Bit of a dropped ball from grand mandarin Lord Simon McDonald of Salford, the former head of the diplomatic service, who last week took to the airwaves to offer his analysis that much of the ‘China spy’ trial activity, er, “is the bread and butter of what embassies and consultancies do around the world”. The Sunday Times then reported that one of the accused allegedly returned to the UK from China with a suitcase full of cash and was stopped by counter-terror police…
As China expert Luke De Pulford writes in The Times today:
“Inconvenient for (McDonald’s) analysis is the allegation that this “gossip” was commissioned by an intelligence agent… This is why McDonald’s analysis is rather sweet and arcane. The two Chrises may have lacked sensitive intel, but this isn’t the 1950s and contemporary China isn’t the Soviet Union. Anyone doubting parliament’s value to Beijing hasn’t been paying attention.”
McDonald’s comments reveal what much of the civil servant class thinks about this affair. A New Statesman profile from 2023 relates: “For McDonald, Taiwan should be the test of the UK’s new worldview. Britain, he argued, should not “make an enemy of China”. “This, for me, would be a break point between London and Washington.” No wonder elements of the FCDO were only too eager to aid Powell’s attempts to meddle in the case. There’s a reason they’re called ‘mandarins’…
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