Systems in Tension: Britain’s China Crisis Spy Farce and the Architecture of Denial

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A forensic if mordant look at how the “Chinese spies in Parliament” case collapsed.  I don’t think it was lies, more a system that’s eating itself. Legal, political, and economic silos each told their own version of the truth until coherence disappeared into the vortex. Between Cummings’ claims, Martin’s rebuttals, the embassy standoff, and Kemi Badenoch’s attack on Starmer, it’s a living portrait of Britain’s institutions locked in tension. Prosperity versus protection; diplomacy versus denial. But it doesn’t mean the system is broken; it might be working exactly as intended. Get the money in at all costs?

Contents

Table of Contents

The Collapse Heard Around Westminster… and Nowhere Else

So, the ‘Chinese spies in Parliament’ case has collapsed. Two years of headlines, ministerial chest-thumping, and anonymous briefings: poof. Gone.

Two men, Christopher Cash and Christopher Berry, accused of passing politically flavoured gossip to a Chinese contact named Alex, walk free. The Crown Prosecution Service shrugs, says the case ‘no longer meets the evidential threshold,’ and everyone retreats to their corners.

Cue the shouting match. Labour’s ‘too soft on China,’ the Tories were ‘too incoherent on China,’ the civil service ‘too slow,’ the CPS ‘too cautious,’ and the intelligence agencies?  Well, apparently they either knew everything or nothing, depending on who you ask.

Let’s be honest though. It’s not just about one trial. It’s about a system that has tied itself in so many knots of secrecy, rivalry, and self-preservation that it can’t tell the difference between a threat, a trade partner, and a diplomatic inconvenience. The state’s immune system is fighting itself triggered by policy confusion.

The Web, Not the Conspiracy

Everyone wants this to be a story about villains: a spy, a cover-up, a weak Prime Minister, a conniving adviser. It’s comforting and Kemi Badenoch seems to view it that way.

What it actually is though, is a story about systems in tension; multiple institutions grinding against each other, all technically telling the truth, but none of them telling the truth.

Think of the British national-security establishment as a tangle of semi-autonomous subsystems:

  • Legal — the CPS, Attorney General’s Office, and courts, obsessed with evidence thresholds.
  • Operational — GCHQ, MI5, MI6, the NCSC, protective of sources and methods.
  • Political — No 10, Cabinet Office, FCDO, desperate to preserve plausible deniability.
  • Economic — Treasury and the investment side, terrified of spooking markets or Beijing.
  • Narrative — the media, parliamentarians, and the public imagination, all hungry for a plot twist.

Each speaks its own ‘dialect of truth’. Put them in the same room, you’ll get the screech of feedback rather than harmony.

But they’re not lying. What they’re doing is performing. In a domain where every statement doubles as a signal to allies and a smokescreen for adversaries, even honesty itself becomes theatre. And sometimes the actors forget who the audience is supposed to be.

The Case That Ate Itself

Here’s the mechanics. The charges were laid under the Official Secrets Act 1911, a law written when spies wore bowler hats. It criminalises sharing information ‘useful to the enemy’. Then, last summer, the Court of Appeal ruled that an ‘enemy’ means a nation posing a current threat to the UK’s national security. Not a potential one, not a challenge, but an active threat.

At the time of the alleged offences, the Conservative government had deliberately described China as an ‘epoch-defining challenge,’ not a threat. A challenge. Like Sudoku. So, the CPS asked the government to provide updated witness statements confirming China was indeed a threat. Civil Service lawyers balked. That wasn’t the official line in 2021–23. The statements came back cautious, hedged, written by people terrified of detonating the diplomatic equivalent of a nuclear mine under the City of London.

Here’s a baseline. At Cyber Tzar, our own tiny British cyber firm, we see roughly 250 probes every ten minutes, credential stuffing, port knocking, noisy crawlers, the usual hygiene nightmare. About half resolves to China, about half to Russia. Some hours it tilts one way, some hours the other, but the split is boringly consistent. If that’s our background hiss, imagine what the government endures. Imagine what corporates endure.

