The first doors were kicked in just after 6am on Wednesday, with police executing search warrants on the bewildered residents of six residential addresses, three of them in Wales and one in East Kilbride.
As detectives swarmed the properties, bagging up mobile phones and laptops, three men were arrested. All of them work as political lobbyists. One also happens to be the husband of a backbench Labour MP.
They are being investigated over spying allegations. Or, as the official police statement put it, allegedly ‘assisting a foreign intelligence service contrary to section 3 of the National Security Act, 2023’.
And the intelligence service in question? ‘The country to which the investigation relates is China.’ All of which has, quite naturally, sparked a major kerfuffle.
Joani Reid, the backbench MP whose 39-year-old husband, David Taylor, is at the centre of the whole thing, said on Thursday that she would ‘voluntarily’ give up the Labour whip, saying ‘this has been the worst week of my life… I have done nothing wrong’.
Dan Jarvis, the security minister, meanwhile revealed that he’d already approached his counterparts in Beijing about the whole thing, telling the Commons: ‘We remain deeply concerned by an increasing pattern of covert activity from Chinese state-linked actors targeting UK democracy.’
Yet the fallout from recent days will be more than just diplomatic. Beneath the surface of the latest Chinese intrigue to hit Westminster will lie concerns as to how far it reaches.
What follows might seem a story of byzantine complexity with a cast of characters – and their companies – to match.
Three men, all of whom work as political lobbyists, have been arrested over spying allegations, including David Taylor (left), the 39-year-old husband of backbench Labour MP Joani Reid (right)
The second is Matthew Aplin (pictured), 43, who worked as a senior communications officer for Labour in the Welsh Assembly from 2010 to 2012, before pursuing a career in public affairs
At the time, the party was led by Carwyn Jones, whose head of communications until 2014 was Steve Jones (pictured) – the final member of the trio arrested on Wednesday
But when it comes to close connections and interwoven relationships, there is little to match the Labour Party. Or more specifically the Welsh Labour Party, which has run the country’s Senedd, or parliament, for almost 30 years.
Though hugely powerful with an annual budget of £27billion at its government’s disposal, Welsh Labour operates in a small and at times incestuous world.
And all three of the political fixers who were arrested this week have for years been prominent members of the party machine.
Taylor, who has two children with Reid, was brought up near Wrexham, joined the party as a teenager and worked as special adviser to Peter Hain when the New Labour grandee was Welsh Secretary during Gordon Brown’s administration.
He then stood unsuccessfully for election as the party’s Police and Crime Commissioner in North Wales in 2016.
Matthew Aplin, 43, who was arrested at his terrace home in Pontyclun, worked as a senior communications officer for Labour in the Welsh Assembly from 2010 to 2012, before pursuing a career in public affairs.
At the time, the party was led by Carwyn Jones, whose head of communications until 2014 was Steve Jones. He’s the final member of the trio arrested on Wednesday.
Adding to the intrigue is the fact that all three of the arrested men – each of whom, it must be stressed, is understood to protest his innocence – happen to boast close connections to a wind farm company named Bute Energy, for which they have worked as lobbyists.
While there is no suggestion of wrongdoing by Bute, or indeed that it boasts improper links to China, the company has built extraordinarily intimate ties to Labour, and in particular Welsh Labour, in recent years.
Specifically, it has made donations and offered hospitality to a string of MPs and Senedd members.
The spouse of a Labour cabinet member was given a job on its advisory board. And a non-executive director of its parent company, Windward Energy, is none other than Tom Watson, Labour’s former deputy leader nominated for a peerage by Sir Keir Starmer in 2022.
How Bute might, or might not, fit into the whole saga is unclear.
But one of the homes raided by police this week happens to belong to a man named James Robinson.
He is a former Guardian journalist who became a top aide to Watson, running the media strategy for his successful deputy leadership election in 2018.
Robinson, who has not been arrested, is in turn married to Gloria de Piero, the former Labour MP and broadcaster.
There are, in other words, wheels within wheels. And almost all of them seem to turn, in one way or another, around senior figures in the Welsh Labour Party.
