Indecent Exposure

With Reform UK at third place in the polls, its Leadership Election is in full swing. Rishi Sunak’s sometime Immigration Minister, Robert Jenrick, has had to be slapped down for saying that he would allow, if not order, the Royal Marines to shoot to kill the passengers of the migrant dinghies. Zia Yusuf has blamed the boats on “everybody” in the previous Conservative Government, including Jenrick as well as Suella Braverman, twice Home Secretary, whom Yusuf has criticised for her suggestion that British Asians were not English. The parliamentary report into Nigel Farage’s five million pounds will be with us any day now. And Daniel Hewitt writes:

An undercover investigation by ITV Exposure into Nigel Farage’s Reform UK has found multiple elected councillors and party candidates expressing racist views and using offensive language, calling Muslims “parasites” and describing black children as “animals”. One undercover reporter recorded a Reform councillor from South London calling for King Charles to be decapitated because he “is a Muslim”, while another senior Reform councillor from Solihull said of Asian people: “drag them out of their homes, stick them on planes and f*** them off to Pakistan.” 

The ITV investigation has obtained secretly recorded footage showing elected Reform officials from across England and Wales using violent, racist and sexist language. When speaking about a female Reform candidate, one male councillor said “if she was my daughter, it would still be bath night on a Thursday”, and that he would sexually assault another female candidate if he was given the chance to hug her. Reform UK told ITV News investigations have commenced into the findings by ITV Exposure, and while “a handful of individuals who do not share our values will initially make it through vetting. This is the same for all organisations.” 

In September 2024, Reform’s leader Nigel Farage promised he would professionalise the party, and improve its vetting process for selecting candidates. “We don’t want extremists, we don’t want bigots, we don’t want people who think that way, because we represent the silent, decent majority of this great country that we live in,” said Nigel Farage at Reform’s annual party conference in Birmingham.

In a documentary for ITV Exposure, reporters went undercover with Reform UK candidates and councillors across England and Wales during the May local elections and four by-election campaigns in 2025 and 2026. In April and May 2026, ITV’s undercover team were in Birmingham as Reform hoped to make big gains in the local elections.

The ITV reporters joined Reform Councillor Alan Feeney in Solihull, where he was campaigning to retain his seat on the council, having defected from the Conservative Party in 2025. Over several days of canvassing, Councillor Feeney was secretly recorded expressing racist views about Asian people, and Muslims in particular. He told undercover reporters the area has been “infested” with Asian families, and called them “absolute parasites”. 

When out knocking on doors, Councillor Feeney said “if it’s an Asian name, I’m not even knocking at the door, they’re not voting Reform and I ain’t wasting my time”. He calls his approach to campaigning “Alan’s racist canvassing”. Speaking of Muslims in Britain, Councillor Feeney said “they’re in our judiciary, they’re in our schools, they’re in our healthcare, they’re everywhere, and they are not working on our side, they’re against us”.

He said he believed that “no more than one percent of British population can be non-white”. “When a house comes up for sale, white people need to be in there,” he told ITV’s undercover reporter. “You almost need to out-Muslim the Muslims. You’d need a proper nuclear option, like literally drag them at their homes, stick them on planes and f*** them off to Pakistan. Which you’ll never do in a month of Sundays.”

ITV’s undercover team also filmed with two other Reform candidates in Solihull – Jamie Campbell and Chris Whelan. In a conversation between Campbell, Whelan and Alan Feeney, they discussed speculation that a mosque may be built in Castle Bromwich. “There’s got to be a way of stopping that, like go and buy some pork chops,” said Campbell. “We’ll bury it in the ground.” “Unfortunately this is a pig cemetery mate,” replied Feeney. 

The men then go on to discuss a female Reform candidate from Solihull, using sexist and sexually aggressive language. “That’s reminded me, I need to buy an orange in a sock,” said Councillor Feeney. “If she was my daughter, it would still be bath night on a Thursday. I’ll wash you properly this time,” added Whelan. In a separate conversation, Chris Whelan complains his comments online are being moderated. “Once one was mouthing off at me, some Asian lad, and I just put - it was struck off almost immediately – ‘I’ll tell you one thing, I’ve never been put on my arse by a f****** p***,’” said Whelan. 