Result? The prosecution evaporated in a puff of definitional logic. Starmer’s government inherited the mess and now look like appeasers; the Tories who authored the policy now get to cry ‘cover-up!’ from the opposition benches. Everyone wins their little trench skirmish. The system cannibalises itself and calls it whatever it wants to call it, ‘accountability’ being one.

The 2020 Breach That May or May Not Have Happened

Enter Dominic Cummings, stage right, waving a flamethrower made of memory and rage.

In his interview a few days ago with Robert Peston, he recounts a 2020 Downing Street meeting where the Cabinet Secretary allegedly briefed him and Boris Johnson in the No. 10 ‘bunker’ that China hadn’t merely hacked British government systems but had purchased the pipes themselves.

According to Cummings, the company, Global Switch, part-owned by Chinese investors, was hosting and connecting sensitive government data centres including, he says, MOD, the Cabinet Office, and MI6 traffic.

He described officials calling it ‘catastrophic,’ the PM and Chancellor open-mouthed, and civil servants later smothering the issue in procedural fog.

In his retelling, no one was fired, nothing was fixed, and the story was buried.  Classic Whitehall cycle in other words – error, inquiry, obfuscation, promotion.

To Cummings, this wasn’t just an information breach but was more like a form of corporate occupation. Beijing didn’t need to break into the network if it simply it bought the landlord instad.

Within hours, Ciaran Martin – the man who actually ran the National Cyber Security Centre at the time – called it ‘categorically untrue.’ He said there was no such breach, no NCSC operation, no top-secret panic meeting. Top-secret networks, he reminded everyone, sit on entirely separate, air-gapped infrastructure built and monitored on a different basis.

So, who’s lying?

Perhaps no-one.

Cummings may be describing the political level. The revelation that critical government data sat on infrastructure with Chinese ownership to him looked like systemic compromise. Martin may be describing the technical level — the classified STRAP systems, which remained intact. Both statements can co-exist. That’s how bureaucratic truth works: context-specific, compartmentalised, technically accurate, and often mutually contradictory.

Side note. For all the noise, there’s one point on which Cummings, Ciaran Martin and even GCHQ violently agree: China is the pre-eminent cyber threat to the UK, every day, closely shadowed by Russia. Argue about process all you like but the fundamentals are not controversial.

Don’t forget the dark art of obfuscation by design either. In national security, partial truth is the only safe kind. If there had been a breach, would they tell us? Hell, would they even tell each other?

Systems in Tension: Four Feedback Loops Eating Each Other

The reality is obviously nuanced. Walk through any part of the security estate or a major contractor site and it’s right there in 40-point font: ‘China is significant threat.’ Posters, screensavers, weekly briefs. It’s institutional wallpaper. Everybody inside knows the score; it’s only the public line that goes soft and starts talking about ‘balanced relationships’. These tensions and dichotomies echo through the entire saga. And these are not tidy dichotomies; they’re oscillating systems, feeding and damping each other in real time. A snake pit of Ouroboroi.

  • Prosperity versus Protection — the Economic Ouroboros
  • Department versus Department — the Bureaucratic Ouroboros
  • Procedure versus Personality — the Cognitive Ouroboros
  • Public versus State — the Political Ouroboros

1. Economic: Prosperity versus Protection

Britain wants Chinese investment and Chinese restraint, but never gets both.
The Treasury’s blood runs on liquidity; MI5’s on paranoia. The Foreign Office wants stable trade flows; GCHQ wants to unplug half the world.

Right now, the symbolic battlefield is Royal Mint Court, where China wants to build Europe’s biggest embassy — a 20,000 m² complex a stone’s throw from the Tower of London and directly above fibre-optic cables serving the financial district. Ministers have delayed the decision again, muttering about the ‘detailed nature of the responses.’ Translation: they’re terrified either answer — yes or no — will blow up somewhere, diplomatically or politically.

