House speaker tells Commons that ‘MPs who needed to be told were told’ at time of aide’s arrest in March
MPs vented their fury on Monday over a six-month silence that followed an aide operating at the heart of parliament being arrested on suspicion of allegedly spying for China and accused of passing information to Beijing in breach of the Official Secrets Act.
Responding directly to Blackman, Lindsay Hoyle, the Commons speaker, said “the MPs who needed to be told were told” at the time of the arrest, which had quietly taken place in March. Police sources also confirmed to the Guardian that there had been no public report of the arrests at the time they were made.
Parliament’s security team is understood to have been “actively involved from the beginning” in the investigation, according to a senior parliamentary source. They told the Guardian that the authorities worked with the security services to identify the parliamentary researcher who was arrested.
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