Diplomacy falters where politics dissembles. The collapse of Britain’s China spy trial has exposed not merely the perils of influence, but the fragility of a state that can no longer speak with one voice.
 

The espionage trial against the two Christophers—Cash and Berry—was not merely a legal embarrassment but the state catching sight of itself. The trial did not fail because of hidden hands alone but because the machinery of government—divided, hesitant and morally conflicted—chose evasion as method. What now emerges is not confusion but choreography: officials instructed to unsay what they knew to be true.
 

Over the past month the story has unravelled with literary flair: secret meetings in the Cabinet Office, the Prime Minister’s national security adviser allegedly drafting a “box note” urging non-intervention, and two civil servants accused of softening witness statements—not out of partisan bias, as first alleged, but out of fidelity to a government line that dared not name an enemy. Parliamentarians demand to see the note that bears the Prime Minister’s tick; the Opposition accuses him of deception; and beneath the recriminations lies a quieter question: what kind of state has Britain become if it cannot decide whether China is its enemy?
 

For years, Whitehall’s doctrine has been summarised in three words—cooperate, compete, challenge—borrowed from Brussels and echoed in Washington, as if the trio formed a convergent Venn diagram rather than three hares wrestled into a bag. Yet this ambiguity has hardened into paralysis. The Treasury, the Department for Business and Trade and the Foreign Office view China as an indispensable trading partner—a market of last resort after Brexit. The Home Office, Ministry of Defence and MI5 see a strategic adversary that infiltrates via universities, donations and data. Between these factions lies a vacuum which policy should fill; tendrils of self-censorship where debate should thrive.
 

The latest CPS correspondence shows how that vacuum became operational. Between July and September 2025, senior officials debated not whether China posed a risk but whether saying so was politically survivable. The distinction proved fatal. What began as semantic restraint ended as legal self-immolation.
 

In the weeks after the trial’s collapse, competing explanations spilled from Downing Street, the Cabinet Office, and the CPS, each claiming procedural propriety while pointing elsewhere for blame. Consequently, Parliament’s appetite for clarity sharpened into accusation. Committees demanded timelines, ministers issued statements and Kemi Badenoch, Leader of the Opposition, wrote a letter.

She demanded to know who authorised the decision, and the witness statements that made prosecution impossible, and accused the Prime Minister of misleading Parliament over that very point. Her letter dismissed the government’s defence, that formally designating China an “enemy” was legally impossible, as a red herring. It was not law that failed, she implied, but will.

Subsequent correspondence from Jonathan Powell and Matt Collins clarified that the CPS had bound officials from sharing their witness statements and that ministers were informed only after the collapse became inevitable. The government insists the civil service acted properly—yet that itself reveals the malaise: a state that outsources conviction to procedure.
 

When the trial collapsed, explanations multiplied: a failure of communication, a bureaucratic oversight, a procedural misunderstanding. Each phrase attempted to make indecision sound incidental, to make caution sound like control. Yet beneath the euphemisms lay something plainer: a fear of consequence. Collins’s own edits show this vividly. The word “enemy” appeared in drafts, was struck out, and finally outlawed in evidence altogether—not for lack of proof but from an institutional terror of the word itself. To name China as a threat, even in closed court, was judged more dangerous than to let espionage go untried.
 

Few in Whitehall wish to recall the particulars. One of the accused, stopped at Heathrow airport, was found with £4,000 in cash from a handler known only as Alex—a small sum, yet large enough to make the official narrative tremble. What the state called “insufficient evidence” looked more like the point at which discretion became dereliction. In the end, the decision not to proceed told its own story: a government that claimed to prize national security could not bear the costs of clarity.
 

This is not the failure of one man, ministry or sector but a divided organism. Treasury optimists dream of “jam tomorrow” through Chinese investment; security realists warn that every yuan carries a wire. The Prime Minister presides not over a cabinet but over a truce. Policy has become the management of irreconcilable reflexes—an empire of committees, each fluent in its own dialect of fear.
 

It later emerged that the case had been pursued under the 1911 Official Secrets Act—a relic from an age when enemies had capitals and wars had fronts. Its language, defining espionage as any act “useful to an enemy,” belonged to a world of uniforms, not algorithms. The Act was quietly repealed in 2023, replaced by the National Security Act, but not before leaving the ghost of its fingerprints over the Cash and Berry prosecution. The problem was not political interference so much as legal anachronism: the machinery of secrecy remains Victorian, while the world it is meant to police is digital and diffuse. 
 

When the case collapsed, Beijing’s foreign ministry issued its warning: Britain must “fulfil its obligations and honour its commitments” or “bear all consequences.” The statement was not diplomatic theatre but a test, and Britain’s silence its answer. Behind closed doors, ministers debate the economic fallout of defying China, yet none asks what dignity is worth in sterling.
 

What the espionage case has exposed is more fundamental than infiltration. It is the corrosion of both a cultural consensus and the willingness to assume responsibility for costly decisions that once underpinned governance. The scandal’s true revelation is not that Beijing infiltrated Westminster but that Britain’s institutions are permeated by disbelief. A political class that once prided itself on pragmatism now drifts into conflating maturity with evasion.
 

The espionage case will fade, replaced by newer crises and inquiries, each generating and absorbing the same fatigue. The machinery will keep humming, its rhythm intact but its music forgotten. The collapse now reads not as an accident but as an act of governance by omission—a state that prefers the alibi of confusion to the cost of conviction. Britain’s problem is not that it lacks control but that, in fits of post-ideological fervour, it no longer believes control is useful except in emergencies. What remains is process without purpose—a state running on the echo of authority long after the sound has gone.