Whelan then discussed another female Reform candidate in Birmingham, saying that he “would have been sniffing that seat as soon as she got up. If she’d have given me a hug I’d have f****** fingered her”. At the local elections in May, Alan Feeney, Jamie Campbell and Chris Whelan were all elected as Reform councillors. Alan Feeney was appointed deputy Mayor of Solihull Borough Council. 

ITV Exposure’s findings were put to Councillor Feeney, Councillor Campbell and Councillor Whelan by ITV News. They have yet to respond. On Monday evening, Councillor Feeney said he had “mutually agreed” to resign from Reform UK, citing “personal reasons”, and would be continuing as an Independent councillor. Councillor Whelan has also resigned from Reform for personal and health reasons. 

In a video posted on X, Reform Deputy Leader Richard Tice accused one of the people filmed by ITV of working for the Conservative Party as a “Tory plant” to make the party “look bad” and said they knew they were being recorded. He did not name the person, but his description of them suggested he was referring to Alan Feeney. ITV News has approached Councillor Feeney for a response. 

Reform UK made significant gains in the May local elections, and now have more the 2,300 local councillors. They have an outright majority on 23 local councils, and are the largest party on a further 12. In July 2024, Reform leader Nigel Farage acknowledged his party had “a few bad apples” but promised they “will be long gone, and we will never have any of their type back in our organisation. You have my 100% promise on that.” 

Two years on, ITV Exposure’s investigation secretly filmed inside the Reform campaign in Makerfield in Greater Manchester. In June 2026, the party were competing with Labour in the parliamentary by-election that Andy Burnham would go on to win. The undercover reporter met Dean Miller, a Reform Councillor in Bromley, South London, who was in Makerfield campaigning for the party. In one recording, Councillor Miller claimed: “We’ve been ethnically cleansed out of London.” “Because you never used to get any blacks over in Bromley, and now Bromley [has] massive Nigerian communities there,” he said. 

In a separate conversation, Councillor Miller’s language became more extreme when he claimed local children have been committing vandalism in Bromley. “Like all the ethnic f****** kids, they’re not white, they’re all f****** black, and they’re like f****** animals. It’s horrible to say it. I’m not racist.” Councillor Miller, who was elected as Reform councillor in May 2026, claimed that King Charles is secretly a Muslim. “The Muslim thing is going to be that thing that takes over everything and then everyone just has one religion. Apparently King Charles is a f****** Muslim. Someone from the inside saw a f****** prayer mat and all that in one of his f****** rooms. I think that’s f****** traitorous. Cut the c***’* head off, sorry.” Councillor Miller told us he was heavily medicated at the time due to a chronic pain condition, and he has now resigned from Reform UK. 

In October 2025, Reform had vowed to “throw everything” at a by-election in Caerphilly for the Welsh Senedd. ITV’s undercover reporter joined the party knocking on doors and handing out leaflets. He met Martin Roberts, who was a Reform branch treasurer in Pontypridd, who has twice stood as a Reform candidate. The ITV reporter told Roberts he was from Leicester, which he said had changed. “Lots of d******, is it?” Roberts replied. “Say what you want around me man.” 

When the discussion turned to the Conservative Party’s prospects, the reporter said he didn’t believe they would be successful with Kemi Badenoch as leader. “What, because she’s black?” laughed Roberts. “I used to hear all these comments as I was growing up you know, like ah look at that f****** four-door over there. I’m like what’s a four-door? Four-door saloon, c***.” In response, Martin Roberts told ITV News he was trying to be humorous and informal, but accepts and regrets he used language that he describes as inappropriate. He denies being a bigot or an extremist.

