Bastler, Schneider, Soldat, Prinz – Ist er nur ein verzweifelter Zufall oder eine echte Bedrohung für die britischen Interessen?

Robert Hutton:

*[…] It’s not as if we need to import empty vessels from the other side of the world.*

*On Monday Richard Tice, the Reform MP whose catalogue model looks make him a nailed-on choice to play the lead in any am-dram production of Diamonds Are Forever, had been promising that if the courts didn’t lift the order preventing us from identifying H6, he would use parliamentary privilege to do so.*

*In the end Tice was denied the opportunity as the alleged spy himself asked for the order to be lifted so that he could issue a statement insisting that he was “an independent self-made entrepreneur”. His name was Yang Tengbo, and he seems to pop up everywhere in royal videos.*

*And not just the prince. There he was with Theresa May and David Cameron, although both of them managed to undermine British interests without any help from China.*

*All day we turned over the central question: was this man simply a desperate chancer who sought opportunities to meet famous people in order to cultivate an image of success that would help him to fund a luxury lifestyle, or a genuine threat to British interests? And when we’d finished talking about Prince Andrew, we began discussing Yang.*

*Travelling the world on someone else’s dollar, cosying up to wealthy people with dubious morals, possessed of an obsessive desire to repay ancient insults, he seemed obsessed with being photographed with the powerful. Actually, that’s still Prince Andrew.*

*Where were we? Ah yes. In the House of Commons, Iain Duncan Smith had secured an urgent question on Chinese operations in the UK. It was going to be answered by the Security Minister, Dan Jarvis.*

*Before he could even begin, the Speaker warned the chamber that it would be out of order “to criticise a member of the royal family”. Heaven forfend that MPs should be able to repeat the kind of language heard around every water cooler in the land. […]*