Mike Meakin

Britain's Man In Jerusalem Has A Problem At Home Jonathan Powell has spent this month trying to keep Britain's consulate in Jerusalem open. Israel closed it in retaliation after Ed Miliband banned imports from illegal West Bank settlements, and relations between the two countries now sit at their lowest point in decades. Powell, as national security adviser, has become Britain's chief interlocutor in trying to repair that relationship. His wife, meanwhile, has spent this week being investigated by the Metropolitan Police. Sarah Helm wrote on X that she stood with "authors who support Palestine and Palestine Action," a group proscribed as a terrorist organisation since 2025, after protesters allegedly caused £7 million of damage at RAF Brize Norton. More than 3,000 people have been arrested for expressing support for it. Her post has prompted a formal assessment by Scotland Yard. Helm's views on Israel did not begin this week. She has called Gaza a "strange surreal prison" where Palestinians were "imprisoned without charge." She has asked why occupied Palestinians lack the right to resist their occupier when Ukrainians are celebrated for resisting Russia. In 2024 she called for an international force to "drive out Israel's genocidal army" from Gaza. None of this is new information. All of it predates her husband's appointment as the man now representing Britain's interests in Jerusalem. That timeline matters more than her tweet does. Nobody needs to question Helm's right to hold these views, deeply held and publicly stated over years, to ask a separate question: whether anyone in government considered what it meant to place her husband at the centre of Britain's most delicate Israel negotiations in a generation, with his own household this openly aligned against Israel's position on the war. Diplomacy runs on perceived neutrality as much as substance. Israel does not need evidence that Helm's views shaped British policy to conclude that the man negotiating with them sits considerably closer to the other side of the argument than comfort allows. This is the same gap that has defined Powell's tenure from the start. He ran a secret backchannel to a proscribed terrorist group in Syria before his appointment, undisclosed until journalists found it. He held meetings with PLA-linked Chinese officials through his private charity, undisclosed until Parliament tried and failed to ask about them. His developed vetting status has never been confirmed, despite his predecessor's failed vetting triggering the defining scandal of this government. Each time, the pattern is identical. Something relevant to his judgement or his position existed, and nobody weighed it before he was trusted with the brief it touched. Campaign Against Antisemitism has called on Powell to denounce his wife's rhetoric publicly if he wishes to continue in post. That may be the wrong remedy for the wrong problem. Helm is entitled to her opinions regardless of who she married, and demanding a public renunciation from a spouse sets an uncomfortable precedent. The real failure sits with Downing Street, which appears to have handed its most sensitive Israel brief to a man whose household's views on the conflict were already a matter of public record, without pausing to ask whether that was wise. Powell remains in post. The consulate talks continue. Nobody in government has explained why a national security adviser whose wife has spent years comparing Israel's war conduct to an illegal occupation was considered the right person to represent Britain's interests in Jerusalem at the most sensitive moment in that relationship for a generation. The real question here has nothing to do with Sarah Helm. It is whether anyone in Downing Street does due diligence at all. "Campaign Against Antisemitism has called on Powell to denounce his wife's rhetoric publicly if he wishes to continue in post."