A ruling by the UK’s Particular Immigration Appeals Fee has revealed {that a} Chinese language businessman with hyperlinks to King Charles’ youthful brother, Prince Andrew, has been banned from Britain. The fee was upholding a call initially taken in 2023 by the then house secretary, Suella Braverman, to exclude a person subsequently named as Yang Tengbo.
Britain’s Safety Service, MI5, had suggested the fee that Yang posed “a danger to UK nationwide safety”. Stories have famous Yang’s visits to royal occasions on the request of the prince and his communications with considered one of Andrew’s senior advisers, Dominic Hampshire.
That Andrew might need been cultivated by an agent of the Chinese language authorities will come as no shock to anybody who has studied the work of intelligence companies. Their perfect goal won’t essentially be somebody who sympathises with the regime they serve. Certainly with the collapse of the ideological certainties of the chilly struggle, this has change into more and more unlikely.
Reasonably, a goal will in all probability be somebody who has explicit weaknesses that may be exploited, usually revolving round cash or intercourse. They’re seldom on the very pinnacle of energy. However that, in itself, can depart them resentful and hungry for affirmation.
An exaggerated sense of self-importance can render them much more pliable. This will make for a posh relationship between intelligence predator and their prey.
In Andrew’s case, there are indications that members of his circle really talked up the prince’s significance as a political contact. The fee’s ruling quoted a message from Hampshire to Yang in March 2020 after the latter had been invited to attend the Prince’s sixtieth birthday celebration.
Hampshire instructed Yang: “I additionally hope that it’s clear to you the place you sit with my principal and certainly his household. You need to by no means underestimate the power of that relationship. …exterior of his closest inside confidants, you sit on the very high of a tree that many, many individuals want to be on.”
These extra acquainted with the workings of the British authorities is likely to be sceptical in regards to the peak of the branches Yang had reached. King Charles is, in any case, a constitutional monarch with few formal powers. And Andrew has change into an more and more marginalised determine throughout the royal household.
A gentle stream of revelations about his relationship with sex-trafficker and paedophile Jeffrey Epstein has left him more and more out within the chilly. He was stripped of his position as UK commerce envoy in 2011 and was then pressured to step down from public duties in 2019. So why trouble making an attempt to court docket him?
Clues are supplied in an vital survey of the hyperlinks between the royal household and the intelligence group revealed by worldwide historical past specialists Richard Aldrich and Rory Cormac in 2021. As they observe, earlier than 2011, Andrew had loved a protracted profession within the royal navy after which as a British commerce envoy, changing into carefully concerned within the delicate and secretive world of UK arms gross sales.
In 2010, the Wikileaks revelations recommended Andrew had been fiercely essential of the Severe Fraud Workplace for nearly derailing a cope with Saudi Arabia and that his inside data might need prolonged to some darkish corners of the arms commerce and its strategies. There have been additionally studies that the UK’s overseas intelligence service, MI6, was involved {that a} former US deputy police chief near the investigation into the Epstein affair might need leaked particulars to Russia, leaving Andrew open to blackmail.
So Andrew in all probability was a tempting goal, combining private vulnerability with data that might, on the very least, be embarrassing to the UK. However then, to borrow former US protection secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s vivid phrase about Iraq, the British institution has lengthy supplied overseas intelligence companies with “a target-rich setting”. And the waters are typically muddied by the convenience with which respectable contacts based mostly on cultural and commerce diplomacy can morph into one thing extra sinister.
Broader issues
The ruling of the Particular Immigration Appeals Fee quoted from an announcement by the director-general of MI5 from July 2022 which distinguished between respectable diplomacy and “what we name interference exercise – influencing that’s clandestine, coercive or corruptive”. But, in observe, the excellence is commonly opaque.
When darker forces are at work, it usually solely turns into obvious because of extended surveillance of these concerned. And that, in flip, assumes Britain’s spies are literally doing their job. Numerous our bodies have questioned whether or not they’re.
In a July 2020 report, the parliamentary intelligence and safety committee criticised the intelligence group for not being extra interested by sure points of Russian exercise. The potential for Kremlin interference within the 2016 Brexit referendum was a major concern.
The implication – that intelligence officers had been nervous about getting concerned in such a delicate political problem – was quite borne out by the destiny of the committee’s report itself. It was delivered to then prime minister Boris Johnson in October 2019 however was not launched to the general public till nicely after his pro-Brexit authorities had gained the final election of December that yr.
Neither is the Labour celebration with out inquiries to reply. Concurrently the Prince Andrew scandal was unfolding, Christine Lee, who donated £584,177 to the workplace of the Labour MP Barry Gardiner, misplaced a declare towards MI5 which had accused her of partaking in political interference on behalf of China. Gardiner has mentioned in response that not one of the donations “in response to MI5, got here from an unlawful supply” and that he has “ceased all contact” with Lee following the MI5 warning.
Prince Andrew’s behaviour is a part of a wider image and speaks to the final want for greater requirements in British public life. Stricter guidelines on political donations to stop overseas interference in British politics are lengthy overdue. And folks of political affect, together with members of each homes of parliament, must be way more carefully scrutinised over their relationships with overseas officers and enterprise individuals. Nationwide safety, because the time period implies, very a lot begins at house.
