However, Collins insisted that prosecutors should have known from the outset that he could not provide this statement because it was not official government policy at the time. He said he was “surprised” and “disappointed” when he found out the case was not going to go to trial.
The conflicting versions of events played out in front of the joint committee on national security strategy, which is investigating how the case collapsed and who, if anyone, was to blame.
Collins’s first statement
The committee heard that Collins provided three witness statements to the Crown Prosecution Service to support the prosecution of Christopher Cash and Christopher Berry, who were both accused of spying for Beijing using Cash’s privileged access to parliament. Both men have denied the charges.
The first witness statement was produced by Collins in 2023. It was drafted between August and December with input from external legal counsel, a small number of other national security officials and Cabinet Office lawyers.
Collins said he made amendments to his witness statement during its drafting to ensure that it reflected the strongest elements of the evidence he was given by counterterrorism police.
His first statement set out a “range of espionage threats” posed by China, but Collins argued that it did not deem China a threat in itself because that was not government policy at the time.
“Successive governments have not framed our relationship with China in those terms,” he told the committee. “Therefore, in my witness statement, I did not frame the argument that China was an enemy. As you’ve seen, I removed that from a draft in my first witness statement prior to the charging decision.”
The statement was sent for clearance to the Cabinet Office permanent secretary, the national security adviser and the then prime minister, Rishi Sunak, before it was submitted.
Once the evidence had been given, “no minister or special adviser”, including the current national security adviser, Jonathan Powell, played any role in what evidence was provided for the case, he said.
Collins added this was because the charging decision was made on the strength of his first statement, at which point he became a witness and the case became active.
“I was told I wasn’t able to share my witness statements because it may pervert the course of justice,” Collins said. “I was a witness in a criminal case. I took that very seriously.”
Parkinson told the committee that the prosecution was satisfied there was a case to bring to court because of the strength of the first witness statement, a threshold that he said was “critical’.
Collins’s second statement
Prosecutors returned to Collins in February this year and asked him to provide an additional witness statement. This was in the light of a High Court ruling over the meaning of the Official Secrets Act, which clarified that an “enemy” was a state that posed a threat to national security.
To fulfil this requirement, they wanted Collins to go further in highlighting the threat posed by China.
Parkinson told the committee that Collins’s second statement only provided evidence that China was “a threat to economic security” and the “question wasn’t answered in terms”. He said: “The issue wasn’t so much the statements that we were given, it was what was missing.
“The key question, which would have been posed in cross-examination, was the question that we posed in June: was China an active threat to national security at the material time?”
Collins’s third statement
In August, just a month before the case collapsed, prosecutors had another attempt and asked Collins to explain the nature and extent of the threat posed by China.
It was requested that Collins include examples in his evidence that met the threshold to categorise China as an enemy. He argued that he still could not do this, as it was not the government position and he was a civil servant.
Collins said that he was asked by counterterrorism police to add some of Labour’s policies to his statement for “fear there would be a wedge driven between [his] statements and the new government’s policies”. He denied that anyone in government had asked him to do this.
He then included evidence that he clarified came from an “answer to a parliamentary question”, after accusations arose that he had sampled the Labour Party manifesto, in which the government wished for “a positive relationship with China”.
When asked by MPs whether political pressure had been put on him to include reference to Labour’s position, he replied: “No. I was asked by counterterrorism police, as I was throughout all of my witness statements, to provide evidence in support of the case to secure a successful prosecution.”
Parkinson said that by this point, the statements had failed to meet the threshold needed to prosecute the case. “All routes by which we might establish that China was an enemy were closed,” he said.
“We couldn’t go down the route of ‘threat to national security’ for the reasons we’ve discussed. He had said, we were aware, that he was not prepared to say that China was an enemy or a potential enemy.
“He was not prepared to say that China was opposed to or hostile to the interests of the UK. So there were no other options open to us. The case had to end.”
Case dropped
In August, after the third statement, the prosecution barrister, Tom Little KC, spoke to Collins. He said he needed to understand why two previous attempts to get statements, “which [he] thought would be relatively straightforward”, had not articulated the threat in clear terms.
Little said that it became clear that Collins “would not say China posed an active threat to national security at the material time”.
“That was in answer to the million-dollar question,” Little said. “Once he had said that, the prosecution was effectively unsustainable. I don’t think anyone should misunderstand the effect of what the witness had said.”
Following this meeting, in early September, Parkinson met Collins and the cabinet secretary, Sir Chris Wormald. He told them he was going to drop the case.
Collins said he was both surprised and disappointed by the decision and had raised a number of questions with Parkinson over why he was dropping the charges.
“I very much wanted to secure a conviction,” Collins said. “A lot of people put a lot of effort into investigating the issues and building the evidential case.
“I was expecting to provide evidence in an open court. I have to admit I wasn’t quite expecting to provide evidence at a select committee hearing.”
Prosecutors agreed to look at his points, but ultimately dismissed them. A few days later, they formally told the government that the case would not go ahead.
