In June, a man who wrote for The Critic admitted taking and distributing indecent photographs of a child. We can find no report of it anywhere until four months later.
His name is Henry Hopwood-Phillips. It came out on 13 October, in the 14th paragraph of a Daily Mail story about Dr Lola Salem, the Oxford lecturer and former partner of Michael Gove, who also wrote for The Critic. She is charged with possessing indecent images of children. She denies it, has pleaded not guilty, and her trial is set for March 2028.
So we dug into who owns The Critic and where his money goes. The Critic loses about £1 million a year, and one man, Jeremy Hosking, covers it. He has also given £8.6 million to political parties and campaigns, most of it to Laurence Fox's Reclaim Party and to Reform UK. His magazine has not said a word about either case.
What he admitted
“In June he admitted two counts of taking an indecent photograph and two counts of distributing indecent photographs of a child at High Wycombe Magistrates’ Court. He was handed a 15-month suspended sentence, a sexual harm prevention order and made subject to lifetime sex offender notification requirements.”
Rebecca Camber and Mark Nicol, Daily Mail, 13 October 2026Read the originalArchived copyStill online
The public court list shows the case. On 16 June 2026, High Wycombe Magistrates' Court listed a case against "PHILLIPS, HENRY", brought by the Crown Prosecution Service in Thames Valley, on four counts: two of taking and two of distributing an indecent photograph of a child.
He wrote seven pieces for The Critic between October 2021 and August 2022, on China, France, Russia and Byzantium. They are still on its site, under a profile that says only that he is "an historian living in London".
We found no report of his conviction in any paper, local or national, between June and 13 October. It became news only as a line in a story about Michael Gove's former partner.
What the Mail changed
The Mail's story went up at 1.16pm on 13 October. When archive.today saved it at 2.14pm, it said Dr Salem had worked at The Critic with him. The page was last updated at 6.38pm, and the same sentence now says something else.
2.14pm, as archived
“Salem was charged by Thames Valley Police in May this year along with Henry Hopwood-Phillips, a historian and geopolitical analyst with whom she worked at The Critic magazine.”
Daily Mail, 13 October 2026Archived copySince edited
Live now, last updated 6.38pm
“Salem was charged by Thames Valley Police in May this year along with Henry Hopwood-Phillips, a historian and geopolitical analyst. They both wrote for the The Critic magazine as freelance contributors.”
Daily Mail, 13 October 2026Read the originalArchived copyStill online
The Mail marks no change on the article. Dr Salem denies the charge she faces and has pleaded not guilty.
"Freelance contributor" is not how The Critic described her. Its own masthead listed Dr Salem as its business development partner from February 2025 to February 2026, and she has written 27 pieces for it since 2022.
On 12 October we showed how the Telegraph and the Mail deleted their first reports of her charge, which she denies, and the Spectator deleted her column. Read that here.
The company they ran together
The Mail first said they worked together at The Critic. Companies House shows they also ran a company together.
Hopwood-Phillips set up Konstantinopolis Ltd on 17 January 2022 as a publishing company, registered at St John's College, Oxford, and gave his job as "journalist". He held three of its four shares. Dr Salem held the fourth, and became a director the same month.
On 2 July 2022 he resigned as a director, and the company's registered office became "PO Box Lola Salem, Lola Salem, Lola Salem, St John's College". On 22 August he was made a director again, this time as an "analyst". By January 2023 they held two shares each.
He resigned for good on 3 October 2023. On 14 November 2023 Dr Salem, by then its only director, applied to strike it off, and it was dissolved on 6 February 2024. It never filed a set of accounts, and we can find no trace of anything it published.
Dr Salem denies the charge she faces and has pleaded not guilty. The Mail reports that she will argue the four images were sent to her unsolicited, and that she reported them to the police.
What The Critic has said
Nothing. Search The Critic's own site for his name and you get his seven articles. Search for hers and you get her pieces. Neither case appears anywhere on it.
The Critic writes a lot about adults who stayed quiet while children were abused. On 18 June, two days after his court date, its online editor, Ben Sixsmith, wrote this about the grooming gangs:
“Meanwhile, the authorities — wallowing in a stew of political correctness, classism and corruption — stood by and ignored or actually enabled it. A “conspiracy of murmuring”, as I have written, meant that British children were grotesquely betrayed. A disproportionate number of the perpetrators have had South Asian — and, especially, Pakistani — heritage.”
Ben Sixsmith, online editor, The Critic, 18 June 2026Read the originalStill online
Notice the different standards. When it is someone else's scandal, The Critic calls silence a betrayal of children. When it is a man who wrote for The Critic, it says nothing.
Who pays for The Critic
Jeremy Hosking owns The Critic. He is the only director and the only shareholder of its publisher, Locomotive 6960 Ltd, and The Critic's own author page calls him its owner.
The Critic does not pay its way. In the year to March 2025 it took in £193,109 and lost £1,076,528. Its accounts say it can meet its bills "due to the continued support of the shareholder". The shareholder is Hosking.
What the accounts show:
- £7.2 million lost since the year The Critic launched, to March 2026.
- £6.4 million paid in by Hosking for new shares since 2020, about £1 million every year.
- £1,480,000 from Hosking in the latest year, to March 2026, the most he has put in.
- Two staff on the company's own books in each of the last two years.
