Late yesterday I speculated that Sarah Helm who is married to the UK’s National Security Advisor would not be prosecuted for allegedly expressing support for the banned ‘Palestine Action’ group. It turns out I was correct. The Metropolitan Police have issued a statement saying that, as I expected, that Ms Helm’s words and actions did not meet ‘the criminal threshold.’
The Guardian said
“No further action will be taken against Sarah Helm, the wife of the prime minister’s national security adviser, after she was accused of supporting the banned protest group Palestine Action.
Helm, a journalist and author who is married to Jonathan Powell, posted on X on Thursday: “God help us authors who support Palestine and Palestine Action.”
The Metropolitan police said on Friday the post was “in the process of being assessed to determine whether any further police investigation may be required”.
In an update on Saturday, a force spokesperson said: “On Thursday 15 October, we were made aware of a post on X relating to Palestine Action.
“The post was assessed by specialist officers and it was determined that it did not meet the criminal threshold. No further police action will be taken.” “
Compare this treatment of someone extremely close to the centre of government like Ms Helm and someone like Lucy Connolly, an ordinary person who in the wake of the Southport Atrocity made a quickly removed injudicious statement expressing her anger about it on the X platform. Ms Connolly got 31 months in gaol for that.
There’s further two tier justice news coming from the north of England and it regards a non-Jewish woman who got a knock on the door one day and when she opened it found two officers from Durham Constabulary on her doorstep asking questions about her support for Israel.
The Daily Telegraph said:
“When Holly Passmore heard a knock at her front door at about 11am on July 4 last year, she assumed it was an Amazon delivery.
Instead, the 44-year-old mother-of-two from County Durham found two plain-clothes police officers on her doorstep wanting to know why she had recently visited Israel.
“They said it was a safeguarding matter,” recalled Ms Passmore, who cares for her nine-year-old son, Rex, who has severe autism, while studying for a master’s degree.
She assumed they were concerned she had taken her son into a war zone.
“I said, ‘Well, my son didn’t go to Israel. He stayed here with my mum and my daughter, who’s 20’,” she recalled. But the female officer replied: “No this is about you – because you may be at risk of manipulation.”
The officers from Durham Constabulary were investigating an anonymous referral to Prevent, the Government’s counter-extremism programme. “
Ms Passmore, who has amassed a large following on the X platform under the handle ‘Mummy Is Tired’ has had no further action taken against her by Durham Constabulary. However she submitted a Subject Access Request to the police, which she can do under data protection laws, for information about her and found that it was indeed her support for Jews and for the State of Israel that brought the police to her door. Someone, it’s not made clear who, but I reckon that we can all make a reasonably accurate guess at what sort of person or organisation might do such a thing, had made a Prevent referral about her and her support for Israel.
The Telegraph added:
“Ms Passmore suspected her support for Israel had prompted the referral. It was only months later, when she obtained police records through a subject access request, that her suspicions were confirmed.
A police intelligence report seen by The Telegraph reveals that the referral said she “over-identified with the conflict between Israel and Palestine” and was “supportive of Israel to the point that she has travelled to Israel”.
It also described her as having “MH” – meaning mental health – issues and being “vulnerable to negative influence”. “
It appears that someone has engaged in terminological inexactitude with regards what they’ve said about Ms Passmore, who is engaged in a Masters Degree in Holocaust Studies at Haifa University in Israel. The over-egged complaint about Ms Passmore has clearly, at least from what I’ve seen it tried to tag Ms Passmore as some sort of fraggle (catastrophically mentally ill person) because of her support for Jews and Israel. Someone with knowledge of what words and subjects would push Prevent’s buttons, such as ‘vulnerability’ or ‘mental health’ or ‘going overseas’, put this complaint in. At this time we do not know who and probably never will but it’s pretty clear why this was done. It was done to get the organs of the state to harass Ms Passmore. For the record, those of us who have read her stuff online and who have interacted with her can clearly see that this is not a ‘vulnerable person’ and it is a category that Ms Passmore herself denies being in.
What’s even more concerning about this case is how counter terror gave Ms Passmore the ‘all clear’ on the grounds that visiting a democracy such as Israel is not a crime or anything to be concerned about but Durham Police allegedly visited Ms Passmore after this judgment had been made. Were Durham Police properly aware of this decision prior to their visit or did they know that Ms Passmore wasn’t a problem but went out to intimidate her anyway for their own local reasons? I can’t be sure but I would not be at all surprised if there’s more to this decision to visit Ms Passmore than just misplaced Prevent paperwork.
To be fair to Durham police they did at least send a Superintendent around to her house to say that the police had got things wrong. However Ms Passmore also alleges that the Superintendent tried to persuade her from not speaking about what had happened to her regarding the incident with the police visit. Thankfully neither Ms Passmore nor those who have helped to publicise this case such as writer David Collier and Reform councillor Darren Grimes have taken any notice of the Superintendent and we can all see the massive, possibly malicious from somewhere, cock up that Durham Police have made.
The story gets even more murky with Ms Passmore’s allegations about what has been done to her medical records. She said that eight days after she returned back to Britain from Israel her medical records had been changed to class her as ‘vulnerable’. This classification was later removed. Ms Passmore discovered the medical record entry by chance and is concerned that this is linked to the now very much debunked Prevent report? I’d say that this is quite likely to be the case.
These two cases do at least show us all where Prevent and the police’s priorities lie. Someone who shows support for a group that has a long record for violent extremism, vandalism and non-defensive violence, gets off because of connections to the Government, or so it appears. Someone else who visited Israel and showed support for that country and for the world’s Jews, gets a knock on the door and her medical records changed. How very Soviet it all seems. The Nomenklatura get off whilst the little man gets shipped off to the Gulag. How very two tier.
Links
Guardian story
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/oct/17/sarah-helm-jonathan-powell-palestine-action
Telegraph story
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