China was able to intercept “vast amounts” of the most classified British government documents including national security intelligence for several years by simply buying a relevant data centre, reports state of an affair that is said to have been covered up and buried with legal threats against former government members.
Former advisor to the then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom during the Boris Johnson cabinet, Dominic Cummings, has asserted he was in the room when a senior civil servant revealed that China had been reading some of the most sensitive documents in the British government, because it had been able to buy the data company Whitehall used to internally send files.
People inside government, including Cummings, were threatened that discussing what they’d been told was “illegal”, he states, and so the story was effectively buried at the time in 2020. Nevertheless, Cummings appears to have decided to come forward now, as accusations swirl in Westminster over the collapse of a China spying trial over the now-left-wing government’s apparent refusal to legally classify China as a ‘enemy’.
Cummings told a forthcoming podcast that the spying scandal was like a “sci-fi novel” nobody would bother to write because it’s so unbelievable that any government could be so naive to transfer critical information through a data centre owned by China. Going into specifics is “illegal to discuss” but they are nevertheless “fucking mental”, he said.
A report on these claims in The Times states four government insiders and a Conservative former security minister have confirmed Cummings’ version of events, albeit in vague terms presumably dancing around those claimed legal threats. The paper states the documents seen by China include the very highest tiers of classified information including material from the “intelligence services. Material from the National Security Secretariat in the Cabinet Office”.
The Spectator has splashed on the means of the espionage, claiming to reveal China intercepted the material by buying a company that controlled a data centre used by the British government to transfer files. An unnamed source told the magazine that the leak was the result of a “stratospheric fuck-up”.
Last month, charges were dropped against two Britons accused of spying on behalf of China, with accusations made the prosecution was deliberately sabotaged from within the government. Prosecutors attempted to gather evidence for the trial but were blocked or otherwise unable to succeed, it was claimed, and the law to prosecute a spy requires them to have been serving an “enemy” of the country, and the government was apparently unwilling to apply that label to Beijing.
It is reported now by The Daily Telegraph that in one case, when a senior civil servant was asked to testify against the alleged spies — who both denied the charges — that he failed to do so and instead responded that the government is committed to a “positive relationship” with China.
The revelations by Cummings, if borne out, would seem to absolutely prove that the Chinese government — at the very least — acts like an enemy, further underlining the scale of the failure of the collapsed spy case and quite possibly making explicit why Cummings chose this moment to reveal a scandal he’d been threatened with legal action to keep quiet.
That the Prime Minister, the country’s former top prosecutor, apparently did nothing to prevent the case collapsing has led to accusations — unproven — that is was complicit in allegedly sabotaging it. The role of his national security advisor, Jonathan Powell, has also been under scrutiny.
Brexit leader Nigel Farage has stated, even before the Chinese data centre allegations, that Britain’s lackadaisical approach to cyber security places the future of the Five-Eyes intelligence sharing partnership with the United States at serious risk. He said last week: “America has been concerned about our weakness on China ever since the Huawei fiasco in 2020…. this is very serious”.