ITV Exposure’s investigation did not just uncover racist language and extreme views being expressed by Reform councillors and candidates approved to stand for the party, but councillors talking of how they will conceal those views from voters in order to win power. During the Gorton and Denton by-election campaign in February 2026, ITV’s undercover reporter spoke with then-Reform councillor Alan Feeney. “You’ve just got to be a bit savvy to get the broad appeal, then once you're in you can do what you want,” Councillor Feeney said. 

In Makerfield, ITV’s undercover reporter also spoke with two Reform councillors from Hounslow in West London. “We’re not f****** stupid enough to p*** off the entire woke south or centrist south really of the country,” said Councillor David Kerr. “You need to seem palatable to everyone to get them, to get [the majority].” “The stuff that people feel uncomfortable with, don’t even announce it just do it,” said Councillor Adam Parkins. “We just need to get f****** elected, that’s all that really matters. We won’t necessarily say what we are doing, part of the point is to not [say].” Councillors Kerr and Parkins have been approached for comment.

So what could that “uncomfortable” stuff be? In Makerfield, ITV’s undercover reporter joined a different group of Reform campaigners on polling day in June. He met Raymond Dunning, a Reform councillor in Tameside, Greater Manchester and aspiring MP, who said he had been asked to stand as a parliamentary candidate. Later in the pub, Councillor Dunning talked through what he would want a Reform government to do. “So first of all, I’d deport every other motherf***** in this country that doesn’t deserve to be here and their children as well. First thing, you're f****** gone, bang,” he said. “And then I’ll pick up the pieces after that.”

Asked by the undercover reporter if he meant legal migrants too, Councillor Dunning replied: “Even the legal ones, because there’s nothing wrong with legal immigration as long as it’s done right, but there are certain people who have been granted permission to stay in this country who shouldn’t [have]. 18-30 year old young lads, train them up in the army in insurgency tactics, so they can go street-by-street, house-by-house picking the c**** up.” Responding to Councillor Dunning, a Reform official is heard saying that plan “would create massive civil unrest”. “We’re going to have civil unrest if we don’t deal with it,” replied Dunning. Councillor Dunning has been approached for comment. 

In response, Reform UK told ITV News: “Where members, activists and councillors have clearly behaved inappropriately, investigations have commenced. In some cases, there have been suspensions and due process must be followed. Reform UK has improved and prioritised its vetting procedures, but from time to time, a handful of individuals who do not share our values will initially make it through vetting. This is the same for all organisations.” You can watch ITV Exposure - Undercover: A Year in Reform on Sunday, October 18 at 10:20pm on ITV1 and ITVX.

Extending Beyond The Allegations Themselves

In June 2013, Michael Gove allowed Geoffrey Bettley to be reinstated as a teacher after Bettley had been cautioned for child pornography. Far more recently, Gove told Times Radio that Peter Mandelson and Ghislaine Maxwell were “collateral victims” of Jeffrey Epstein, deserving of sympathy. While she was living with Gove, Lola Salem was charged alongside Henry Hopwood-Phillips, who is now a convicted child pornographer, and on whom see here from back in the days when Jacob Rees-Mogg would still be seen with ethnonationalists, or indeed they with him. Naming their salon after that of Madame Verdurin was no word of a lie. Welcome to a Proustian demimonde, at the root of which is the old Fascist favourite, also articulated, if that was quite the word, by Boris Johnson, that Christianity had overthrown a superior civilisation, a civilisation to which pederasty had been fundamental. As had slavery, which provides an important context to this, from Feminegra:

Dr Lola Salem, a 33-year-old lecturer in French and music at Oxford University’s Oriel College and the former girlfriend of Conservative politician Michael Gove, is facing trial over allegations that she possessed indecent images of children. Salem, who taught French and music at Oriel College, has pleaded not guilty to the charges. Her trial is scheduled for March 2028 at Oxford Crown Court. According to the BBC, the allegations concern three Category B images and one Category C image, allegedly possessed between 2021 and 2023. Category B is the second most serious classification used for indecent images of children. Oriel College confirmed that it suspended Salem in June 2026 after learning of the charges, pending the outcome of legal proceedings. Salem entered her not-guilty pleas on July 23.

