China has soured what was once a promising relationship

Editorial: The state-affiliated cyberattacks on millions of British voters – as well as the hijacking of parliamentarians’ email accounts – deserved to be met with sanctions. We must now be told what else we have to fear from Xi’s China

Golden years: in 2015, China’s Xi Jinping had a pint with David Cameron at a pub near Chequers (Getty)

Speaking, appropriately enough, at the launch of a new generation of nuclear-powered and armed submarines in Barrow, the prime minister warned of the “epoch-defining challenge” from China. With palpable frustration, Rishi Sunak declared that the country is “behaving in an increasingly assertive way abroad” and that it represents “the greatest state-based threat to our economic security”.

He is entirely right about that. The curious case of the Electoral Commission hack in 2021, blamed by the security services on Chinese actors, confirms just how keen these agents are on probing the digital infrastructure of the British state, and, in this instance, harvesting the personal details of 40 million voters.

More targeted has been their fairly blatant hijacking of the email accounts of parliamentarians such as Sir Iain Duncan Smith and crossbench peer David Alton. They then impersonated them in almost comically crude fashion – proving that even a superpower has its limits.