Sarah Helm Cleared: Police Take No Action Over Palestine Action Post — But the Row Isn't Over

Photo: Dietmar Rabich, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (Palace of Westminster, London).

The strangest political row of the week ended not with a resignation or a court date, but with a two-line police update on a Saturday. "It did not meet the criminal threshold," said the Metropolitan Police. "No further police action will be taken." And just like that, the investigation into the prime minister's national security adviser's wife was over.

The woman at the centre of it is Sarah Helm. She is an author and journalist — a former Sunday Times writer and the Independent's diplomatic editor, who spent years covering the Middle East. She is also married to Jonathan Powell, Andy Burnham's national security adviser. On Thursday, in the middle of a row about the writer Sally Rooney, Helm posted on X: "God help us authors who support Palestine and Palestine Action."

On Friday the Met said the post was being "assessed to determine whether any further police investigation may be required." By Saturday, specialist officers had decided: there was not enough to clear the criminal bar. Case closed.

How a tweet about books became a Westminster row

The context matters, because this story is really two stories tangled together. The first is about authors and censorship. Rooney — the Irish novelist behind Normal People and Conversations with Friends — announced this week that she could no longer sell her books in Britain. Her publisher, Faber, concluded that passing UK royalties to her, while she funds Palestine Action, could amount to a serious criminal offence. That is how far the proscription of the group, which came into force on 5 July 2025, now reaches: it turns book royalties into potential criminal liability.

The second story is the Sky News debate that lit the fuse. Times Radio's Adam Boulton had questioned what Rooney's novels had to do with the conflict. The left-wing commentator Owen Jones called Boulton's intervention "vile." Helm weighed in on Jones's side, accusing Boulton of supporting censorship.

Two furious reactions, one relieved one

The Campaign Against Antisemitism called Helm's post "gobsmacking" and demanded she face "the full force of the law, just like others who appear to express support for any proscribed terrorist organisation." Reform UK MP Danny Kruger wrote to the prime minister to raise concerns. Downing Street kept its distance: "These views are held by an individual who does not represent the government in any capacity," a spokeswoman said.

On the other side, Green Party leader Zack Polanski said Helm "should be commended for her bravery" and urged the government to lift the ban on Palestine Action, calling the proscription "ludicrous and authoritarian."

The campaigners want to test whether the ban bites even at the top of the establishment. The police verdict — that the post did not meet the criminal threshold — answers a narrower question than either side was asking: not whether the ban is right, but whether this particular post broke it.

The bigger picture nobody wants to talk about

Whatever you think of the proscription, the numbers around it are worth sitting with. According to the BBC, roughly 3,700 people have been arrested across the UK for publicly expressing support for the group since the ban, and around 2,500 have been charged — but their cases have not gone to trial because a legal challenge to the proscription is still working through the courts. The Supreme Court is expected to hear it next month.

That is an extraordinary backlog of criminal cases against ordinary people sitting in limbo while judges decide whether the ban itself was lawful. In that light, Saturday's decision feels less like special treatment for an insider and more like the Met declining to add one more file to a very tall pile.

There is a fair question, though: what does it do to the vetting of Britain's most senior security officials when the national security adviser's household becomes the centre of a row about a proscribed organisation? Downing Street has given no indication that Powell's position is in question. But it is the kind of thing that does not go away quietly in Whitehall.

For now, the immediate storm is over. Helm has not been charged, arrested or cautioned. And the Supreme Court date next month looms over the whole affair like a second act waiting to happen.

Sources

• The Times of Israel, "Pro-Palestine Action post by wife of aide to British PM doesn't warrant probe — cops" (17 October 2026): timesofisrael.com
• Sky News (via Radio X), "Palestine Action post by Sarah Helm, wife of national security adviser, being assessed by Met" (17 October 2026): radiox.co.uk
• The Times, "National security adviser's wife 'backs Palestine Action'" (17 October 2026): thetimes.com
• BBC (via Anadolu Agency), "UK security adviser's wife faces scrutiny over Palestine Action post" (17 October 2026): aa.com.tr