he have abandoned Tom by not leaning more heavily on Collins? This wasn’t party politics, it was a matter of life and death. Just provide the evidence, damn it! If you haven’t got it, then invent it. It wasn’t hard. What was the point of being prime minister if you didn’t bang up spies?
The Tories kept on coming. Bernard Jenkin refused to believe Collins wasn’t nobbled in some way. Bernie couldn’t explain whether he had been nobbled to keep quiet or write rubbish witness statements. Jeremy Wright and Nick Timothy wanted the spies banged up regardless of whether they were guilty or not. Miraculously, none of the Conservatives engaged with the fact that it had been their own government’s stance on China that had collapsed the case. Or that the case would have still collapsed if they had been in power.
Ward just stood there and took it all. It was all a big cock-up. Look to the CPS for answers. The government was equally gutted the case had not gone ahead. Come the end, there were points of order from Alicia Kearns, another spyee, Tugendhat and Graham Stuart. Stuart asked for an expression of sympathy to be shown towards Ward. Chris looked crushed. Ridicule he could take. Pity was too much.
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A year in Westminster: John Crace, Marina Hyde and Pippa Crerar. On Tuesday 2 December, join Crace, Hyde and Crerar as they look back with special guests at another extraordinary year, live at the Barbican in London and livestreamed globally. Book tickets here