Police said they are being investigated for allegedly ‘assisting a foreign intelligence service contrary to section 3 of the National Security Act, 2023’. Pictured: Police at an address in Wales on Wednesday
So how might they all fit together? And what do we really know about the men, and women, at the heart of recent events?
Welsh Labour’s links to China go back to 2011 and the administration of Carwyn Jones.
In October that year, he travelled to Beijing to sign a ‘memorandum of understanding’ with the Communist administration in the hope of both promoting Welsh business and persuading China to send more students to universities in the principality.
High-profile diplomatic gestures followed and Wales opened up an ‘international office’, a sort of poor-man’s embassy, in Beijing, Shanghai and Chongqing.
The Labour administration was building close ties to China. And at the heart of that was Steve Jones, who worked as its leader’s head of communications.
Steve Jones, who is 68 and lives in Powys, knows almost everyone there is to know in Welsh Labour.
A former Labour councillor, he cut his political teeth as special adviser to Hilary Armstrong, now Baroness Armstrong, when she was chief whip under Blair from 2001-6.
After working for Carwyn Jones from 2009 to 2014, he moved into lobbying, eventually working for a Cardiff-based firm called Camlas.
Also on the books of Camlas was Matthew Aplin, a 43-year-old father of three who was also arrested on Wednesday.
Aplin, who grew up in Cowbridge, is a former journalist who worked for the Western Mail newspaper in his early 20s before taking a job as senior communications officer for Labour in the Welsh Assembly during the era when Carwyn Jones was building links with Beijing.
After leaving that role in 2012, he worked for Ofgem and the Public Services Ombudsman for Wales before setting up lobbying company Aplin Associates in 2021.
Aplin Associates is registered to an address in Lambeth, just over the Thames from Parliament.
Intriguingly, the property is also the registered address of Moblake Associates, one of several lobbying firms that was established in recent years by David Taylor, the MP’s husband who is the third man arrested this week.
Taylor, a bespectacled 39-year-old who bears a passing resemblance to Harry Potter, is a lifelong Welsh Labour activist who first came to public attention in 2004, aged just 17, for setting up a website attacking Clare Short for rubbishing Tony Blair.
He subsequently developed a reputation as Welsh Labour’s leading computer wonk.
Around 15 years ago he was head-hunted to join Peter Hain’s team as a special adviser.
All three of the political fixers who were arrested this week have for years been prominent members of the party machine. Pictured: David Taylor, Ms Reid’s husband
Adding to the intrigue is the fact that all three of the arrested men – each of whom, it must be stressed, is understood to protest his innocence – happen to boast close connections to a wind farm company named Bute Energy, for which they have worked as lobbyists. Pictured: Police at an address in Wales on Wednesday
The York University graduate then left Welsh Labour in 2012, to do a postgraduate course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, before briefly working for a cyber security company.
After returning to politics in 2016, to stand for the £75,000-a-year crime commissioner’s job, he went into lobbying full time, and appears to have swiftly begun making significant amounts of money.
His lobbying firm, Moblake Associates, was set up in 2018. It remained dormant until 2020.
But by the time it had wound up in March 2022, its accounts say it had managed to loan some £600,000 to Taylor.
A second public affairs company, Earthcott Limited, was incorporated in 2021.
In the 2023/4 last financial year, its bank balance grew from £41,000 to an astonishing £926,000.
By this point, Taylor’s businesses had become enmeshed with his wife Joani Reid, granddaughter of Scottish trade unionist Jimmy Reid.
The couple had homes in London and in Reid’s constituency, plus a rental property in Catford.
He also joined the Oriental Club, a private member’s establishment in Mayfair.
‘In 15 years, he went from being a Welsh socialist who was quite good at computer stuff to a high-flying political fixer who lived in nice houses and entertained people at his club,’ is how one acquaintance puts it.
In 2023 Earthcott made a £22,030 ‘interest-free loan’ to his wife’s firm Reid Strategy Ltd. Moblake had, for its part, loaned Reid Strategy £4,775.
Joani’s company, which was also registered to the Lambeth address belonging to Taylor and Aplin’s firm, saw its funds rise from £1,351 in 2022 to £311,836 in 2023, though she insisted this week: ‘I am not part of my husband’s business activities.’
