Chinese spy has been working with MP in UK parliament to ‘subvert processes’, M15 warns

“I should highlight the fact that Lee has facilitated financial donations to serving and aspiring Parliamentarians on behalf of foreign nationals based in Hong Kong and China.

“This facilitation was done covertly to mask the origins of the payments. This is clearly unacceptable behaviour and steps are being taken to ensure it ceases.”

Since 2005, Lee has donated £675,586.88 to various MPs and the Labour Party. One of these payments, a substantial £182,284, pays the wages of Gardiner’s staffers, including her son, the Labour MP’s former diary manager.

According to the register of members’ interests, Gardiner received nearly £62,000 over 2019 and 2020.

MI5 believe Lee’s intention was to “cultivate individuals with the goal of promoting the CCP’s [Chinese Communist Party] agenda and challenging those that do not agree with its principles”.

Former leader of the Conservatives, Iain Duncan Smith, said the warning today was “not good enough”.

He said: “How can it be that an agent of a foreign despotic and despicable power that is hellbent on reducing many of those people into penury it seems, how can they put somebody into Parliament – this mother of Parliaments – and then that individual have nothing done to them other than they’re not allowed in Parliament?”