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At a moment when talk of “broken Britain” is rife, it is comforting to find that the Chinese intelligence services (CIS) allegedly believed that it was in China’s interests to gather gossip about the shambolic Tory party leadership contest in 2022.

What makes the witness statement of the Deputy National Security Adviser, Matthew Collins, so interesting is less his supposed culpability in failing to identify China as an enemy, but rather the paltry nature of the information which he claims was obtained by China.

“None of it was protectively marked,” he wrote in his statement on 22 December, 2023, meaning

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