These are allegations, not findings of guilt. Salem is entitled to the presumption of innocence, and the charges must be proved in court. The case has nevertheless attracted attention for reasons extending beyond the allegations themselves. Salem was until recently in a relationship with Gove, the former Conservative Cabinet minister who now edits The Spectator. The Daily Mail reported their separation on October 2, describing a relationship that had lasted approximately two years. But what happened after several British newspapers published reports about Salem’s charges deserves closer examination. Some of those articles disappeared. And the contrast with the treatment of another British academic, the late Professor Jason Arday, is difficult to ignore.

Why Did the Daily Mail and Telegraph Remove Their Reports?

On October 10, the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail and GB News published reports concerning Salem’s criminal charges. By October 12, those articles were no longer available at their original addresses. Journalist Mic Wright documented the removals in his October 12 Substack investigation, Michael Gove, Lola Salem, and a Sudden Silence, linking to archived versions of the original reports. The Daily Mail has since published another article about Salem’s charges, although questions remain about why its original report disappeared. Wright also reported that LBC subsequently removed its article, although the BBC continued reporting the case. The Oxford Mail likewise published coverage of Salem’s charges and suspension.

Why would several news organisations publish a legitimate court report and then remove it? There may be explanations involving legal advice, editorial decisions or reporting restrictions. But the removal of an article does not, by itself, establish that an editor acted improperly or that anyone intervened to suppress the story. What readers deserve is transparency. If the reports were removed because of a court order, that would be an important explanation. If they contained inaccuracies, appropriate corrections could explain their disappearance. Without that information, questions about the decisions remain unanswered. The situation becomes more interesting when Salem’s connections to established publications are considered.

Wright reported that Spectator Life published an article by Salem on October 9, the day before the initial reports concerning her charges appeared. That article subsequently disappeared, along with her author page. Salem also previously contributed to the Catholic Herald, whose articles and author page bearing her name were reportedly no longer accessible. Meanwhile, her earlier Telegraph columns remained available at the time Wright examined the publications. There is an important distinction here. A publisher removing a contributor’s work is not necessarily the same decision as removing a factual court report. The reasons could differ considerably. But the concentration of removals warrants questions about how these outlets handle controversial news involving people connected to their own organisations. And Gove’s position makes those questions especially relevant.

Michael Gove’s Connection Raises Questions

Michael Gove held several senior positions in Conservative governments before becoming editor of The Spectator in 2024. He was previously married to Daily Mail columnist Sarah Vine, with whom he separated in 2021 after 20 years of marriage. Gove’s relationship with Salem was publicly reported in 2024, including photographs of the pair attending events together. On October 2, the Daily Mail’s Richard Eden reported that their relationship had ended and that Gove had moved out of the London property they previously shared. The report stated that the separation had occurred some time earlier. The timing has prompted speculation online, particularly because Oriel College says it learned of Salem’s charges in June. However, there is no established evidence that Gove influenced the removal of any newspaper article, directed editorial decisions concerning Salem or knew about the charges before they became public. Nor does his former relationship with Salem implicate him in the alleged offences. Nevertheless, it is legitimate to question whether prominent media organisations apply the same standards of transparency and scrutiny to people within their professional circles as they do to those outside them. 

Professor Jason Arday Faced Hundreds of Articles And He Was Never Criminally Charged

Professor Jason Arday became the University of Cambridge’s youngest Black professor in 2023. In July and August 2026, he faced intense media scrutiny over allegations of plagiarism, questions about his academic work and disputed claims about his personal achievements. Arday denied the plagiarism allegations. Liverpool John Moores University investigated concerns about his doctoral work and maintained that his PhD remained valid, reaffirming that position after his death. He resigned from Cambridge on August 5. Nine days later, on August 14, he was found dead at his home in London, aged 41. Arday had not been charged with a criminal offence. The scale of the coverage was extraordinary. According to media-analysis organisation NewsCord, British news outlets published 229 articles about Professor Jason Arday during the 22 days before his death. A subsequent, broader audit identified 274 articles across 26 publications.