As to where exactly the money came from, Earthcott’s website does not name any clients.
However Taylor’s roles included working as adviser to the Central Asia all-party parliamentary group and as ‘head of programmes’ for ‘Asia House’, a think-tank focusing on the Far East.
He also appears to have started taking business trips to Asia, including a 2023 visit to Hong Kong on which he was accompanied by an old friend named Martin Shipton, a veteran political journalist who has covered Welsh politics for several decades.
Shipton, who now writes for Nation.Cymru, a Left-leaning news website part-funded via a grant from the Welsh government, was rudely awoken on Wednesday when the police battered down the door of his home in Cardiff.
Prosecuting such cases is famously hard. Last year saw two political aides, Christopher Cash (right) and Christopher Berry (left), accused of stealing secrets from Parliament and selling them to senior officials in the Chinese Communist Party. But the case collapsed in September
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He was not arrested and is not suspected of any wrongdoing. However he was extensively grilled by detectives about the Hong Kong visit, which he described as a ‘jolly’ organised by a think-tank from Shanghai.
The whole thing was overseen by an employee of the host named ‘Michael’, Shipton told the Mail.
‘It was presented to me that a think-tank was involved in briefing President Xi on international relations and basically they wanted to have chats with us about perceptions of China in Britain. It was as general as that.
‘I remember thinking Michael was an oddball. It was like an Evelyn Waugh novel.
‘He was this introverted Communist apparatchik type who seemed interested in Britain generally and the possibility of improving trade.
‘He was not some mastermind trying to get secrets out of us.’
Shipton, who describes this week’s events as ‘perplexing’, says David Taylor returned to China in 2024.
That trip, he says, once more ‘involved meeting people in the political, academic sphere to talk about international relations’.
Quite how such activity might end up getting one prosecuted for espionage is, it should be stressed, at this stage anyone’s guess.
To be found guilty of ‘assisting a foreign intelligence service’, which can carry a jail sentence of 14 years, a defendant must have intentionally passed information to someone they know to be a spy.
Prosecuting such cases is famously hard. Last year saw two political aides, Christopher Cash and Christopher Berry, accused of stealing secrets from Parliament and selling them to senior officials in the Chinese Communist Party.
Both denied the charges, but the prosecution collapsed in September when the Starmer administration refused to officially designate China as a threat to national security.
Then there is Bute Energy which, while it has no connection to the current investigations, has managed to build intimate links with senior figures in the Labour Party.
Recent years have seen Bute take Baroness Kennedy, a Blair-era fixer, to the British Kebab Awards, Clwyd South MS Ken Skates to a rugby match between Wales and South Africa, Alyn and Deeside MS Jack Sargeant to Wales versus New Zealand rugby match and Newport East MS John Griffiths to the Welsh Women’s FA Cup final.
John Uden, the husband of Labour MS Jenny Rathbone, accepted a position on Bute Energy’s advisory board in March 2021. Also on that body was Derek Vaughan, former Welsh Labour MEP from 2009 to 2019.
Then there are the three lobbyists who were this week arrested.
Steve Jones and Matthew Aplin appear to have worked for Bute via Camlas, which lists the firm as a client.
Taylor’s relationship is more direct. In 2020, Companies House disclosures stated that he owned 211 shares in its parent company, Windward, in his own name, and another 211 via Moblake.
Tom Watson’s connection to the firm is more recent: He was appointed a director of Windward Energy in 2024. Its last accounts list assets of some £177million.
Where this tangled web may lead is, of course, anyone’s guess. And Bute Energy appear to be as mystified by this week’s developments as anyone else.
When the Daily Mail approached the firm for comment, it said in a statement: ‘In light of ongoing police investigations, Bute Energy is unable to make any comment at this stage.’
The statement was, as it happens, emailed from an account administered by Bute Energy’s London-based lobbyists, Woburn Partners.
Woburn Partners turns out to have been founded by former Watson aide James Robinson, whose home was one of the six addresses searched at dawn on Wednesday.
Small world, isn’t it?