2. Bureaucratic: Department versus Department

Every ministry is its own duchy.


The Cabinet Office hoards secrets. It can’t help it; secrecy is its bloodstream. The CPS hoards precedent, terrified of losing a case and setting the wrong one. The Home Office hoards panic and runs on threat levels and moral outrage. And the Treasury hoards money, counting GDP while the roof burns.

Each thinks it’s the grown-up in the room, the rational centre holding the chaos together. But put them all in a meeting, well, you don’t get strategy. What you end up with are four monologues in parallel.

I first heard that term ‘co-opetition’ from John Gage. His point (very American, very sane) was that teams in tension can both compete and cooperate, and that it’s healthy if you keep it transparent and outcome-focused.

Then he dropped a second neologism: ‘matrix management.’ That’s where he compared things to having two parents. You love them both, you answer to both, and yes, you play them off against each other to get things done. That is exactly Whitehall on a Tuesday: co-opetition as theory, matrix management as practice.

And that’s what ‘co-opetition’ really means in Whitehall: cooperation through gritted teeth. Everyone’s technically on the same side but still fighting for their own turf. It’s less teamwork, more a daily negotiated truce between silos that barely speak the same language

Inside that culture, unsurprisingly, shared responsibility means shared paralysis. The intelligence agencies collect evidence that can’t be shown in court; prosecutors demand evidence that can’t be shared outside it. So the machinery eats its own paperwork.

3. Cognitive: Procedure versus Personality

Ciaran Martin is the archetypal proceduralist: methodical, internally consistent, allergic to melodrama. Dominic Cummings is his polar opposite: narrative-driven, intuitive, pattern-seeking and allergic to bullshit.

They embody the two cognitive poles of British governance, the bureaucratic mind that systematises risk, and the autistic mind that fixates until the system blinks. Both are indispensable; neither knows how to translate the other.

And Cummings’s own phrase for it, ‘weaponising autism’, lands with grim accuracy. He meant it pejoratively; I take it literally. That’s what I do. I’ve harnessed my wiring, enslaved it to pattern-recognition, turned obsessive analysis into a tool instead of a trap.

Weaponised, yes, but aimed at understanding, not destruction. Because sometimes the only way to make sense of this madness is to see the data beneath it and bottom up the insanity.

4. Public versus State

To most people, China is social credit scores, cheap goods and TikTok trends but to government, it’s the second-largest counter-intelligence headache after Russia. The state doesn’t trust the public with complexity though, so it hides behind euphemisms.

‘Epoch-defining challenge,’ ‘constructive engagement,’ ‘balanced relationship.’ It’s the politics of sedation. The unspoken doctrine of course is: don’t scare the children. Don’t spook investors, don’t alarm voters, don’t trigger diplomatic retaliation. Tell bedtime stories about cooperation and quietly patch the leaks at night.

But walk through any part of the security estate or site and it’s right there in 40-point font: “China: significant threat.” Posters, screensavers, weekly briefs. It’s institutional wallpaper. Everybody inside knows the score; it’s only the public line that goes soft and starts talking about “balanced relationships.

The closer you get to the man on the street, as you navigate through layers of Government away from the security services, the more diluted that truth becomes; until everything looks calm, manageable, fine. Like Chaplin said: “Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot”.

Not the First Time, Not the Last

For all the noise around the spy-trial collapse, this isn’t the first time Britain has been caught flat-footed on Chinese interference – and it certainly won’t be the last.

What we’re seeing now is simply the latest iteration of a pattern: denial, discovery, embarrassment, then amnesia.

In 2020, MI5 quietly expelled three alleged Chinese intelligence officers working under the guise of journalists for state media. No dramatic arrests, no headlines; just a discreet ‘goodbye’ at Heathrow. They’d been operating comfortably inside the press circuit for years.