NewsCord documented the methodology and the individual articles included in its analysis. The figures provide a measurable picture of how extensively British newspapers pursued Arday’s story. By comparison, the initial reporting about Salem’s criminal charges was relatively limited, and several articles subsequently disappeared. The allegations are different, and criminal reporting can involve legal restrictions that do not apply to academic misconduct investigations. Nevertheless, the contrast raises an unavoidable question. Why did some newspapers sustain weeks of intense scrutiny of a Black academic accused of professional misconduct, while reports about a well-connected white academic facing criminal charges disappeared within days? This question does not require assuming Salem is guilty. It requires asking news organisations to explain their editorial standards.

Jason Arday’s Death Makes These Questions More Urgent

Arday’s family criticised what they described as a sustained campaign of misinformation and harassment directed towards him. Following his death, Cambridge announced an investigation into the circumstances surrounding his resignation and the support available to him. More than 40 senior Cambridge academics subsequently challenged the proposed investigation’s scope, arguing that it lacked sufficient transparency and accountability. An inquest into Arday’s death has opened. In the final weeks of Professor Jason Arday’s life, British newspapers published hundreds of articles scrutinising his academic career, personal history and credibility. People who knew Arday warned that the relentless accusations and public commentary had taken a profound toll on him and his loved ones. Arday’s family subsequently described a sustained campaign of misinformation and harassment.

These warnings cannot be separated from any serious examination of his final weeks. Although the inquest has not established the circumstances of his death, the documented pressure he experienced, and the media’s contribution to that pressure, deserve rigorous scrutiny. Accountability requires examining not only whether individual reports were accurate, but also the cumulative impact of the coverage. Although the inquest has yet to establish the circumstances of his death, the media’s role in the pressure surrounding his final weeks deserves serious scrutiny, not dismissal. Its potential contribution to his distress must be examined as part of any meaningful reckoning with what happened.

The racial dimension also deserves examination. Arday was a Black academic whose professional achievements and personal history became subjects of extensive national scrutiny. Salem is a white academic who contributed to several prominent conservative publications and had a publicly reported relationship with a former Cabinet minister. These differences do not, on their own, prove racial discrimination or preferential treatment. But they provide legitimate grounds for asking whether race, professional connections and institutional status influence editorial decisions. A consistent media standard would require fair, proportionate and accurate reporting in both cases.

British Newspapers Must Explain Their Editorial Decisions

The fundamental issue is not whether Salem deserves hostile treatment comparable to Arday’s. She does not. Nobody should face a media pile-on, and everyone accused of wrongdoing deserves fair treatment. The issue is why some publications appear willing to maintain extensive coverage of one academic while removing straightforward reports about another. There may be lawful and legitimate reasons for those removals. If so, the publications should explain them where they can.

NewsCord has called on the Telegraph and Daily Mail to clarify whether their decisions followed court orders or other legal concerns and, if not, to explain why the reports disappeared. That is a reasonable request. Readers should not have to rely on archived webpages and independent journalists to establish that a major newspaper previously reported a case heard in court. Nor should an accused person’s professional connections determine whether the public receives accurate information about legal proceedings.

A Genuine Outrage

Paul Knaggs writes:

Earlier this month, Volodymyr Zelenskyy told the Warsaw Security Forum that Ukrainian strikes on the data centres of the Russian technology company Yandex had made the internet a calmer place. Fewer bots, he said, and so less hate and fewer provocations. The story travelled at the speed of wish fulfilment. A Polish political scientist posted that support for the AfD online had collapsed by 56 per cent. A Czech politician observed that German patriotism had gone quiet the moment the Russian connection went down. Millions of people saw it. It felt like the first good news in a decade of bad news about the internet.

