In defence of Chris Cash: Was China 'spy' case a Le Carre-style bestseller or just Westminster HR issue?

In 2017 the SNP promised over 800 more GPs in a decade, but in the last ten years the number of full-time equivalents has fallen from 3,675 to 3,590, so there is clearly work to do. Earlier this year, our Bruntsfield GP Mike Cash hung up his stethoscope, and I hope it doesn’t embarrass Dr Cash to receive public acknowledgement for the fantastic job he did, certainly in my case, picking up a wee sound with that stethoscope which resulted in a five-hour repair job in the tender care of Edinburgh Royal Infirmary's cardiac surgery department.

But this column isn’t about what sounds like another half-baked SNP wheeze, or Dr Cash’s badly needed experience and expertise ─ who knows, he might yet pop up running a Swinney drop-in centre ─ but about one reason he’s no longer practicing. There were other motivations, but he wanted to be on hand to support his son through what was going to the ordeal of a lifetime. The surname might ring bells with readers, because his son is Chris Cash, the former parliamentary researcher accused of spying for China.

I’ve never met the younger Cash, but he was the year above my daughter at school, and by all accounts he did not lack confidence, the kind of high-flyer common around Westminster; bright young things on the way up in a hurry. It’s not hard to imagine someone in their 20s who had become director of the China Research Group, an association of Conservative MPs concerned about Beijing’s influence, and then assistant to Alicia Kearns MP, chair of the foreign affairs select committee, being pretty full of himself and keen to make good use of contacts and a very sellable fluency in Mandarin.

But two years ago, his world fell apart when he and Christopher Berry, with whom he had taught in China, were charged with spying under the 1911 Official Secrets Act. Under normal circumstances they could have just got on with the rest of their lives when the case against them collapsed last month, but instead there has been an increasingly hysterical political blame game for the Crown Prosecution Service’s failure to take the case to trial, ostensibly because China wasn’t officially an enemy at the time of the alleged offences. The refusal of Downing Street to respond to prosecution’s request for confirmation of China’s threat to national security is, the theory goes, because of Labour’s keenness to improve trade relations.

But with one exception, there seems to be an assumption that whatever the reason for the collapse, Berry and Cash were up to no good and can be thrown to the wolves. The exception was ex-Conservative MP Matthew Parris in last week’s Spectator magazine who made the case for Cash’s innocence.

Perhaps I should have come out in Chris Cash’s defence before Matthew Parris, but something does not feel right about this case and when no less than MI5 chief Sir Ken McCallum warned of China’s “sustained campaign on a pretty epic scale” even the most cynical Whitehall operator would balk at crashing a serious espionage trial for the sake of a few business deals.

Why, for example, was the decision to prosecute taken before key information had been received from Downing Street? What sensitive information did Cash pass on to Berry? Wouldn’t it need to be a lot more than who was in what hotel room on Alicia Kearns’ fact-finding trip to Taiwan? If it was information about the China Research Group, wouldn’t the Chinese already have known which Tory MPs weren’t on message? And if he did have access to classified information, wouldn’t the security services have been all over it, and him, to the extent that the prosecutions would have gone ahead and the spooks would have made sure government lawyers knew not to let anything of critical importance see the light of day.

Political intervention to halt prosecutions with the potential for serious international embarrassment is not unfeasible, such as is alleged to have happened in the case of Iraq War whistle-blower and GCHQ translator Katharine Gun in 2004. But unlike Cash, Gun worked in a high-security environment handling real secrets. Even what little is known puts Chris Cash in an altogether different league, and a minor one at that.

As Matthew Parris pointed out, the old Official Secrets Act, under which they were charged, had a broad scope, with catch-all definitions covering general state “interests” without needing proof of intent, but while trust has almost certainly been broken ─ Alicia Kearns and her predecessor Tom Tugendhat have said as much ─ is that enough to condemn them as traitors without trial? And to carry on doing so even though there is officially no case to answer? Both government and opposition seem determined to destroy their lives no matter what.

Maybe the witness statements will prove me wrong, but in an increasingly febrile atmosphere about the Chinese Communist Party ─ and there’s a lot to be febrile about ─ perhaps the security authorities over-reacted to what was little more than sophisticated, well-informed tittle-tattle and sought to make an example with a case so flimsy it was always going to fail. A misconduct case for Parliament HR to sort out was never going to make much of a Le Carre-style bestseller.

And meanwhile back in Bruntsfield, we’ve lost a good GP.