UK drops China spying case against ex-parliamentary researcher Christopher Cash
For Christopher Cash, it was a job he loved. The young parliamentary researcher, then in his late twenties, was a China specialist who worked in turn for two influential backbenchers, Tom Tugendhat and Alicia Kearns. He had a parliamentary pass and was immersed in Westminster’s rumour mill throughout 2022, a year of Conservative upheaval with three prime ministers and uncertainty over future policy.
At the same time, Cash stayed in close touch with a friend, Christopher Berry, a teacher based in Hangzhou, eastern China, where the two Britons had first met five years earlier. They discussed politics constantly, using an encrypted app. On 18 July, Berry allegedly told him he had met a senior Chinese Communist party figure (though he now denies meeting anyone of that rank). In a reply the next day, Cash said: “You’re in spy territory now.”
That exchange was one of many voice notes and messages between the two that were recovered by the Met police’s elite SO15 unit, best known for its counter-terror work but also responsible for investigating espionage threats to the UK.
It was alleged that Berry had been tasked by a man known only as Alex, a Chinese spy with the Ministry of State Security working through a front. Cash was described as Berry’s sub-source, passing on information from Westminster to Alex, who in turn shared it with Cai Qi, a member of China’s ruling politburo.
Cash and Berry were arrested in March 2023, accused of spying for China, and charged in April 2024. They denied the charges and have continued to assert their innocence. Last month, the case was dropped by the Crown Prosecution Service, prompting questions about the prosecutors’ decision and a political row. Yet little was known about the allegations the two men had faced until Downing Street published a witness statement, part of a broader Labour effort to draw a line under the affair.
The statement, written by Matthew Collins, one of the UK’s deputy national security advisers, in December 2023, drew on evidence assembled by SO15. It depicted the two men in close and at times urgent contact: “On one occasion, for example, a total of 13 hours passed between Mr Berry receiving tasking, speaking with Mr Cash, and incorporating the information he provided in a written report back to ‘Alex’.”
On 21 July 2022, Cash was said to have told Berry that Tugendhat, a moderate China-sceptic, would “almost certainly”, in Collins’s words, become a minister under Rishi Sunak, who was then vying for the prime ministership against Liz Truss. This would be in exchange for Tugendhat’s support on foreign policy matters. The information was “very off the record” and Berry should not tell his Chinese interlocutor, Cash said. Nevertheless, the detail featured in a report Berry sent to Alex on 28 July, though, in a fact not mentioned by Collins, a day later Tugendhat endorsed Truss.
Collins’s witness statement, one of three he gave prosecutors, was published at 9.35pm on Wednesday. Those named in it were notified in advance, so that night the former researcher was able to put out a response through his lawyer. Cash acknowledged he “routinely spoke and shared information” with Berry, who was “as critical of and concerned about the Chinese Communist party as I was”. It was, he added, “inconceivable to me that he would deliberately pass on any information to Chinese intelligence”.
Meanwhile, Berry said, also through his lawyer, that the reports he wrote were “provided to a Chinese company which I believed had clients wishing to develop trading links with the UK”. Those reports “contained no classified information”, Berry said, and “concerned economic and commercial issues widely discussed in the UK at the time”. They drew on information freely in the public domain, he continued, “together with political conjecture, much of which proved to be inaccurate”.
At another point, Collins claims, Berry was said to have told Alex that Kearns and Tugendhat held a “secret” meeting with Taiwanese officials from the country’s defence ministry in May 2025. They had discussed “Taiwanese strategy for a potential attack from China”, Collins said, and the report was based on information from Cash, who had sent his friend “multiple messages” describing the event “including a photo of some attendees”.
The taskings were frequent. Berry had at least 34 reports to write for Alex between December 2021 and February 2023, and he messaged his friend regularly. Yet, despite the activity, there was no financial relationship, according to Cash. “I did not ever receive money for information which I provided,” he said this week, though at one point, in his witness statement, Collins says the researcher was offered some by Berry if he could reply at short notice.
Alex, according to Collins, had asked in December 2022 if Berry could find out more about the level of communication between the US and UK over Xinjiang, the north-western province that is home to the country’s heavily repressed Uyghur minority, and what measures they might take against Beijing in protest. This tasking was passed “verbatim to Mr Cash with an offer of payment”, Collins wrote, though “Berry did not specify an amount” and there is no suggestion any money was paid.
Berry’s final report included some intriguing information. “Berry told ‘Alex’,” Collins wrote, “that the then foreign secretary [James Cleverly] did not consider sanctions to be an effective tool in respect of the import of products from Xinjiang and similar matters.” It was unclear how this conclusion was reached, but this was at the centre of the government’s case, that “the Chinese state was given real time insights” into political information, sometimes before it became public.
In response, Cash stated: “I have been placed in an impossible position. I have not had the daylight of a public trial to show my innocence, and I should not have to take part in a trial by media”.
Statements made by Collins, Cash said, “are completely devoid of the context that would have been given at trial”. He added: “I have lost a career I loved for an allegation against me of which I am entirely innocent.”
Head of Investigations
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