It was not true. The traffic that fell was web crawler traffic, the automated indexing that keeps search engines fed, and Cloudflare’s own public data showed exactly that. The researchers who actually track Kremlin information operations said so at once. Antibot4Navalny reported no drop in the activity of the Russian troll networks it has monitored for years. The Vatnik Soup account said plainly that nobody had demonstrated any effect with solid data. A Scandinavian consultancy, Common Consultancy, took 76 AfD politicians and 136 MAGA accounts and compared each post against that account’s own normal for the same weekday and hour. The variation was a few percentage points either way. Ordinary noise.

Renée DiResta of Georgetown University explained to Mother Jones why the fiction flew. A strike that silences the fakes is a victory over a shared enemy, and it feeds a far more comfortable belief: that your political enemies aren’t even real. Hold that sentence. It explains almost everything that happened in British politics this week, and a good deal of what has happened to our public argument over the last ten years.

Burnham’s Brexit Russia Claim and His Commons Retreat 

On Sunday, in an interview with Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart for The Rest Is Politics, Andy Burnham became the first serving Prime Minister to say that Russia interfered in the 2016 referendum. He had asked the question on arriving in Downing Street in July, he said, and had been given the clear answer that yes, there was. He named nobody. He cited no assessment, no document, no date, no finding. He added that it mattered to put this on the record so that voters in France and Germany would understand that some of their politics is instigated by our enemies, a remark that follows his meeting in Berlin with Friedrich Merz about the AfD. 

By Monday morning the government was reversing at speed. The Foreign Office minister Stephen Doughty spent a round of broadcast interviews avoiding the question before conceding the only thing that mattered: nothing Russia attempted had succeeded. The Prime Minister’s own spokesman told reporters it was inconceivable that Moscow had not tried to turn the referendum to its advantage, agreed that it had not worked, and stressed that Burnham accepts the result. Nigel Farage, at a press conference in Dover, called the Prime Minister a liar. Boris Johnson surfaced to say he had asked the same question as Foreign Secretary and been told there was no evidence of any successful interference. 

Then came the Commons. Kemi Badenoch asked Burnham to publish the evidence that Russia swung the result of the 2016 referendum, reminding the House that the head of MI5 had said in 2018 he had seen nothing to show Russia influenced the outcome. The Prime Minister replied that he had implied no such thing, told her to go back and look again, said he was not reopening the referendum and respected the result, and moved the conversation on to Russian activity around the 2019 general election. 

Thirty hours. That is the whole life cycle, from revelation to disavowal. And the disavowal is the tell. A Prime Minister who believed he held intelligence that a hostile state had corrupted the largest democratic exercise in British history would not retreat from it under questioning from Kemi Badenoch. He would publish. He did not publish because there is nothing to publish, and he knew that when he said it.

Russian Bots and Brexit: The 17.4 Million Voters Smeared 

Strip away the theatre and almost everyone in this row agrees on the facts. Russia runs influence operations against this country. It did so in 2016, as it does every year, because that is what it does. Because that is what we do and that is what they all do. Burnham’s own speech to the UN General Assembly on 22 September set out the government’s case in more detail than anything he has said since: bots, fake websites, falsified newspaper articles, the forged branding of 28 British institutions including universities and the BBC, far right narratives amplified from abroad, and evidence of attempted interference in the 2019 election. None of that is in dispute between the front benches.

What is in dispute is a single adverb. In Moscow in December 2017, standing beside Sergei Lavrov as the Russian Foreign Minister claimed Britain had conceded there was no interference, Johnson cut in with two words: not successfully. That has been the official British position ever since, under four prime ministers. Burnham has not contradicted it. He simply dropped the adverb on a podcast, let the louder version run for a day, and picked it back up at the despatch box.

Russian Bots: When Political Dissent Becomes Propaganda 

Here is why that one dropped adverb matters more than a Westminster scuffle, and why this publication is not prepared to treat it as a gaffe. The remainers were fed their line, and they are using it. Whatever the Prime Minister did or did not imply, the formulation he reached for has a life of its own out in the country, and it has had for years. It is no longer an allegation about foreign intelligence services. It is the cheapest available method of refusing an argument.

