Jonathan Powell was not security vetted before being given his post as Britain’s national security adviser, The Spectator can report. In a previously unreported aspect of his evidence to parliament about the Peter Mandelson affair, Keir Starmer’s former chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, said:
It didn’t jump out to me as a problem that [Mandelson’s] DV [developed vetting] was happening after the announcement [of his appointment]. That is what happened in the case of the National Security Adviser.
McSweeney also said that ‘Jonathan Powell, too, got appointed before the necessary work’ and that ‘we made a political appointment for National Security Adviser, in Jonathan Powell. As far as I remember, we appointed him and then we began the DV [developed vetting]’.
Would it have been too embarrassing to un-appoint Powell ‘just’ because of his wife’s posts?
The disclosure may shed new light on how Powell got the job despite the social media activity of his wife, Sarah Helm, as reported in The Spectator over recent days. Helm’s support for the banned terror group Palestine Action postdates Powell’s appointment, of course. But just after Hamas’s 7 October attacks on Israel, the year before Powell was appointed, Helm criticised the leftwing journalist James O’Brien for attacking Hamas, defended the terror group, saying it had helped eradicate Isis in Gaza, and blamed the atrocity on the creation of Israel in 1948.
As early as 2021, Helm objected to the banning of Hamas’s political wing as a terror group, complaining: ‘Anybody, like me, or whoever, who is, has any sort of dealings with them [Hamas] at all will be criminalised.’ In spring 2024, again before Powell was appointed, Helm compared Israel to the Nazis and attacked the UN for reporting that Hamas had carried out rape and sexualised torture against the hostages it took on 7 October.
Developed vetting is the highest regular level of security clearance. It is surely extraordinary that, according to McSweeney, someone was given one of the most sensitive security jobs in Britain before it was done. Powell was presumably vetted for his previous role as Tony Blair’s chief of staff to 2007, but DV status must be reviewed after seven years, so any clearance from that time would have expired long before he took up the national security job in November 2024.
UK vetting guidance is clear that ‘national security concerns’ can be triggered by ‘the individual or their family or associates having links with (or giving support to) terrorism’ (our italics.) It seems likely, therefore, that Helm’s activity would have been picked up in the vetting process.
We don’t know what subsequently happened. Was it decided that Helm’s activity did not constitute links with, or support for, terrorism? Or was it decided, as with Mandelson, to overlook any material flagged in the vetting process, and if so, who made that decision? Would it have been too embarrassing to un-appoint Powell ‘just’ because of his wife’s posts? Does he actually have full, unqualified, top-level clearance?
Nobody will say. A parliamentary answer in March stated merely that Powell’s vetting ‘was conducted to the usual standard set for Developed Vetting’ – in other words, a response about the process, not the outcome. It added that the government ‘does not comment on individual vetting cases’. Another question on whether Powell passed vetting without qualification was stonewalled.
Finally, McSweeney’s statements also seem to rule out that Powell already had clearance to the necessary standard from his previous job with Starmer as special envoy for the Chagos Islands between August and November 2024. Parliamentary answers are consistent with this. Unlike the government’s answer from March, which does at least state that Powell was put through the DV process for the National Security Adviser job, a parliamentary question on whether he was vetted for his Chagos role was referred to another response which does not answer the question.
A new question has now been tabled to try to get to the bottom of the mystery. It awaits an answer.
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