The Guardian-Yvette Cooper admits complex relations with China amid Prince Andrew spy claims

Prince Andrew

The UK home secretary, Yvette Cooper, has admitted the government has a “complex arrangement” with China because of the need for economic co-operation, against the backdrop of the exclusion of an alleged Chinese spy with links to Prince Andrew.

The man – who was banned from Britain by the government on national security grounds – was invited to Andrew’s birthday party and visited Buckingham Palace twice as well as St James’s Palace and Windsor Castle at the invitation of Andrew, according to the Times.

It was reported by the Sunday Times that the man also met David Cameron and Theresa May and kept pictures of his meetings with the two prime ministers on the desk in his office. Both said they did not recall meeting him.

Cooper was asked on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme what her message was to China. “Well, we will continue to take a very strong approach to our national security, that includes to any challenge to our national security including to our economic security from China, from other countries around the world, that will always be the approach that we will take.

“Of course, with China we also need to make sure we have that economic interaction, economic co-operation in place as well. So it’s a complex arrangement.”

The former Conservative leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith has said he will raise an urgent question about the man in the Commons on Monday, raising the possibility he could be named under parliamentary privilege.

On Friday, the Duke of York said he had “ceased all contact” with the businessman when concerns were first raised about him. A statement from his office said Andrew met the individual through “official channels”, with “nothing of a sensitive nature ever discussed”.

The businessman, referred to as H6, brought his case to the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (Siac), which upheld a ruling that he should be excluded from the UK.

The shadow home secretary, Chris Philp, said proven instances of Chinese interference needed to be publicly exposed in order to keep the public and government vigilant.

“This question of Chinese influence is not a new one. It’s been around for years, or even decades,” he told the BBC. “They’ve been systematically trying to infiltrate universities, to steal intellectual property businesses for the same reason, and also influence government institutions. We need to be super-vigilant and publicly expose Chinese infiltration where it happens. Everybody in academia, in business, in government needs to be alert. If anyone has the slightest concern, they should contact the security services immediately.”

In the letter from the home secretary excluding the businessman in July last year, it said: “We have reason to believe you are engaging, or have previously engaged, in covert and deceptive activity on behalf of the United Front Work Department (UFWD) which is an arm of the Chinese Communist party (CCP) state apparatus.”

The alleged spy was initially stopped at an airport in November 2021 where his phone was seized. Communication on the phone, which is set out in the hand down from the Special Immigration Appeals Tribunal, suggests there was high-level contact between the businessman and the prince.

In a message from the duke’s adviser, Dominic Hampshire, it said that “outside of his closest internal confidants, you sit at the very top of a tree that many, many people would like to be on”.

It also contained a message from the duke’s adviser to the businessman, which said that since their first meeting “we have wisely navigated our way around former private secretaries and we have found a way to carefully remove those people who we don’t completely trust … we found away to get the relevant people unnoticed in and out of the house in Windsor.”