At the height of 'Cool Britannia', Prime Minister Tony Blair's Chief of Staff, Jonathan Powell, was invited to dine at one of the hottest joints in town: the Groucho Club.
Plans were duly made for a big night out with his partner, a Left-wing journalist named Sarah Helm. But a familiar middle-class problem soon emerged: she'd only recently given birth to a child, and they were unable to find a babysitter.
Others would have re-scheduled. Yet this New Labour power couple was made of sterner stuff.
Instead of politely declining the invitation, they decided on that night in August 1999 to check their eight-week-old daughter, Rosamund, into the venue's cloakroom.
The infant enjoyed a convivial evening among the Groucho's cologne-infused bags, anoraks and umbrellas. But her fate didn't stay secret for long. In fact, it swiftly became national news, thanks to the disgruntled cloakroom attendant, who told friends: 'I only did it because I thought I would get a decent tip.'
The Guardian, which carried that quote, revealed that the attendant had been left sorely disappointed: the couple's 'decent tip' had in fact amounted to zero pounds.
In the ensuing PR kerfuffle, Downing Street issued a statement claiming Powell and Helm had been the victims of an embarrassing mix-up.
'They realised they had no cash with them as they left,' said a spokesman, claiming that a cheque was in the post.
Whether the loot ever arrived is unclear – the attendant was gagged by her employer. But that was not the end of the controversy. Helm later complained to the Press Complaints Commission about the coverage on the grounds it 'intruded into the infant's private life,' the Daily Telegraph reported. 'But it wasn't upheld.'
Fast-forward 26 years. Jonathan Powell remains one of the most powerful men in Britain, having returned to Downing Street in 2024 to serve as the Prime Minister's National Security Adviser. Yet, his unusual domestic affairs are, once more, making work for No 10's press office.
Today's row centres on Sarah. Or more specifically, her bizarre social media activity.
At a lobby briefing on Tuesday, a government spokeswoman was bombarded with questions about a series of highly provocative posts she'd made on X.
At the height of 'Cool Britannia', Prime Minister Tony Blair's Chief of Staff, Jonathan Powell (pictured), was invited to dine at one of the hottest joints in town: the Groucho Club
Some were old. Others more recent. The vast majority involved the Gaza conflict. Put bluntly, our National Security Adviser's wife turns out to be a vigorous, and some might say obsessive, campaigner for the Palestinian cause. And she's not afraid to say so, in ways that seem highly controversial. Two of Helm's fruitier tweets appear to express support for Palestine Action, which is supposedly a proscribed terror group (a police investigation at the weekend cleared her of criminality).
In a third tweet she claimed that her husband had not been involved in banning Palestine Action, nor could he un-ban it. That led to allegations that she was 'leaking' confidential security information about goings on at the heart of Government.
Helm has also attacked critics of Hamas in other posts, and cast doubt on whether the organisation actually carried out the mass rape of Israeli women during the October 7 attacks. Several older posts – in which she'd praised Syrian despot Bashar al-Assad, and talked in arguably sinister terms about the 'Jewish Lobby' and its mysterious access to
'British corridors of power' – have also surfaced.
'These views are held by an individual who doesn't represent the Government in any capacity,' is the current Downing Street line.
Critics of course disagree. They are now calling for Powell's head.
What no one can deny in this ongoing war of words is that the very last thing a Svengali of Jonathan Powell's standing needs is to be caught up in this or indeed any brand of online controversy.
The curly-haired 70-year-old is, after all, supposed to be a consummate diplomat. The man who prime ministers trust to deftly manage Britain's reputation and influence on the world stage, building relationships with both friend and foe.
He is also, nominally, responsible for national security.
Yet across the breakfast table from him in their Ravenscourt Park home (like many influential liberals, they live on a leafy street in West London where houses fetch almost £3 million) sits a vigorous supporter of a banned terror group.
This arrangement is at odds with Powell's blue-chip CV. The younger brother of Lord (Charles) Powell, a trusted adviser to Lady Thatcher, he was educated at King's Canterbury (fees now £57,000 each year) and Oxford, before moving into the Foreign Office in 1979. There, he eventually landed up at the British Embassy in Washington in the early 1990s.
Powell's close relationship to Bill Clinton (they had been in the same Oxford college) purportedly impressed a visiting Tony Blair, who brought him onto his team in 1995. He then spent a decade at the heart of the Blair government, navigating everything from the Ulster peace process to the run up to the Gulf War. There followed a lucrative spell at Morgan Stanley. And in 2014 David Cameron made him the UK's special envoy to Libya.