At the same time, academia was already riddled with influence operations. Between 2019 and 2023, British universities — Cambridge, Oxford, Manchester, Southampton — were collaborating on joint research with Chinese institutions tied to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Quantum computing, aerospace, AI — the very foundations of the next strategic arms race – was being outsourced in plain sight under ‘knowledge exchange.’

GCHQ and its contractors were also in Beijing’s crosshairs. The Cloudhopper campaign — a Ministry of State Security (MSS)-backed cyber operation — targeted managed service providers like Rolls-Royce’s IT partners and even government-adjacent systems. It was a clean rehearsal for everything that came later.  Attack the supply chain, not the fortress.

Then came the Huawei 5G war, the mother of all institutional arguments. Treasury wanted cheap rollout, GCHQ wanted the backdoor shut, and Downing Street wanted the headlines to stop. It was an early, perfect case study in systems in tension — prosperity versus protection, markets versus national sovereignty.

Strike One! China Gets Its First ‘Interference Alert’

By 2022, MI5 had clearly had enough. It issued its first ever ‘interference alert’ to Parliament, naming Christine Lee as an agent of the Chinese state. A domestic lawyer, she’d funnelled hundreds of thousands in donations to MPs and political parties. The response? A few red faces, some stern tweets, and then business as usual.

Meanwhile, Beijing’s reach was becoming literal. In 2022 and 2023, reporters uncovered clandestine Chinese ‘police stations’ operating in London and Glasgow, allegedly used to monitor dissidents and ‘encourage’ returns to China. The government promised to investigate; nothing public ever came of it.

And when the UK Electoral Commission finally admitted in 2023 that it had been hacked two years earlier, the attackers were traced to Chinese state-linked groups. They weren’t stealing votes, they were harvesting metadata. Electoral registers, addresses, demographic data. The raw material of political manipulation.

By 2024, the line between espionage and diplomacy had blurred completely. The Hong Kong Economic & Trade Office case saw three men charged with assisting an overseas intelligence service. The institution itself was a diplomatic façade for Beijing’s information-gathering in London.

Thread them together and you get a familiar structure. The same contradictions, the same rituals of outrage and denial. Each case shows a system unwilling to confront its dependencies — on Chinese money, Chinese students, Chinese infrastructure — because the economic gravity is too strong.

Not the first time. Not the last either.

Every decade brings another revelation, and every time the machinery reacts the same way: deny, delay, redefine.

The System Is Working as Intended

Fast-forward to October 2025. While the spy case collapses and the embassy decision stalls, the Hong Kong-based conglomerate CK Infrastructure makes a bid for Thames Water; the company that literally owns the other sorts of pipes beneath London. Dominic Cummings tweets in real-time:

‘After letting China buy the data infrastructure used by MI6, Cabinet Office, MoD etc — and covering up and lying about it — the government now wants to let China buy all the water supply for London.
The system is working as intended.’

That line, ‘the system is working as intended’, is among the most damning thing he’s ever said, and he’s said it and more plenty. Because it’s true. Not factually, maybe, but structurally. The system is working as intended: to protect the flow of capital first, the flow of data second, and the flow of truth somewhere down around third place. Recall Stafford Beer’s ‘POSIWID’ – the purpose of a system is what it does.

Treasury doesn’t care whose money it is; GCHQ doesn’t control who owns the pipes; the regulator only looks at risk through a quarterly lens. Everyone is doing their job. Precisely, faithfully. And catastrophically.

That’s how you get a country where the cyber spooks call China a threat while the water regulator considers its bids ‘under review.’ No conspiracy required. Just incentives.

