There has been a long standing problem with Chinese nationals associated with the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party gaining access to UK parliamentarians. It’s not a good thing for those operatives of a government that is likely to be hostile to British interests in the future to be having so much access to the UK government and to Parliament. Now of course this is not a one sided party political matter, the Chinese Government has had people close to the Tories and the current spy suspect Christine Lee has been photographed with former Prime Minister David Cameron, so there is no party that has completely clean hands on this matter. However Labour’s response to the ‘Beijing Barry Affair’ where £600,000 was funnelled via companies associated with Ms Lee to the Labour MP Barry Gardiner, looks rather too nonchalant.

During an interview on LBC the Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said that he had not yet spoken to Barry Gardiner about the Chinese spy case. He told LBC that there was no grounds for believing that Mr Gardiner had done anything wrong.

Now it may well be the case that technically Mr Gardiner was innocent of any wrongdoing but I would have expected that at least Sir Keir would have sought out Mr Gardiner and spoken about this matter to him. If I was in the same position as Sir Keir and leading the official opposition and one of my MP’s had been named in connection to a spy scandal one of the first things I’d want to do is to speak to the MP in question personally to get their side of the story.

Not only would I want to know the details of what had happened and the nature of the connection between the MP and Ms Lee but I would also want to gather enough information to a) ensure that there are no future Chinese spy scandals in my party waiting to erupt and b) to try to ascertain whether there were political advantages to be gained by knowing about contacts that the alleged Chinese spy might have had with the governing party as this could be useful.

Days have gone by since this scandal erupted but even by yesterday Sir Keir Starmer had not spoken to the MP at the centre of this scandal. This looks to me to be both odd and indicative of poor leadership. It certainly doesn’t cause a rise in confidence in Sir Keir’s ability as a potential Prime Minister.