The abrupt collapse of a high-profile espionage trial in London has thrown the United Kingdom’s fraught relationship with China into the spotlight, igniting a fierce political row, legal soul-searching, and questions about how Britain defines its adversaries. The trial, which was set to begin in early October 2025, involved two men—Christopher Cash, a former parliamentary researcher, and Christopher Berry, a teacher—accused of passing sensitive information to Chinese intelligence between December 2021 and February 2023. Both men denied the charges.
The prosecution’s case, brought under the centuries-old Official Secrets Act of 1911, alleged that Cash and Berry had gathered and provided information “prejudicial to the safety and interests” of the UK, potentially useful to an enemy. Yet, in late September 2025, just weeks before the trial was to begin, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) dropped the charges, citing an insurmountable legal hurdle: the government had not officially classified China as an “enemy” or a threat to national security at the time of the alleged offenses.
The legal snag arose from a recent Court of Appeal ruling in a separate case involving Bulgarians accused of spying for Russia. According to BBC, the court determined that an “enemy” for the purposes of the Official Secrets Act means a country representing “a current threat to the national security of the UK”—not simply any foreign power. Friendly powers, the court noted, would fall outside this definition. The problem for prosecutors was that, as late as early 2023, the UK government had not designated China an adversary, instead describing it as a “systemic competitor” and, later, an “epoch-defining and systemic challenge.”
Director of Public Prosecutions Stephen Parkinson explained in a letter to lawmakers that prosecutors had spent “many months” trying to secure government statements to meet the new legal test. “None of these stated that, at the time of the offense, China represented a threat to national security, and by late August 2025 it was realized that this evidence would not be forthcoming,” Parkinson wrote. “When this became apparent, the case could not proceed.”
This explanation has not satisfied critics. Opposition lawmakers, especially from the Conservative Party, accused Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour government of deliberately undermining the prosecution to avoid antagonizing Beijing and to protect Britain’s economic interests. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch was blunt: “Labour deliberately collapsed the trial of two men accused of spying on MPs for China because the prime minister wants to suck up to Beijing. This is squalid.”
Prime Minister Starmer, speaking from India, insisted that the decision was driven by legal constraints, not politics. “The position is very clear that the trial would have had to take place on the basis of the situation as it was at the time under the previous government,” he said, according to Reuters. “So whatever their position was, was the only position that could be presented at trial ... Now that's not a political to and fro, that's a matter of law.” Starmer, himself a former chief prosecutor, emphasized the government’s disappointment at the outcome and suggested that any blame lay with the Conservative government’s previous China policy.
The Chinese embassy in London, for its part, dismissed the allegations as “entirely fabricated and malicious slander.” In a statement, the embassy said, “We urge certain individuals in the UK to stop this kind of self-staged anti-China political farce.”
Legal experts, meanwhile, have questioned the CPS’s rationale for abandoning the case. Ken Macdonald, a former director of public prosecutions, told the BBC that he believed Stephen Parkinson may have been “over-fussy” in demanding the government “make a statement in open court that would be embarrassing in some ways to British national interests.” Nick Vamos, a former CPS lawyer, argued that the Court of Appeal ruling had actually “set lower” the bar for espionage prosecutions, expanding the definition of an enemy to any country considered a national security threat. “This case changes nothing,” Vamos said. “It expands the definition of an enemy from a country the UK is about to go to war with, to a country that is considered to be a national security threat.”
Some legal observers suggested that prosecutors should have been able to infer China’s threat status from public statements by senior officials and intelligence chiefs. MI5 Director General Ken McCallum, for example, has repeatedly named China as a state threat in public threat assessments, warning of “serious risks,” especially in the cyber domain. Two years ago, McCallum accused Beijing of engaging in espionage on an “epic scale” by trying to steal commercial information through LinkedIn and other means.
Yet, prosecutors insisted that the evidence required by the new legal test—a clear government statement that China was a threat at the time—was not forthcoming. Parkinson complained that the government would not say as much in witness statements provided to the court by Matthew Collins, the deputy national security adviser. Some experts speculated that the government may have been reluctant to make such a statement in open court, fearing diplomatic or economic repercussions.
The case’s collapse has exposed the underlying dilemma for British policymakers: how to balance the country’s economic interests with the growing consensus among security officials that China poses a significant threat. In 2015, the Conservative-led government promised a “golden decade” of Anglo-Chinese relations, but that language has all but vanished. While security services have grown increasingly alarmed by Chinese cyberattacks and crackdowns in Hong Kong, successive governments have continued to seek trade and investment ties with the world’s second-largest economy.
Last November, Prime Minister Starmer became the first British leader in over six years to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping, signaling a desire to improve relations after years of tension. The Labour Party’s policy agenda, published ahead of the 2024 general election, sought to strike a careful balance: “We will cooperate where we can, compete where we need to and challenge where we must.”
The legal landscape for espionage prosecutions has also shifted. The Official Secrets Act under which Cash and Berry were charged has since been repealed and replaced by the National Security Act, which came into effect in 2023. The new law allows prosecutions for conduct benefiting any “foreign power,” not just an “enemy” state or one with which the UK is at war. Jonathan Hall, the government’s adviser on state threats, noted that the new law removes the need to prove that the foreign power is a persistent threat or that the UK is at risk of war.
As the dust settles, the collapse of the China spy trial stands as a vivid illustration of the UK’s struggle to reconcile legal standards, political realities, and national interests. The episode has left lawmakers, prosecutors, and the public grappling with the uncomfortable question: can Britain protect itself from foreign threats without jeopardizing its place in the global economy?
