Juliet Samuels: Mega mistake to allow new Chinese embassy in UK

Juliet Samuels/Times: What seems likely is that the new embassy will allow the Chinese Communist Party to scale up its espionage and interference operations across Europe. As The Sunday Times revealed, China’s list of authorised diplomats, already among the longest in the UK, has grown 50 per cent since 2010, including a whole roster of education, policy and cultural officials no doubt helping to surveil and schmooze scientists, students, business contacts, activists and spies. And MI5 and others have explained repeatedly how Chinese intelligence banks upon its superior scale to extract the maximum commercial, military and diplomatic advantage from these operations…