A Chinese solicitor suing MI5 for calling her a spy claimed yesterday that it was ‘unlikely’ she would be chosen by Beijing because she is a devout Christian.
Yesterday Christine Lee appeared at the High Court wearing a silver cross as she launched a legal bid for compensation. The 60-year-old argues that her ‘profile and religious denomination’ made her an ‘unsuitable candidate’ for spying.
It was also suggested that MI5 may have conspired with then Foreign Secretary Liz Truss and Home Secretary Priti Patel to name her as a Communist agent as a ‘distraction’ from Boris Johnson’s Partygate scandal.
Spy chiefs issued an alert in January 2022 warning MPs that Lee was engaged in ‘political interference activities on behalf of the United Front Work Department (UFWD) of the Chinese Communist Party’. But her lawyer claimed Ms Lee ‘did not know’ her activities ‘could fall foul of national security measures’ and insisted ‘foreign political interference activity’ isn’t unlawful.
Ms Lee, from Birmingham, worked as a legal adviser to the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office, an agency overseen by the UFWD. She had spent years cosying up to MPs, donating £640,000 to Labour and the Liberal Democrats.
But yesterday her lawyer Ramby de Mello told the Investigatory Powers Tribunal that MI5 had no authority to call her a spy, suggesting his client’s ‘harmonious’ work with MPs had been ‘misinterpreted as dealing with the devil’. He argued that his client had been treated worse than Russians who have similarly donated to MPs, after Ms Lee gave more than £500,000 to Labour MP Barry Gardiner.
In a text to Ms Lee, sent via a mutual friend after the alert was issued, Mr Gardiner said: ‘Many people have said to me that they believe the reason for [MI5] putting out the story when they did was to detract attention from Boris’s Partygate apology which was announced the day before’.
Mr De Mello said the MI5 alert resulted in Ms Lee receiving death threats and having to go into hiding. Her son, Daniel Wilkes, is also suing after he lost his job working for Mr Gardiner.
But Victoria Wakefield KC, representing MI5, said it had ‘concluded on the information available… that Ms Lee posed a threat to national security and that action was necessary’, adding that MI5 has a duty to ensure it takes no action to ‘further the interests of any political party’. The hearing continues.