Chinese spies: a storm in a bowl of Chow Mein
The row over Chinese spying is reaching proportions of an Evelyn Waugh (or perhaps today a Mick Herron) comic novel. This is really about MPs employing “researchers” who also sold information freely available to any accredited diplomat in London.
When I was named an FCO minister in 2001 I felt a thrill. On my first day in my handsome office overlooking St James Park, my Private Secretary explained that after an induction at Vauxhall Cross, the wedding cake building that is home to MI6, I would start receiving every morning on my desk the daily summaries of what our spies in the countries I was ministerially responsible for – including China, East Asia, the Balkans and Latin America — were sending back to London.
It was a flimsy green paper folder with the relevant telegrams inside. The folder was marked CX and I often wondered why the call sign for Hong Kong’s Cathay Pacific airline was chosen.
But there was nothing in the file that helped me as I travelled to the countries I was nominally responsible for. I remember a story the late Robin Cook, then Foreign Secretary, loved to tell when I worked with him as a PPS of being in Islamabad and staying at the UK High Commission when an evening call came through to his bedroom from the Today programme. They asked him to appear the next morning to comment on a coup that had overthrown the Pakistani government.
Cook called the High Commissioner in his bedroom to ask for his evaluation of the coup. “Absolutely nothing has happened, Secretary of State. I would be the first to know. You have a good night’s sleep and we can discuss your programme over breakfast.”
Cook called the High Commission switchboard and asked to be connected to the Today team at the BBC in London. He asked the local staffer manning the switchboard if anything was happening in Islamabad. “Oh, Mr Cook, we are so happy. That crooked bastard who was our president has gone. We are dancing in the streets.”
Diplomats and MI6 staff move in their grooves and often are the last to know what is happening in a country. I read with interest the CX reports on arms smuggling in the Balkans or preparing for a visit to Central America the location of a president’s mistress or his drink problem. But quickly told my private secretary to read the file, as I got much better intelligence from The Economist, Le Monde, El Pais or Der Spiegel.
London and every big capital city is awash with political consultancies that sell political intelligence to business and to embassies. The workings of British politics and parliamentarians is a closed book to the non-adept. Parliamentary researchers are paid peanuts. Compiling lists of MPs who serve on different committees or who go on agreeable fact-finding trips to countries in the news can seem like important secrets to embassies and foreign firms based in London.
Jonathan Powell, now once again the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff, served Britain well in Tony Blair’s day by doing so much of the heavy lifting for the Northern Ireland peace agreement. He has since worked tirelessly on promoting peace deals in Latin America and Asia with financial support mainly from Nordic NGOs. The Conservative Party’s efforts to smear him over China is unworthy of serious opposition politics.
One can feel sympathy for MPs such as Alicia Kearns and Tom Tugendhat, who spoke out as their Conservative colleagues in ministerial office crawled to Beijing and who now feel betrayed by young men they hired. But they are not the first MPs and won’t be the last who make unwise choices in their staff.
Britain, our allies in Europe, North America and the Pacific do not know how to answer the China question. The idea that it will be solved by putting low-grade MPs’ staffers on trial and attacking the Prime Minister by smearing his highly qualified Chief of Staff will only make officials in Beijing smile. The Chinese are used to the sight of British MPs and newspaper editors barking up the wrong tree.
Denis MacShane was a PPS and Minister of State in the FCO 1997-2005.
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