If there’s one person who knows a thing or two about stories involving Chinese spies, it’s “Beijing Barry”. Appearing on Politics Live this afternoon, the Labour MP slammed the security services for allowing the spy on the premises:

“What is going on with our security services? First of all, that these people are able to get in there in the first place… this was somebody that had a parliamentary pass, who was actually working, known to be working, on an area of sensitivity about China! […] Why is it that the security services arrested somebody in March, and now in September we are finding out about it? … on the day the story broke about Christine Lee, I went straight onto the media, I spoke about it, I answered questions from the public about it!”

In Barry’s defence, this is true: he was all over the media the day the Christine Lee story broke. Although Gardiner did also claim Lee’s son – who worked as his researcher – “wasn’t aware” of his mother’s alleged “illegal activity“. Just as well, because he had access to the parliamentary estate mere hours before the news went public…