The Cabinet Office has rejected Dominic Cummings’s claim that China breached high-level systems used to transfer the most sensitive government information.
The former adviser to Boris Johnson had said that he and the then-prime minister were told about a breach in 2020 and that it involved so-called Strap material, a government classification for highly sensitive intelligence material.
He told The Times: “The Strap system was compromised. All sorts of systems were compromised. Fundamental infrastructure for transferring the most sensitive data around the British state was compromised for a long time. For years.”
The Cabinet Office rejected this as “untrue”.
“It is untrue to claim that the systems we use to transfer the most sensitive government information have been compromised,” a spokesperson said.
Mr Cummings did not say how the system had been breached but that he would be willing to share what he knew with MPs if they were to hold an inquiry.
He said that “vast amounts” of data classified as “extremely secret and extremely dangerous for any foreign entity to control” had been compromised.
“Material from intelligence services. Material from the National Security Secretariat in the Cabinet Office. Things the government has to keep secret. If they’re not secret, then there are very, very serious implications for it,” he said.
It comes as Sir Keir Starmer promised to publish key evidence that forms part of the collapsed China spying case.
The Crown Prosecution Service said the case collapsed because the Government’s evidence did not show that China represented a threat to national security at the time of the alleged offences.
But Sir Keir insisted the “substantive” evidence was submitted under the Conservatives and supplementary statements handed to the CPS subsequently reflected the Tory administration’s position.
Mr Cummings called it “absolutely puerile nonsense” to suggest that whether to define China as a threat is a “difficult semantic question”.
“Anyone who has been read in at a high level with the intelligence services on China knows that the word threat doesn’t even begin to cover it,” he said.
