LATIKA M BOURKE: Prince Andrew, be grateful for him this Christmas. I didn’t think I would say that this year

Just when you thought Prince Andrew had reached rock bottom, along came another royal scandal so bad that the already-exiled Royal is banished from the family walk to church at Sandringham on Christmas Day.

But the King’s brother has unwittingly done Britain a favour and handed the nation a giant gift this festive season, even if it is the result of his shocking judgment of which he is his own casualty once more.

In the past few weeks, Britain’s press has talked about little else other than the legal case involving a then-unknown Chinese businessman who was later unmasked as Yang Tengbo.

This is because Yang cultivated and infiltrated the country’s most treasured symbol – the monarchy, through its habitually poorly behaving Prince Andrew.

Elizabeth II’s second son was already all but banished from the public’s eye over his association with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislane Maxwell, who is jailed in the United States for her role in sex trafficking girls for Epstein, who was found dead in his jail cell.

In 2019, the Duke of York was forced to step aside from publicly attending events on behalf of the royal family, after his infamous interview with the BBC’s then-Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis, in which he claimed his daughter’s party at Pizza Express Woking and an inability to sweat, as alibis after being accused by Virginia Giuffre of sexually assaulting her in London in 2001.

Prince Andrew denies the allegations but settled a private lawsuit with Ms Guiffre. But if making that story go away via a settlement was the hope, it failed.

In 2022, while his mother was still alive, it was confirmed that he would never return to public life and since his brother Charles’ ascension to the throne, the banishment has only strengthened.

So it seemed things couldn’t get worse for the reviled, irrelevant Prince.

Until the case of H6 — 50-year-old Yang Tengbo.

Yang first travelled to the UK in 2002 to study before returning to China where he became a civil servant.

In 2005, he formed a UK company and began dividing his time between his new home and China, obtaining the permanent right to live in Britain in 2013. Over time his business interests expanded and so too did his stature in and access to British society.

He became so close to Prince Andrew that he was twice invited to Buckingham Palace and in 2020 was invited to celebrate the Duke’s 60th birthday.

This particular party invitation was a sign of how important he was to the Duke, according to Prince Andrew’s adviser Dominic Hampshire who told Yang in a letter dated March 2020: “I also hope that it is clear to you where you sit with my principal and indeed his family.”

Hampshire went on to assure Yang of his apex status: “You should never underestimate the strength of the relationship … outside of his closest internal confidants, you sit at the very top of a tree that many, many people would like to be on.”

But the gushing turned sinister when Hampshire told Yang that he and the Duke had found a way around former private secretaries and “under your guidance, we found a way to get the relevant people unnoticed in and out of the house in Windsor.”

MI5’s Director-General determined that Yang was in a position to generate relationships between Britain’s movers and shakers and Chinese officials that could be leveraged by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for political interference purposes.

Further, he stated that Yang’s relationship with the Prince had a “covert and clandestine” element to it that Yang had not properly accounted for.

In 2021, authorities swooped, stopping Yang, seizing his devices and downloading their data.

The alleged spy then began legal challenges that would eventually lead to his own public unmasking as well as his relationship with Prince Andrew that catapulted what might otherwise have slid under the radar to the front pages of the British press and triggered a major debate exhibiting what Chinese interference looks like.

Because, according to the court documents, by May 2022, the UK authorities told Yang they believed he was associated with the United Front Work Department.

“We have reason to believe you are engaging, or have previously engaged, in covert and deceptive activity on behalf of the United Front Work Department which is an arm of the CCP,” Yang was told.

A year later he was taken off his flight from Beijing to London and told the British were considering blocking him from ever stepping foot back on UK soil, an act formalised in March 2023 when then Home Secretary Suella Braverman ordered that his right to remain in the UK was void on national security grounds.

It is the most sensational exposé of CCP interference yet –

Prince Andrew sought a financial bonanza in China while Yang in return sought access and influence which he obtained over nearly two decades by quietly building relationships with Britain’s elite.

M15 described the act of “mounting patient, well-funded, deceptive campaigns to buy and exert influence” as a textbook CCP tactic.

This was backed up by academics, Australian Alex Joske and the UK’s former Ambassador to China Charles Parton, both of whom were referred to in this case to back the decision to block Yang from the UK.

Charles Parton has been banging on about the threat CCP tactics pose to anyone who would listen for many years now. But the trouble was, not enough in the UK were interested in listening.

Australians will have read about this case with a sense of familiarity as it mirrors the examples of Chinese interference that kicked off our domestic debate more than a decade ago and the public is subsequently very China-literate when it comes to understanding the challenges posed by the CCP’s behaviour.

But the UK’s public debate on China is still far from mature by comparison. The former Tory government began with wanting a “Golden Era” of relations with China, was forced into tougher positions by the first Trump Administration as well as the pandemic and Beijing’s takeover of Hong Kong and now in opposition says the CCP should be formally designated a “threat.”

But the new Labour government, despite decrying the royal spying scandal in an exclusive interview with The Nightly as a “tragedy” has signalled an all-in approach in seeking more Chinese trade and investment in a bid to resurrect its listless economy.

But thanks to Yang Tengbo’s alleged infiltration of the royal family, the issue has become mainstream in a way that could threaten Labour’s attempts to move closer to China while pretending to the public that it’s as tough as the Tories eventually became on the bilateral relationship.

At the recent AUKMIN press conference involving Australia and the UK’s defence and foreign ministers the UK press corp was notably filled with some extra faces – royal reporters whose job it is not to cover defence and national security but the monarchy.

Every mainstream news podcast and newspaper has delved into the story with gusto and depth and there has been a wider public discussion in Britain about issues of “elite capture,” and foreign interference when it comes to China than previously witnessed.

So for once, it’s just possible that there is a reason to be grateful for Prince Andrew’s seeming pursuit of ticking every sort of scandal box possible.

Because in conducting a “covert and clandestine” relationship Yang Tengbo and the Duke of York have aided the intelligence agencies in alerting the British public to the threat of Chinese interference in a way no bureaucrat ever could and paved the way for a deeper public grasp of the issue when it’s no longer a royal involved.