Are the Tories to blame for the China spy scandal?

Coffee House Shots

The Spectator

News, Politics, Government, Daily News

4.4 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 15 October 2025

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Keir Starmer did not go into Prime Minister’s Questions with the intention of resolving the row over the collapse of the Chinese spying case: he merely wanted to avoid the pressure building too much. He announced in a long statement at the start of the session that the government would be publishing its three witness statements, and then spent the rest of his sparring with Kemi Badenoch arguing that this was all the fault of the previous government anyway. So who is to blame, the Tories or Labour? What does the inability to deal with this scandal say about the ineptitude of successive governments, and how they communicate with the public?

James Heale speaks to Tim Shipman and Isabel Hardman.

Produced by Oscar Edmondson

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Transcript

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0:33.7	Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots.
0:39.6	I'm James Seal and I'm joined today by Tim Shipman and Isabel Harbman.
0:42.9	Now, there's only one story in town this week and it's about China.
0:46.0	Tim, what do we learn today at PMQ's?
0:48.2	Well, what we learned was that Kemi Badernock was going to bash Kirstama around the park.
0:52.8	So Kirstama, being the prime minister and getting to go first,
0:56.0	decided to make a statement about the China spy scandal and preemptively announced that he is going to
1:02.6	publish the evidence that the government submitted to the court. For those of you not following the
1:07.1	details, the crime prosecution service says it dropped the case because the government
1:12.4	needed to show that China was our enemy and it then failed to do so. Lots of experts say that's
1:18.3	completely untrue and the CPS could have pushed ahead with the case anyway. The Labour government
1:22.1	then says, well, this first statement was written by the Deputy National Security Advisor under
1:26.5	the Conservative Government,
1:27.6	and then we added to it several times before the case,
1:31.5	and we had to stick to the views of the Conservative Government,
1:34.5	which were that China was a strategic arrival rather than a threat or enemy.
1:40.1	Upstands the leader of the opposition, Kemmy Bedrock, and says,
	...

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