Opposition as Operating System

And now the political feedback loop is eating itself in real time. On 18 October, opposition leader Kemi Badenoch fired off a four-page letter to Prime Minister Keir Starmer, accusing him of ‘misleading the House’ over the failed spy case. The letter is blistering. Badenoch argues that Starmer’s ministers misrepresented both the law and the facts, that their witness statements were massaged to ‘soften’ Britain’s position on China, and that Labour effectively allowed the case to collapse ‘because [they] believe Britain needs short-term deals from China to prop up the public finances.’

It’s Westminster theatre at its most weaponised: legal interpretation as political cudgel. But it also shows how the system metabolises pressure. The same contradictions — commerce versus security, diplomacy versus disclosure — now play out not just between departments, but across the despatch box. Badenoch’s letter links the collapsed spy case to the delayed decision on China’s mega-embassy in London, calling the government ‘weak and spineless’ for deferring it. The feedback loop has gone public.

Soon after her formal letter, Badenoch expanded her attack on X, calling the saga ‘something from a spy novel — more Slow Horses than James Bond.’ She claimed Labour ministers had deliberately withheld key evidence from prosecutors, collapsing a ‘slam-dunk’ case to avoid diplomatic and financial blowback from Beijing. In her telling, Starmer’s team substituted neutralised language about ‘opportunities with China,’ even lifting passages from the Labour manifesto into witness statements.

She invoked the pressure ministers face from Beijing, the £1 billion dispute over Jingye’s ownership of British Steel, and the delayed embassy decision — all as proof that Labour’s instinct is to appease, not confront. Whether or not her account is accurate, it shows how both parties now weaponise the same system they claim to defend: secrecy, process, and plausible deniability. Badenoch’s framing adds another mirror to the hall – outrage as opposition strategy, narrative as national-security posture.

Yes, the feedback loop has gone public alright. John Crace jumps in with a ‘calssic’ Guardian damage-control-through-satire move. Wrap Labour’s discomfort in a bit of wry theatre, turn Cummings into a cartoon (‘Super Dom’) and turn the whole episode into farce. The subtext: if you laugh at it hard enough, maybe you don’t have to understand it. Well done Guardian, well done, reductio ad absurdum writ large.

Meanwhile Michael Gove chimed in with a history-nerd flourish ‘Once you start paying the Danegeld’, as if the Conservatives hadn’t been happily wiring tribute for years. Everyone’s pretending they weren’t at the feast.

And then, almost on cue, cherry on the cake, Chinese Party stooge and mouthpiece Victor Gao pipes in with: “If Britain wants to ruffle feathers with China… you need to be fully aware of all the consequences”. Translation: a polite threat. As a million single Mom’s know; wind your neck in, or the maintenance payments slow down.

Truth in a Hall of Mirrors

Here’s the thing: truth in this environment isn’t an absolute; it’s a coordinate system.

  • The CPS told the truth within its frame: there wasn’t enough admissible evidence.
  • The Cabinet Office told the truth within its frame: China hadn’t officially been labelled a threat.
  • Cummings told the truth within his frame: the system buried a scandal to save face.
  • Martin told the truth within his frame: the STRAP networks weren’t compromised.

Each is consistent inside its own logic. Together, they produce the informational equivalent of static. Systems under stress yield noise rather than crarity. The trick is hearing the underlying frequency — the slow hum of institutional self-protection that drowns out everything else.

The Don’t-Scare-the-Children Doctrine

Britain’s approach to China, and to espionage more broadly, has been one long exercise in risk theatre. Behind closed doors, the warnings are explicit. China is an adversarial power engaged in systematic intellectual-property theft and political interference.
In public, the line softens: ‘We seek constructive engagement.’

That gap between these positions isn’t prudence, rather it’s fear. Fear of economic retaliation. Fear of revealing how much of Britain’s infrastructure is already owned by foreign capital. Fear of public outrage that might force an answer no one can afford.

So, officials keep calm and carry on, like a national-security version of the Blitz poster. Ministers murmur about balance; agencies issue coded statements; and the public, lulled by everyday convenience, forget that their data, their water, their grid, their chips are all part of the same contested terrain.

