The Prince Andrew spying scandal exposes the credulity of the elites

When it comes to national security, the British establishment has been too complacent for too long

The British intelligence services intimated last week that a former business partner and friend of Prince Andrew may be a Chinese spy. For the prince, the younger brother of King Charles III, this is yet another fiasco of many he has blundered into. For the British ruling classes more broadly, this is another embarrassing display of their own credulity.

Yang Tengbo, who was named as the suspected spy this week, began work with the prince on an enterprise named Pitch@Palace China back in 2016. This was a Dragons Den-inspired competition designed to foster Anglo-Chinese investment in entrepreneurship and innovation. The Telegraph revealed this week that, in 2017, Pitch@Palace China claimed to have launched a £1 billion venture fund for selected start-ups. The suggestion is that the prince may have benefitted financially from the scheme, and that he maintained a close relationship with Yang, who was later banned from entering the UK on national-security grounds.

It’s not just Prince Andrew who has been implicated in this scandal. During the so-called golden era of Anglo-Chinese cooperation between 2010 and 2020, Yang was photographed with former prime ministers David Cameron and Theresa May. His firm, Hampton Group International, advised companies from pharmaceutical giant GSK to luxury-car manufacturer McLaren. In Britain’s arts sector, Hampton built a ‘strategic partnership’ with the National Museum of Liverpool. This gave the museum the coup of displaying, in 2018, parts of China’s 2,200-year-old Terracotta Army.

Yang also invested in a fashion and soft-furnishings company, B&H Enterprise, which was led by the late Lady Barbara Judge, a wheeler-dealer and former chair of the UK Atomic Energy Authority and the Institute of Directors.

Then Yang got involved with the famously blue-blooded British public school, Gordonstoun, in Moray, Scotland. This was the alma mater of Prince Andrew, King Charles and the late Prince Philip. Yang helped Gordonstoun open educational facilities in China, further extending his links with the British establishment.

If the media and MI5 are to be believed, Yang’s influence stretched deep within the UK. But what exactly is the scorecard here? Yes, Yang had plenty of access to Prince Andrew and top businesspeople. And if the spying allegations are true, then the scale and general level of his operation is impressive. We should certainly be wary about CCP manoeuvres in the UK. With regard to China’s industrial espionage and the theft of UK corporate intellectual property, MI5 chief Ken McCallum has spoken of ‘a sustained campaign on a pretty epic scale’.

Still, this latest disaster for Britain’s monarchy provides no reason to get hysterical. ‘Influence operations’ of the kind Yang is accused of undertaking can easily be another way of talking about ‘soft power’. In that respect, Britain – and, of course, the US – runs significant influence operations abroad, with achieving influence over negotiations on climate change high among their priorities. Moreover, it is easy to exaggerate the effect of such operations. Supposed Russian subversion, for example, was never as big a deal as Democrats alleged in Trump’s 2016 electoral victory, nor during the Brexit referendum, as many prominent Remainers claimed.

The more interesting aspect of this affair is the clientele who appear to have been taken in by this alleged CCP agent. It smacks of John Le Carré’s fictional upper-class traitors – or of the very real espionage by the well-educated, well-to-do Cambridge Five, who passed secrets to the Soviet Union during the Second World War. While there is no sexual element evident in this latest scandal, Prince Andrew’s lax attitude to national security in his personal relationships is certainly reminiscent of the Profumo Affair. The establishment’s complacent tolerance of his dealings with foreign powers is also similar to how the elites largely closed ranks around art historian Anthony Blunt, even after he was exposed as a Soviet spy in 1979.

Under this Labour government, the CCP will continue to be granted access to the gullible rich. Both UK prime minister Keir Starmer and his chancellor, Rachel Reeves, have made no secret of their ambitions to recruit Chinese foreign direct investment to Britain. In January, Reeves is due to follow foreign secretary David Lammy’s October visit to Beijing with one of her own. There are no signs this latest spying scandal has changed the government’s thinking.

If we are going to get closer to China, then we will need to be far more vigilant. The deeper our ties, the more potential there is for our security to be compromised. After the Yang Tengbo debacle, we can’t say we haven’t been warned.

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