It’s Day Two of Guido’s Chagos Files, a trove of hundreds of Foreign Office emails which expose the inner workings of the negotiations over the now torpedoed Chagos deal. It does not make good reading for Starmer or his National Security Adviser Jonathan Powell…
As Guido revealed yesterday, Jonathan Powell was engaged on the Chagos issue by Foreign Office officials at least a month before his formal appointment as the PM’s envoy for BIOT sovereignty negotiations. During this period he was given extensive government information via email to his private email address, and took meetings with officials prior to his involvement being announced…
Now it has emerged that Powell visited China to attend a conference at ‘front organisation’ the Grandview Institution while working on the Chagos file. Powell was in Beijing from 20-22 September 2024, six weeks after his engagement on the Chagos issue began. As The Chagos Files reveal, Powell was working with FCDO officials from at least the 6 August of that year. Powell visited China in his private capacity as the head of consultancy Inter Mediate while simultaneously working as the government’s Chagos envoy…
The propriety of this visit is obviously questionable: Who paid for it? Was it funded by the Chinese government? Was Chagos on the agenda? Did FCDO officials attend and were discussions minuted? In what capacity did he visit China?
As one China expert notes: “The United Front Work Department is the CCP agency tasked with co-opting elites, intellectuals, and foreign figures to advance Beijing’s interests and neutralise opposition… Grandview operates as a direct facilitator for this apparatus… Grandview regularly hosts internal seminars on sensitive topics—such as Xinjiang—bringing together officials from the UFWD, the People’s Armed Police, and state media to coordinate policy and research.”
Why was Powell meeting with a Chinese government front organisation while simultaneously negotiating the sovereignty of Chagos – a matter of direct interest to the Chinese government?
Hat-tip: Chung Ching Kwong
Starmer was read out a list of his 13 U-turns on BBC Radio 2, to which he responded:
“Well, I am a common sense merchant.”