During the 2020s he worked with our intelligence services in Syria before Keir Starmer invited him to return to Downing Street in 2024.
To put things another way, Mr Powell (he has always declined honours) has spent much of his career juggling official secrets and matters of crucial national security, which requires him to exercise discretion.
Then there is his 69-year-old wife who is cut from a very different cloth.
While also a product of public school (Millfield, now £60,000 per year) and Oxbridge, with high-powered siblings (brother Toby is a well-known political journalist), she came to prominence as the Middle East correspondent of the Left-leaning Independent newspaper in the early 1990s.
Helm met Powell, who was then a married father of two, during a posting to Brussels. Having left her Fleet Street job around the time the couple's daughters were born, she continued to write freelance articles, along with several well-regarded non-fiction books and an autobiographical play, of which more later.
The problem is that like many decent journalists, Helm holds strong opinions, which she is unafraid to publicly express.
Her hobby horses include Brexit (which she hates), Boris Johnson (she has repeatedly called for him to be 'tried for treason' over the 'Party-gate' controversy), and the state of the Middle East (as previously mentioned, she's in the fanatically anti-Israel camp).
At times, these interests rub up awkwardly against those of the Government her husband is supposed to serve. This week's controversy, for example, comes just days after Powell travelled to East Jerusalem to conduct hugely difficult negotiations over the future of the British consulate there.
'Talks are at a delicate stage,' is how one Whitehall source puts it. 'They could go either way, and now the bloke at the negotiating table, supposedly buttering up Israel, is caught up in a massive row back home over his wife's support for Palestine Action and Hamas. Couldn't make it up.'
That row kicked off last week, when Helm took to X – where she has posted 5,500 times since joining in 2012 – to say: 'God help us authors who support Palestine and Palestine Action.'
Scotland Yard decided, after a short investigation, that the message 'did not meet the criminal threshold'. And that emboldened Helm to write a second post asking 'where do I sign' a letter 'calling for Palestine Action to be unbanned under the Terrorism Act?'
The Campaign Against Anti-Semitism duly weighed in ('So it's illegal to express support for a proscribed terrorist organisation if you're an ordinary person, but if you allegedly do it when you're the wife of the National Security Adviser, that's OK?') before things took a turn for the surreal when a fellow X user asked Helm if her husband had been involved in the decision to outlaw Palestine Action.
His wife Sarah Helm, a left-wing journalist, has attacked critics of Hamas in online posts, and cast doubt on whether the organisation actually carried out the mass rape of Israeli women during the October 7 attacks
Rather than ignoring the question, Helm replied 'nope and nope'. Alicia Kearns, the shadow national security minister, wrote to the Prime Minister, saying that Helm's social media activity raises 'serious questions about the handling of sensitive national security information, about apparent support for a proscribed terrorist organisation, and about whether Mr Powell can credibly continue in his post'. 'If her account is accurate, sensitive detail about the handling of a terrorism proscription has been disclosed on social media from within the national security adviser's own household,' she continued.
The matter was also raised in the House of Lords, where Cabinet Office minister Baroness Twycross insisted Ms Helm does 'not represent this Government in any capacity'.
Online sleuths, meanwhile, began digging into Helm's other posts. Since the vast majority of her thousands of tweets had, in recent years, been in some way hostile to Israel they quickly found plenty to get angry about.
On the day of the October 7 attacks in 2023, she had, for instance, responded to comments from EU President Ursula von der Leyen lamenting that 'terrorists struck at the heart of Israel capturing and killing innocent women and children' by saying: 'Not for the first time Von der Leyen is spouting empty dangerous glib tropes on a subject she apparently doesn't understand.' Earlier that day, she'd also posted about 'Israel's Gaza prison'.
A couple of weeks later, when radio presenter James O'Brien called Hamas a 'murderous death cult,' Helm had responded: 'James you can do better than this.' And by that December she was declaring it 'puzzling' that there wasn't more testimony from October 7 rape victims, and asking why the Israeli authorities 'have not apparently done post-mortems… or got forensic evidence from survivors'.
