What the China spy case farce says about Britain

Only in Britain could a spy trial collapse because no one in government could decide who the enemy was. The case against two men accused of passing secrets to China did not fail for lack of evidence or investigative effort, but because the Crown Prosecution Service could not extract from Whitehall a simple statement that China was, at the time, a ‘threat to national security.’ Without that label, the law would not allow the case to proceed. A nation that once prided itself on clarity of purpose now finds itself paralysed by its own semantics.

A nation that once prided itself on clarity of purpose now finds itself paralysed by its own semantics

The farce is revealing. It is not merely a procedural mishap but a symptom of how Britain conducts foreign policy in the age of China – through le