We’ll never know whether Huawei is still listening

This column has been banging on about the peculiar nature of Huawei, the Chinese telecoms giant, ever since its expanded presence in the UK won what I described as ‘grateful applause from David Cameron’ back in 2012. I have deployed everything from serious intelligence sources to laborious knock-knock jokes (‘Huawei who?’ ‘Who are we kidding, prime minister? We don’t need to knock on your front door when we’ve already got a backdoor device in the Downing Street switchboard’) to make my point that the proliferation of Huawei kit in UK telecoms networks represented an obvious but unquantifiable security risk. Which means I can’t disagree with the government’s belated decision to exclude Huawei from the UK roll-out of 5G, though the ban does not extend to 70,000 roadside boxes of switching equipment for domestic lines, so we’ll never really know whether they’re still listening.

The change of policy comes in response to pressure from Washington and from Tory backbenchers, itself fuelled by China’s harsh new security regime in Hong Kong and increasingly jingoistic tone.