Perhaps the most controversial post saw her complain in 2018: 'Palestinians have never had their voice heard in British corridors of power. They have no equivalent of the Jewish lobby here. No access to ministers, still less prime ministers.' Critics argued that it revolved around the anti-Semitic trope that Jewish people secretly control world leaders. The Labour Against Anti-Semitism group joined the calls for Powell's dismissal.
Helm, who denies anti-Semitism, this week devoted much of her time to picking fights with various critics on X.
Andrew Gilligan, who had written an article for the Spectator suggesting that she has previously 'compared Israel to the Nazis, defended Hamas, and questioned reports of their mass rape' was accused of writing 'drivel' and 'cut and paste distortion'.
The Jewish journalist (and former editor of The Jewish Chronicle) Jake Wallis Simons, who'd called for Powell to resign over the affair, was slapped down for 'pulling out all the old tropes'. Julia Hartley Brewer, the Talk TV commentator who'd discussed the affair on her eponymous show, 'really takes the biscuit', Helm said, adding: 'Who is this creature? Seriously?' And so on.
Such public mud-slinging is, of course, highly unusual for the wife of a senior Downing Street official. Some might call the whole thing an ugly mess.
Yet Helm's habit of making awkward headlines for Jonathan's employer dates back even further than the night her baby was deposited in a cloakroom.
The couple's relationship made front pages from the get-go. A Sunday newspaper revealed in August 1997 that 'Blair's chief of staff' had separated from his first wife Karen Drayne, a poet with whom he had two sons, and was 'involved in a relationship with a journalist who is expecting
his child'. Intrigue ensued. The report was published on the same day that Blair's Foreign Secretary Robin Cook had decided to leave his wife for his parliamentary secretary. Some commentators detected the hand of Labour spin-doctors.
Whatever the truth, Powell and Helm's first child, Jessica, was born that October. According to a gossip column, The Daily Telegraph refused to publish a birth notice on the grounds that the still unmarried couple wanted to use both their surnames on it. The happy news was instead published by The Times.
In 2000, Helm wrote a newspaper article claiming that Blair, her partner's boss, was leading the public 'blindfold' into the arms of a European super-state. It prompted Downing Street to put out a statement confirming that 'Jonathan Powell does not share the views of his wife.'
Whoever drafted that line seems to have been unaware that the pair had yet to marry. They eventually tied the knot in the New Forest in 2007.
In true New Labour style, Jonathan wore trainers at the reception, while the guest list included such noted party animals as Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams.
Another major bone of contention was the Iraq war. Powell was one of its leading architects. Helm, a vigorous opponent, who took Rosamund and Jessica, on protest marches.
And in 2006, she wrote a comment piece saying that Blair was 'flunking the challenge as the Middle East swamps fill – and they are filling fast with innocent blood'.
To friends, such forays 'off message' merely reflect the fact that Helm is a free-thinking woman capable of holding opinions that diverge from those of her husband. 'It's actually one of the things that first attracted Jonathan to her,' says one longstanding acquaintance.
Yet there are occasions when her lack of discretion puts Powell in a very awkward position indeed.
In 2011, Helm wrote an autobiographical stage play called Loyalty, about the tension between a bitter opponent of the Iraq war and her husband, who was a prime minister's chief of staff.
It contained an account of a telephone call between Tony Blair and George W Bush shortly prior to the 2003 invasion, during which the US president allegedly declared himself 'ready to kick ass'.
A few years later, in 2016, Helm published a full, blow-by-blow transcript of the same call in The Guardian, saying she'd taken a note of the conversation while eavesdropping on Jonathan, who was listening via an 'antiquated secure phone' in the upstairs bedroom of their family home.
'It was impossible not to overhear,' she declared.
Impossible or not, diplomatic phone calls are not supposed to end up being leaked by a Downing Street aide's wife. It's one of the reasons we have the Official Secrets Act, along with security service vetting of central figures in Government.
Today, Powell, of course, is working in Andy Burnham's inner circle.
Indeed, despite a series of Press reports, most recently in the Spectator and Sunday Telegraph, stating that Powell intends to retire, colleagues were this week insisting: 'He isn't going anywhere and has no plans to stand down.'
All of which means that the PM's National Security adviser, entrusted with handling our delicate relationship with Israel will, for the foreseeable future be a man whose spouse continues her outspoken support for a proscribed pro-Palestinian terror group, picks heated fights with critics via social media, and boasts a track record of leaking confidential information about her husband's day-job.
Or, as they say in the trade, watch this space!
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