- 10,704 of its 19,654 copies were given away free in November and December 2020, in its audited circulation figures.
What The Critic loses, and what Hosking pays in
Years to March. Locomotive 6960 Ltd accounts, Companies House.
See the figures
| Year to March | Loss for the year | Paid in by Hosking |
|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 690,447 | 0 |
| 2021 | 1,327,305 | 783,577 |
| 2022 | 976,041 | 1,075,000 |
| 2023 | 993,661 | 1,034,585 |
| 2024 | 999,368 | 1,020,000 |
| 2025 | 1,076,528 | 1,020,000 |
| 2026 | 1,144,632 | 1,480,000 |
The Critic does not need readers to survive. It needs Jeremy Hosking.
What his money publishes
Dr Salem has written 27 pieces for The Critic since 2022. Many are about music, opera and the arts. The rest are culture war, and The Critic files them under that name: "Culture Wars" is one of the tags it put on her November 2025 feature.
“Renewing culture for the Right Why should the culture sector still be in thrall to the left?”
Lola Salem, The Critic, 10 November 2025Read the originalStill online
The Critic's tags on the piece are Art, Culture, Culture Wars and Immigration.
“The French disorder France needs more realism about its social decay”
Lola Salem, The Critic, 4 July 2023Read the originalStill online
“Therefore, it wasn’t much of a surprise that the violent death on 27 June of Nahel Merzouk, 17 years old, immediately provoked riots that escalated and spread across the nation.”
Lola Salem, The French disorder, The Critic, 4 July 2023Read the originalStill online
A French police officer shot Nahel Merzouk dead at a traffic stop in Nanterre (Al Jazeera). The two paragraphs The Critic shows readers without a subscription do not say so.
“Gender Gymnastics Endorsing gender ideology as a female politician always comes with a cost”
Lola Salem, The Critic, March 2023Read the originalStill online
A teenager shot by a police officer becomes a "violent death" that provoked riots, and the riots become proof of "social decay". That is the politics The Critic sells, and it loses £1 million a year selling it. Jeremy Hosking covers the loss.
Where else his money goes
Hosking has given £8.6 million to political parties, campaigns and politicians since 2005, in 142 donations on the Electoral Commission's register.
| The Reclaim Party | 4,313,948.77 | Registered in 2019 as Brexit Express BE, renamed Reclaim. Largest gifts £500,000 on 8 and 29 March 2021. |
|---|---|---|
| Reform UK | 1,718,000 | Includes gifts to the Brexit Party before it was renamed. £125,000 in June 2024. |
| Vote Leave | 916,500 | 2016 referendum. £500,000 on 8 May 2016. |
| Conservative Party | 706,600 | |
| Brexit Express | 630,236.27 | His own 2016 referendum campaign. |
| Labour Leave | 150,000 | |
| Liz Truss | 50,000 | In kind, staff costs, April 2023. |
| David Davis | 30,000 | |
| No Campaign Ltd | 25,000 | |
| Simon Clarke | 10,000 | |
| Liberal Democrats | 10,000 | |
| Andrea Jenkyns | 5,000 | |
| Andrew Bridgen | 3,834.27 |
Half of it, £4.3 million, went to the Reclaim Party, Laurence Fox's party, which began as Hosking's own Brexit party. He wrote in The Critic in April 2021:
“I have been the sole funder of both parties, although I would love to be able to invite others to contribute.”
Jeremy Hosking, The Critic, April 2021Read the originalStill online
Another £1.7 million went to the Brexit Party and Reform UK, the latest £125,000 in June 2024, and £916,500 to Vote Leave.
He is in business with Laurence Fox too. Hosking controls Reclaim The Media Ltd, which runs the Democracy 3.0 campaign site, and Fox has been one of its directors since March 2025.
He also owns part of Crystal Palace. According to the club's November 2025 filing, he holds 57,556 shares in Palace Holdco UK, its top UK holding company, about 2.7 per cent. He sat on the board of one of its holding companies from 2015 to 2021.
What we are asking for
By 21 October 2026:
- The Critic tells its readers that Henry Hopwood-Phillips, who wrote for it, admitted taking and distributing indecent photographs of a child, as plainly as it writes about every other case of child abuse it covers.
- The Daily Mail marks the change it made to its 13 October report and prints the line it removed.
The Critic will tell you the heritage of the men in the grooming gangs. It has not written one word about a man from its own pages.
How we did this
Sources
Daily Mail, Rebecca Camber and Mark Nicol, 13 October 2026: archive.today capture at 2.14pm on 13 October, Wayback Machine capture at 4.14pm on 14 October, live page read at 3.10pm and captured at 4.20pm on 14 October. HMCTS court list, High Wycombe Magistrates' Court, 16 June 2026, via opencourtdata.uk. The Critic: author pages, site search, the pieces quoted by Lola Salem, Ben Sixsmith's column of 18 June 2026 and Jeremy Hosking's of April 2021, read 14 October 2026. Companies House: Konstantinopolis Ltd (13853093), officers, filing history and application to register; Locomotive 6960 Ltd (07995278), accounts for the years to March 2020 to 2026 and confirmation statements; Reclaim The Media Ltd (13562398); Palace Holdco UK Ltd (09898364), confirmation statement of 12 November 2025. ABC certificate for The Critic, November to December 2020. Electoral Commission register of donations. Al Jazeera, 29 June 2024. All times are UK time.