Tom Tugendhat is a Conservative Member of Parliament, representing Tonbridge and Malling, and Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee.
I met him about twenty-five years ago when he was a journalist at Bloomberg and we have stayed in touch. He packed a lot into the years between leaving journalism and being elected to Parliament, only hinted at in his Wikipedia entry. This morning he has returned to his roots and has written a short article in The Times, hidden behind a pay wall, that I’d like to share with you.
“The warning that a Chinese ‘spy’ was operating in Westminster broke with the excitement of a John le Carré novel. But this is not a story of double agents or dead drops. It is another tawdry tale of funding, of cash and of incremental influence.
Christine Lee, the lawyer who runs the British-Chinese Project and has made donations to Berry Gardiner MP, among others, has been linked formally by MI5 to the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department.
The question is, what would she gain? Why would the CCP spend hundreds of thousands of pounds and years of effort on infiltrating the office of the honourable member for Brent North? His former positions as an environment minister under Tony Blair and shadow trade secretary under Jeremy Corbyn do not suggest a trove of intelligence awaited them.
The answer is simple: because they could. The ability to access parliament, to attend functions and to pick up gossip is worth something to the Ministry of State Security that oversees foreign activity for Beijing. They need to justify their expenses and tell tales to their masters. Most importantly they need to build up the patterns of life, the stories of who drinks, who gambles, who has weaknesses and secrets, those little nuggets of information that will help them turn a contact into an agent.
As Sir David Omand, the former head of GCHQ, put it, to find a needle, first you need a haystack. And for that, you need a way in.
Questions were first raised publicly in 2017 when The Times reported on the £180,000 that Lee had donated to Gardiner’s office but the warning did not dissuade co-operation. Nor, says the MP, did ‘liaising with our security services’ for many years about her.
This is not about which researchers were sponsored nor the declaration of the donations, but simply that our democracy is vulnerable in a world where autocracy is growing in power and trying to hijack our institutions.
Those of us who are privileged to pilot our nation through these dark days need to learn from the airline industry that we must do what we can to protect ourselves from outside influence and the least we can do is lock the door to the cockpit.
Yesterday MI5 showed clearly that it had been wide open for years.”
(Tom Tugendhat, MP, The Times, Friday January 14th 2022)
In 2019 I was in Eastern Europe four times as an OSCE election observer. Once, I got back to the hotel gasping like a goldfish for a drink in the early hours of Election Day +1. I was befriended at the bar by a representative of a country not entirely friendly to the UK. His advances were tentative and easily fended off. He did not want to have sex but he did want to know my position in the British Establishment. He gave me his card and suggested we stay in touch.
If you have fished for salmon you will know the ratio of casts to catch.