Labour MP was handed £600,000 – and hired agent’s son
CHRISTINE Lee has been active in Britain’s corridors of power for more than 15 years, lobbying ministers and running pressure groups as well as giving money to Labour MPs.
This included more than £600,000 given to a single MP to cover staffing costs, with her own son even working in his office up until yesterday.
Solicitor Miss Lee, now outed as a suspected Chinese spy by MI5, set up the British Chinese Project to encourage Chinese people to vote in the UK in 2006.
In 2011 it began helping to run a Westminster pressure group, the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) called Chinese in Britain.
Its chairman was Barry Gardiner, a Left-wing Labour MP who had worked with Miss Lee on a failed campaign to save a Chinatown near his north London constituency.
Electoral Commission registers show that her firm has given about £670,000 to Mr Gardiner and Labour, almost all of it for his staffing costs. Just £5,000 went to the central party, while her firm also made a handful of small donations to local Labour groups.
The APPG produced official-looking reports and was involved in an art exhibition marking the arrival of China’s President Xi Jinping to Britain in 2015.
Miss Lee began to give substantial amounts of money to Mr Gardiner after initially hosting a gala dinner for his constituency Labour Party in 2014. Soon afterwards her law firm began paying for staff in his parliamentary office, including her son Daniel Wilkes, who was his diary manager until yesterday.
A list of research assistants from 2020 shows that two people on Brent North MP Mr Gardiner’s books, Thomas Evans and Matthew Torbitt, said they were ‘paid by Christine Lee & Co (solicitors) for the work I do in Parliament’.
As far back as 2006, Miss Lee had given evidence to Parliament.
She was candid about her efforts to influence a planned immigration crackdown by Tony Blair’s government. ‘I have been working on this Bill and lobbying the government for the last four months,’ she told MPs on the home affairs committee.
She went on: ‘I have been lobbying the House of Lords quite heavily for the last three months and the House of Lords have been absolutely wonderful.’
She mentioned three female peers who she claimed had ‘really pushed the Bill out for us and getting what we demanded’, including Labour’s Baroness Ashton, who was then a minister and later became the EU’s foreign affairs chief.
Miss Lee also name-checked the then-immigration minister, saying: ‘I did manage to talk to Tony McNulty as well and he has agreed some of our demands.’
Incredibly she revealed that her law firm had set up an office inside a British Embassy building in China. ‘They are on the second floor, we are on the 17th floor. So every time the British Embassy has a problem, they send the people up to us and we can explain to them in Chinese what is going on there,’ she said.
Last night Mr Gardiner admitted he had long known of MI5’s interest in his benefactor. He said: ‘I have been liaising with our security services for a number of years about Christine Lee and they have always known, and been made fully aware by me, of her engagement with my office and the donations she made to fund researchers in my office in the past.’
But he insisted that ‘steps were taken to ensure Christine Lee had no role in either the appointment or management of those researchers’ and that while the security services ‘have definitively identified improper funding channelled through Christine Lee, this does not relate to any funding received by my office’.
In an extraordinary interview on Sky News last night, Mr Gardiner said: ‘The first time I knew about Christine Lee being a spy was this morning when I had a meeting with the director of parliamentary security and two security service agents.
‘And they made me aware that they now had information which showed that Christine Lee had been engaged in illegal activity.’
The Labour MP claimed he had been ‘cautious’ in his dealings with Miss Lee because he knew she acted for Chinese businesses, and claimed he did not discuss Labour policy with her ‘in great detail’.
But he admitted he had spoken to her only this week.
Asked if he felt foolish, he replied: ‘No, I don’t feel a fool. But I do feel very angry. I feel very angry that somebody tried to use me in that way.’ In 2008 she gave £1,200 to then-Labour MP Andrew Dismore. In 2019, when he was on the London Assembly, she gave him a hamper. When Jeremy Corbyn was Labour leader, Miss Lee appeared alongside him at a Chinese New Year event at the party’s headquarters.
She also mingled with top Tories. In the same year, 2016, she was invited to Downing Street as thenprime minister David Cameron held a reception.
According to an interview Miss Lee once gave, in 2010 she was ‘the only Chinese member in British prime minister David Cameron’s 2010 business delegation to China’. And in 2019 she won a ‘Points of Light’ award for her work with the British Chinese Project from his successor Theresa May.
Mrs May told her at the time: ‘You should feel very proud of the difference the British Chinese Project is making in promoting engagement, understanding, and cooperation between the Chinese and British communities in the UK.’ The award was rescinded last night.
It also emerged that Miss Lee gave £5,000 to the Liberal Democrats in Kingston in 2013, not long before local MP Ed Davey, visited China to discuss nuclear power.
‘Somebody tried to use me’