Truss pushed Badenoch to send military kit to China

LIZ TRUSS privately urged Kemi Badenoch to “expedite” the sale of anti-landmine equipment to China, it has emerged.

The former prime minister, who is known for her particularly tough stance on Beijing, wrote to the Business Secretary last August imploring her to intervene on behalf of a company based in Ms Truss’ constituency.

Ms Truss wrote that she would be “grateful if you expedite (sic) licence” for Richmond Defence Systems, according to private correspondence obtained by Politico.

She confided that the company had told her “if the licence is not granted, the Chinese would simply reverse engineer and manufacture the products themselves”.

“This would mean the loss of future sales running into the millions,” she added.

A draft response in Mrs Badenoch’s name said: “We are required to balance the desire to move quickly through the system with the need for careful and thorough consideration of the application, and some decisions can take longer”.

Officials told Politico that Mrs Badenoch sent a later version of the draft last December, but the department refused to release it.

A spokesman for Ms Truss insisted that she “always takes up cases of constituents with government departments and follows up to get them the answers they need,” and that it was part of her job as an MP.

But the revelations have prompted criticism towards the former foreign secretary and ex-prime minister, who has sought to become one of Westminster’s most vocal China hawks.

Speaking in November, Ms Truss said that there has been “far too much appeasement” of China and that “if we keep doing deals with China, if we keep exporting more to China and getting more Chinese investment into the UK, that is ultimately leverage that can be used against us”.

She also travelled to Taipei City in Taiwan last May, three months before writing to Mrs Badenoch, where she urged Rishi Sunak to brand China a “threat”.