Sir Julian Lewis

The Minister says that it is for another Department to decide whether the Chinese Government should have a new embassy. That is certainly true, but the proposed new embassy is so large that it would be the biggest embassy in any country anywhere in Europe. That has national security implications, and if the Minister wants to encourage people to believe that the Government are not cosying up to communist China, he should make recommendations accordingly. May I just ask the Minister about the extract he read from the 1911 Act? I will read a slightly fuller one, though still one with ellipses: “If any person for any purpose prejudicial to the safety or interests of the State…obtains or communicates to any other person any…document or information which…might be…directly or indirectly useful to an enemy; he shall be guilty of felony”. My reading of that extract from the Act is that the felony lies in the disclosure to anyone at all—it does not have to be directly to an enemy. Whether or not China was regarded as an enemy at the time, the nature of the sensitive material disclosed meant it was a felony, even if it was disclosed to a China that was not regarded as an enemy. Surely the trial should have gone ahead.