Intrigue has littered the history of parliament

When foreign powers have sought influence, the result has often been underwhelming, writes Sean O’Grady

MI5 have alleged an ‘agent’ of the Chinese government has been active in Westminster (PA Archive)

The spotlight being faced by Barry Gardiner is to be treated with a good deal of care. Gardiner has put out a statement that stresses how he liaised with the security service over Christine Lee, a Chinese agent according to MI5 and the Speaker of the House of Commons. Gardiner’s office received about £500,000 from Ms Lee’s legal firm, and her son was employed in Gardiner’s office in a routine role. Gardiner says Ms Lee “gained no political advantage for the Chinese state from me”.

Whatever else, Gardiner was in no position to, say, pass state secrets, inadvertently or otherwise to someone accused of being a Chinese spy, for the simple reason he was not in possession of any. He was shadow international trade secretary under Jeremy Corbyn. Had he joined a Corbyn cabinet he might have been better informed and in an important job, not least because trade with China is even now substantial and, post-Brexit, might be further expanded in a trade deal. But he didn’t and he wasn’t. For their part, the Chinese embassy in London sniffily commented that they have no need to influence anyone in the British parliament.

You might take the view that if the funds did indeed originate in Beijing the spymasters there got a pitiful return on their investment and any attempt to gain influence. Arguably, because he was also liaising with MI5, Gardiner was in fact playing Ms Lee along, and acting as a British agent, a kind of parliamentary James Bond - “The Spy Who Debated With Me”, “Corbyn Is Not Enough”, “Licensed to Attend the NEC In A Seconded Capacity”, and, of course, “Lose Another Election”.

Such, in fact, has been the general experience of foreign powers in parliament: poor value. During the Cold War the general pattern was of usually Labour MPs, career backbenchers, selling bits of gossip to Russian and Czech diplomats in London for exorbitant sums. Rarely did they manage to penetrate government, despite the overactive imagination of a group in the British secret service who thought a prime minister of the time, Harold Wilson, was passing secrets over to the other side. John Stonehouse, more famous for faking his own death in 1974, was a minister in the 1960s, and also sold some valuable defence secrets and more general information to Czechoslovakian spies. Tom Driberg, a famous figure in his day, faced allegations of being a double agent for the British and Russians. He was an inveterate gossip and intriguer, and would probably spill any number of modest secrets to anyone he liked.

Various others have been accused of some sort of unwise contact with foreign powers, with varying degrees of credibility. And what is intelligence anyway? If a backbencher once told a Czech diplomat that, say, he thinks, on a hunch, that the prime minister, Mrs Thatcher, might cut taxes in the next Budget and call an election, what use is that to the Warsaw Pact? They'd have been better off reading the Daily Telegraph.

Probably the most useless agent of influence was an obscure, even at the time, Labour backbencher named Will Owen (1901-1981). He was a rare case indeed in that he was actually prosecuted under the 1911 Official Secrets Act in 1972, and after he’d left the Commons (he was MP for Morpeth). He was found not guilty. Once again he was said to be handled by the Czechs, who seem to been the Russians’ favoured sub-contractors, and he sold low-grade intelligence and gossip for £500 a month (about £10,000 in today's money, or £120,000 a year). It was the kind of thing the Communists could have found out by reading the diary columns of the national press or subscribing to Private Eye.

According to Owen’s Czechoslovak handler Josef Frolic, in his memoirs, Owen, codenamed “Lee” and nicknamed “Greedy”, was “interested solely in the five-hundred pounds a month retainer which we gave him. In spite of the obvious danger, he was always demanding free holidays in Czechoslovakia so that he might save the expense of having to pay for the vacation himself. He even went as far as pocketing as many cigars as possible whenever he came to the embassy for a party.” Maybe the Chinese have had more luck in their activities. We may soon find out.