Jonathan Powell’s wife backed Starmer being tried at the Hague

Sarah Helm, the wife of Britain’s national security adviser Jonathan Powell, has had a busy 24 hours. The Spectator revealed yesterday that she had (among other things) defended Hamas, questioned the UN investigation into mass rape by the terror group, blamed the 7/10 attacks on the creation of Israel in 1948 and compared Israel to the Nazis. Since then, Helm has been frantically doubling down. She has reposted a tweet saying that ‘Zionism [is] racism,’ the thing that got Zack Polanski’s Greens into such trouble, and that ‘almost the entire British political and media classes are RACIST.’

If you’re wondering whether she counts her own husband in that, she reposted another tweet attacking the ‘Zionist Labour government under Andy Burnham.’ So I’d guess that’s a yes. One of her other reposts links to a legal argument claiming that Israel has no right to exist, brought as part of a case trying to get Hamas unbanned in the UK. From further back, there are more extraordinary posts or reposts which we didn’t have space to cover yesterday – such as this one from last August, when she reposted a demand for her husband’s then boss, Keir Starmer, and Foreign Secretary David Lammy, to be put on trial at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

And this one from November 2019, years before the latest outbreak of violence, when Helm blamed anti-Semitism on ‘Israeli policies.’ Perhaps even more problematically, Helm was yesterday directly tweeting about her husband’s work in government, denying that he had any hand in the government’s decision to ban Palestine Action as a terror group and saying that he had not blocked sanctions against Israeli settlements. People in sensitive government jobs have to undergo developed vetting, where their close family and friends are scrutinised both for security risks and sometimes to give a picture of their judgment.

There aren’t many more sensitive government jobs than No. 10 national security adviser. I can’t imagine the deep state will be entirely happy with Powell’s wife publicly answering questions from random people on Twitter about his decisions at work.