Every effort made to support trial of pair in China spy case, says minister

The government made “every effort” to support the trial of two men accused of spying for China, a minister has insisted, as he accused the Tories of claiming the case was deliberately abandoned “without a shred of evidence”.

- Eleni Courea

Dan Jarvis, the security minister, issued a robust defence of Keir Starmer’s national security adviser, Jonathan Powell in the Commons after reports that Powell played a role in the collapse of the case.

Jarvis’s intervention prolongs an extraordinary blame game between ministers and prosecutors over the abandonment of charges against two men, including a former parliamentary researcher, who were accused of spying for Beijing.

Charges were dropped against Christopher Cash and Christopher Berry, who had always maintained their innocence, last month after the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said it could no longer meet the evidential threshold needed to proceed.

Jarvis said that since the charges against Cash and Berry were brought in April 2024, the deputy national security adviser, Matthew Collins, provided three witness statements to support the trial.

“All of the evidence provided by the deputy NSA was based on the law at the time of the offence and the policy position of the Conservatives at the time of the offence,” he told MPs. “Every effort was made to provide evidence in support of this case within these constraints.”