It’s the politics of tranquillity. The reflex to soothe when alarm is warranted.
And it leaves us, again, exactly where Cummings’ tweet lands. the system working as intended. POSIWID.

Systems Thinking and the Architecture of Denial

If you zoom out, you can see the feedback loops in motion.

  1. Legal conservatism ensures no prosecution proceeds without iron-clad definitions.
  2. Political cowardice ensures those definitions are never explicit.
  3. Economic dependence ensures ownership questions remain politely unanswered.
  4. Security compartmentalisation ensures no one ever sees the whole picture.

Each subsystem believes it’s rational. Together, they produce irrational outcomes — like building a spy centre under the Tower of London or selling the country’s data pipes to an adversary.

This isn’t incompetence as much as it’s system dynamics.
Every safeguard becomes a barrier; every boundary a blind spot.

Weaponising the Wiring

Cummings says he’s ‘weaponised autism’. Fine. So have I; just differently. For me, it’s about seeing the code in the chaos: the loops, the recursion, the self-defeating patterns that neurotypicals politely ignore because it would ruin lunch. It’s not rage; it’s pattern fidelity. The brain that won’t stop turning the problem over until it finds the logic fault. That’s how I read this whole affair; as a system analyst might debug a failing circuit. Inputs, outputs, feedback loops, energy loss. And what the diagram shows isn’t corruption so much as entropy: institutions built to ensure accountability now dissipate it instead.

Autism, when you can steer it, becomes the capacity to stare into that entropy without flinching — to notice the recurring lines of denial that everyone else edits out for comfort. I’ve made my peace with that. The same wiring that makes social small talk a form of waterboarding also makes pattern-recognition a weapon. Used properly, it cuts through the noise. And that’s what this story needs. Not outrage, not ideology, not an agenda other than just having clear sight. Of the machinery eating itself.

Then the Sunday papers serve up a bit of ambience: ‘Spy suspect stopped with a suitcase of cash.’ Four grand. Not four million. It isn’t illegal to carry cash, just catastrophically bad optics if you’ve just flown in from Beijing. But that’s how the feedback loop works. The system is already humming with suspicion, so every weird vignette becomes narrative fuel, and nuance gets pulped into headline protein.

The Takeaway

The spy collapsed because everyone told the truth that best served their function, not because anyone lied.

  • The law was out of date.
  • The politics was conflicted.
  • The departments were siloed.
  • The people inside them were half-blind by design.

Britain’s national-security system isn’t malevolent but it is self-referential. A hall of mirrors reflecting sincerity, bureaucracy, and fear in equal measure. It isn’t that the left hand doesn’t know what the right one is doing, it’s that both have been told not to look. So here we are: a prosecution that couldn’t define its own enemy, a government that can’t admit what it knows, and a public that doesn’t know much at all.

Is it incompetence or strategy? The answer, as ever, is yes.

Thanks and Substack

Huge thank you and gratitude to my friend Ian Dunmore, ex Founder of Public Sector Forums and a real genuine journalist, who’s giving me a (massive) hand up into the grown up world of public commentary. Ian has persuaded me to try out publishing on Substack, so this article is going to be the first one there (published here initially). Thank you, Ian!

Check out https://horkan.substack.com for this article and hopefully some more as I write them.

Appendices

Appendix A – References

Appendix B – Key Points from the Peston interview

Dominic Cummings’ interview with Robert Peston (ITV, October 2025) lays out an incendiary version of events surrounding Britain’s China exposure — part confession, part accusation, part systems analysis. Below are the key claims and themes, distilled:

1. The Alleged 2020 Breach

  • Cummings claims that in early 2020, the Cabinet Secretary briefed him and then–Prime Minister Boris Johnson in the Downing Street “bunker” about a catastrophic security issue.
  • The revelation: China had allegedly bought and controlled companies running the data infrastructure used by British government departments, including the Ministry of Defence, the Cabinet Office, and MI6.
  • The company named was Global Switch, a major data-centre operator part-owned by Chinese investors.
  • According to Cummings, this wasn’t hacking — it was “worse than hacking.” Beijing, he said, had bought the actual pipes and platforms through which classified data moved.
  • The Cabinet Secretary supposedly called the situation “catastrophic.”
  • Cummings says the PM and Chancellor were “slack-jawed” when told, and that civil servants later buried the issue in “procedural fog.” No one was held accountable.

