Prosecutors on Monday dropped charges against two men who had been accused of spying for China under the Official Secrets Act, saying the "evidential stage of the case" was no longer met.
Christopher Cash, 30, of Whitechapel in east London, and Christopher Berry, 33, of Witney, Oxfordshire, were each charged with offences alleging that between Dec. 28, 2021, and Feb. 3, 2023 they "for a purpose prejudicial to the safety or interests of the State, obtained, collected, recorded, published or communicated to any other person articles, notes, documents or information which were calculated to be, might be or were intended to be, directly or indirectly, useful to an enemy." Both men had denied the allegations and were due to stand trial in October.
The charges were discontinued at a hearing at the Old Bailey after prosecutor Tom Little told the court the evidential threshold required to continue prosecution was no longer satisfied. The men will no longer face prosecution on the spying counts, court officials said.
Cash worked as a parliamentary researcher and had links to senior Conservative figures, including former security minister Tom Tugendhat and Alicia Kearns, then chairwoman of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. He had been employed in Westminster by Kearns and worked with the China Research Group, set up by Tugendhat. He left his parliamentary role following his arrest last March and later issued a statement through the law firm Birnberg Peirce saying the allegations were "against everything I stand for." The statement said he had spent his career "trying to educate others about the challenge and threats presented by the Chinese Communist Party."
Berry had been based in China in various teaching posts since September 2015. As young graduates, Berry and Cash taught together at Hangzhou Oriental Middle School near Shanghai in 2018. Berry later produced online material promoting Chinese landmarks and the Zhejiang province, and posted blog clips describing a typical day as a teacher in China.
Both men were formally charged last year under the Official Secrets Act and had consistently denied wrongdoing. They were remanded pending a further hearing before the judge accepted the Crown's concession to discontinue the case.
The prosecution's decision comes amid an uptick in high-profile counterintelligence investigations in Britain involving alleged activity on behalf of Beijing. British government officials have warned that Chinese intelligence operations have increasingly targeted people in sensitive positions across politics, defence and business. The Chinese government has repeatedly dismissed such claims as exaggerated.
Legal teams for the men have not published detailed comment beyond earlier denials and the statement released on Cash's behalf. The Crown Prosecution Service did not provide detailed reasoning for the evidential assessment beyond the statement in court that the case could not proceed on the available evidence.
The discontinuation leaves unresolved public questions about the initial decision to charge under the Official Secrets Act, the investigation that led to those charges, and any material gathered by security services. Where prosecutions are dropped on evidential grounds, investigators sometimes retain the ability to reopen matters should new material emerge, but the court order on Monday ends the immediate prospect of criminal trials for Cash and Berry.
The case had drawn attention because of Cash's parliamentary employment and the broader political sensitivity surrounding allegations of foreign-directed espionage. It is one among several recent inquiries in the United Kingdom concerning alleged intelligence activity linked to China, which have prompted debate in Westminster about safeguarding classified information and vetting public servants. Chinese authorities have consistently rejected accusations of state-sponsored espionage directed at the UK as "hype," while British security officials have described a more sophisticated and persistent threat environment.
With the charges withdrawn, both men remain free of the specific Official Secrets Act prosecutions. The Crown and the defence may make further submissions in court records, but Monday's hearing concluded with the formal end of the active criminal case against the two defendants.