British counter-terrorism officers arrested three men on suspicion of assisting China’s foreign intelligence service on Wednesday, with one identified by media as the husband of a sitting Labour MP and a second as the partner of a former Labour MP, the most politically sensitive espionage arrests in Britain since the government convicted parliamentary researcher Christopher Cash in 2024, and a development that has intensified pressure on Keir Starmer‘s government to harden its posture toward Beijing weeks after the prime minister’s state visit to China.
A 39-year-old man was arrested at an address in London, a 68-year-old man at an address in Powys, and a 43-year-old man in Pontyclun, both in Wales, by Metropolitan Police counter-terrorism officers. All three were arrested on suspicion of assisting a foreign intelligence service contrary to section three of the National Security Act 2023. Three additional properties were searched in London, East Kilbride in Scotland, and Cardiff.
None of the suspects had been charged by Wednesday evening. Police said they did not believe there was any imminent or direct threat to the public.
David Taylor, the husband of Joani Reid, the Labour MP for East Kilbride and Strathaven, was identified as one of the three men. Taylor is a lobbyist and the director of a communications and consultancy business called Earthcott Limited, and also serves as director of policy and programmes at Asia House, a London-based think tank focused on economic ties between Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. The Speaker of the House of Commons confirmed Taylor did not hold a parliamentary pass to access the estate.
Reid, who sits on the Home Affairs Select Committee, issued a statement saying: “I have never seen anything to make me suspect my husband has broken any law. I am not part of my husband’s business activities and neither I nor my children are part of this investigation.” She added: “I have never been to China. I have never spoken on China or China-related matters in the Commons.” She also said she was “not any sort of admirer or apologist for the Chinese Communist Party’s dictatorship.”
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The partner of a former Labour MP is also among those arrested, according to sources who spoke to Bloomberg and Guido Fawkes on condition of anonymity. The identity of the third man and whether he has any connection to parliament have not been disclosed.
Security Minister Dan Jarvis told the House of Commons that Chinese officials in the United Kingdom and in Beijing had been summoned and formally reprimanded. “The government has been consistent and unambiguous in our assessment that China presents a series of threats to the United Kingdom. We remain deeply concerned by an increasing pattern of covert activity from Chinese state-linked actors targeting UK democracy,” he said. He warned that if criminal activity were proven, “we will impose severe consequences and hold all involved actors to account,” while declining to confirm any operational details of the investigation.
The arrests were made weeks after Starmer visited Beijing for meetings with President Xi Jinping, during which he announced the opening of a direct bilateral communication channel — a diplomatic initiative his Conservative opponents cited on Wednesday as evidence of political naivety. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch called on the government to “treat China as the threat we all know it is,” saying: “Keir Starmer chose to go to Beijing and boasted about opening a direct channel to President Xi without getting anything in return. That was a mistake. His government has approved China’s mega-embassy in London. Worse than that, he’s making us even more reliant on Chinese goods for our energy security.”
The Chinese embassy in London condemned the arrests as an attempt to “fabricate facts and concoct so-called espionage cases to maliciously slander China,” and said it had lodged a formal protest with the British government. Beijing has consistently denied all UK allegations of Chinese intelligence activity on British soil.
The case falls within an expanding pattern of Chinese interference operations against the United Kingdom documented by MI5 over the past four years. In January 2022, MI5 issued an alert to parliamentarians warning that a woman named Christine Lee was acting as an agent of the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department and had made political donations to multiple MPs. In November 2025, MI5 issued a further warning to lawmakers about Chinese agents posing as headhunters and corporate representatives to make contact with individuals with access to sensitive parliamentary and governmental information. Commander Helen Flanagan, head of Counter Terrorism Policing London, said: “We have seen a significant increase in our casework relating to national security in recent years.”
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Christopher Cash, a parliamentary researcher, was convicted in April 2024 of passing information to China’s intelligence services along with his associate Christopher Berry, in the first successful prosecution under the National Security Act 2023. That Act, introduced by the then-Conservative government, replaced the Official Secrets Act and extended the definition of prohibited conduct to cover a broader range of assistance to foreign intelligence services, making Wednesday’s arrests legally possible under a framework that did not exist before 2023.
The arrests come as Starmer faces a broader set of questions about the government’s China posture following Wednesday’s by-election in Gorton and Denton, in which Labour suffered a political defeat, and as his administration attempts to manage a transatlantic relationship strained by Trump’s pressure on European security spending. Whether the arrests will shift the government’s approach to the bilateral relationship with Beijing, which Starmer has sought to manage through what his team describes as a strategy of “engage, align, compete,” or whether they will be treated as a law enforcement matter separate from diplomatic strategy, was not clear from Jarvis’s statement on Wednesday.