The government did not apply any pressure to drop a China spy trial last month and is “incredibly disappointed”, a minister has told Sky News.
Emma Hardy said “it wasn’t what we wanted” after the case against teacher Christopher Berry, 33, and former parliamentary researcher Christopher Cash, 30 – accused of spying for China – was dropped by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) on 15 September.
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Berry, of Witney, Oxfordshire, and Cash, from Whitechapel, east London, had denied accusations of providing information prejudicial to the interests of the state in breach of the Official Secrets Act between December 2021 and February 2023.
On Tuesday, Stephen Parkinson, the director of public prosecutions (DPP), told MPs in a letter the CPS had tried “over many months” to get the evidence it needed to carry out the prosecution, but it had not been forthcoming from the Labour government.
He said the government refused to brand China a threat, despite being repeatedly asked.
To prove the case under the Official Secrets Act of 1911, prosecutors would have to show the defendants were acting for an “enemy”.
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Former chair of the powerful foreign affairs committee, Alicia Kearns, who Mr Cash worked for when he was arrested, accused Labour of crippling prosecutors to appease Beijing for a trade deal.
However, Ms Hardy said the case was dropped due to a change in case law following a High Court case earlier this year, which meant the evidence threshold “wasn’t met”.
She said the China spy case had to be based on the evidence from 2023, when they were charged, and when the previous Conservative government was in power.
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