2. “A Systemic Cover-Up”

  • Cummings claims there was a deliberate Whitehall cover-up, with officials obfuscating, deflecting, and ensuring the scandal never surfaced publicly.
  • He says this pattern — of error, inquiry, denial, and quiet promotion — is standard in the British civil service.
  • He accuses the Cabinet Office of issuing “carefully worded denials,” technically accurate but designed to downplay the seriousness.
  • Example: Officials said “the systems used for the most sensitive data were not compromised,” which he argues avoids admitting that less sensitive but still vital systems were.

3. Treasury vs. Security — “Money Over Safety”

  • A recurring theme: the Treasury’s obsession with Chinese capital.
  • Cummings says politicians of all parties have prioritised “Chinese money over national security,” echoing similar mistakes made with Russia in previous decades.
  • When he pushed for a new National Security Act in 2020–21 to strengthen counter-espionage laws, Treasury officials resisted, fearing it would disrupt trade and investment.
  • “My priority was security,” he says. “Theirs was money.”
  • This, he argues, is the systemic tension at the heart of Whitehall — economics vs. security — and the root cause of Britain’s vulnerability.

4. The Embassy as “Spy Centre”

  • Cummings claims MI5 and MI6 explicitly warned him that China was trying to build a spy centre beneath its proposed new embassy at Royal Mint Court in London.
  • Intelligence officials allegedly told him: “It’s an extremely bad idea to allow this to go ahead.”
  • He says he and the PM agreed it was “insane,” but that Treasury and other departments resisted confrontation with Beijing.
  • The embassy plan, he says, is a metaphor for Whitehall’s dysfunction: an adversary literally building under the capital while officials dither.

5. The Collapsed Spy Case

  • Cummings also addresses the collapse of the prosecution of two alleged Chinese agents in Parliament (Christopher Cash and Christopher Berry).
  • He says Matthew Collins, the Deputy National Security Adviser who provided witness statements, knows “perfectly well” that China is a dangerous enemy and has briefed ministers to that effect.
  • Yet, in official statements, the government softened its language to “compete where we must, cooperate where we can” — a phrase lifted from Labour’s manifesto.
  • Cummings claims that softening was politically directed, not bureaucratically accidental — designed to keep relations with China warm during delicate financial negotiations.
  • He says if the PM had ordered it, the case could have proceeded: “That’s how the system works.”

6. Structural Paranoia and Bureaucratic Truth

  • Cummings acknowledges that each institution has its own logic: the intelligence agencies want secrecy; prosecutors want definitions; politicians want deniability.
  • The result, he says, is a machine that cannot act coherently.
  • He frames it as a cybernetic failure — “a system that protects itself rather than the country.”
  • His conclusion: Britain is “drifting toward danger,” addicted to Chinese capital and bureaucratic self-justification.

7. The Systemic Diagnosis

  • “The system is working as intended,” Cummings says — the most damning line of the interview.
  • Every actor (Treasury, Cabinet Office, CPS, intelligence agencies) is behaving rationally within its own domain, but collectively irrationally.
  • He portrays this as a failure of structure, not individuals: a web of incentives that prioritises appearance, short-term calm, and financial comfort over strategic clarity.

In Summary

Cummings paints Whitehall as a system in denial — compartmentalised, conflict-averse, and economically compromised — where truth is a function of departmental perspective and “security” means not protecting the nation, but preserving plausible deniability.