Question the wisdom of arming one more war and you are a Russian bot. Say the quiet thing about energy prices, about NATO expansion, about why the yards closed, about why your town has three vape shops and no bank, and somebody will tell you which troll farm you work for. The accusation requires no evidence and survives any amount of contradiction, because it is not really a claim about the world. It is a permission slip. It allows a person to feel they have won an exchange they never entered. 

The irony, which the political class never quite reaches, is how much of this is done by people who imagine themselves the defenders of truth. They are not countering astroturf. They are producing it. And there are a great many people on this side of the propaganda line who have found that withdrawal extremely comfortable. 

We know this is not theoretical, because the British state has done it and been caught. In April 2018, after Salisbury and after Douma, Whitehall briefed the press that there had been a 4,000 per cent rise in Russian bot activity. Newspapers ran the figure and named accounts. One of them, @Ian56789, turned out to belong to Ian Shilling, a man in Yorkshire with a borrowed photograph for an avatar and strong opinions about chemical weapons, several of them wrong and some of them actively Kremlin friendly. He went on Sky News and said so himself.

Another named account, @Partisangirl, was verified by Twitter as a real identity, and its owner posted a video stating that she was not a robot but a human being. Channel 4’s FactCheck went through the claims and found the accounts had been wrongly labelled; government sources then conceded that their analysts had been monitoring a broad range of accounts, not merely automated ones. Say what you like about the views of either person, and this publication would say a good deal. They were British civilians, and the state told the national press they were machines operated by Moscow.

That same year brought the Integrity Initiative. The Institute for Statecraft, a charity working out of a mill in Fife, was found through leaked documents to have received around £2.2 million from the Foreign Office to counter Russian disinformation, while its associated Twitter account circulated material attacking the leader of the Opposition, including the charge that Jeremy Corbyn was a useful idiot for the Kremlin. The then Foreign Office minister Sir Alan Duncan ordered an investigation on the Today programme. Chris Williamson, then a Labour MP, called for a public inquiry. There never was one. Public money, routed through a charity, aimed at domestic politics, under the banner of defending us from exactly that.

None of this means Russian operations are imaginary. It means the label has never been applied carefully, and that the people with the most power to apply it have the least incentive to be careful. Researchers at Indiana University found in 2023 that people routinely overestimate how many bots there are and believe everyone else is more gullible than they are, and that the word had become a way of dismissing accounts holding opposing views. We are now watching that habit scaled up from a timeline to a country, with a Prime Minister doing the labelling.

Orwell understood the mechanism exactly, and put it in Winston Smith’s mouth in 1984. The Party’s demand was not that you believe a particular falsehood. It was that you reject what your own eyes and ears had told you. It was their final, most essential command. Set that beside a man in Leigh being informed that his vote was a Russian output, or a man in Yorkshire reading in the national press that he is a machine, and the distance between the fiction and the practice is not as great as we would like.

The 2020 Russia Report and the Inquiry Britain Never Had

There is a genuine outrage buried in this story, and it is not the one either front bench is shouting about. In July 2020, Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee published its Russia report. Its central finding was not that Russia swung the referendum. It was that no British government had ever bothered to find out. No assessment of Russian attempts to interfere in the 2016 campaign was ever commissioned. When the committee asked MI5 for written evidence on the question, it received six lines. The report was completed in March 2019, handed to Johnson that October, and kept from the public until after the general election. The absence of evidence had been manufactured by a refusal to look.

Six years on, nothing has changed except the party in office. Johnson would not look because the answer might have embarrassed him. Burnham will not publish because vagueness suits him better than any finding could. If the Prime Minister truly received a clear answer in July, a document exists, and the Intelligence and Security Committee exists precisely to see it. Send it. Let them report to Parliament. Anything less is not candour about the last decade, it is the management of an impression.

How the Russian Bot Narrative Dismisses Leave Voters: But that’s the Aim

This publication campaigned to leave the European Union, and did so from the left. Not from Moscow, and not from Mississippi. From the Bennite argument that those who make the laws must be removable by those who live under them, and that a treaty structure locking in competition policy, state aid rules and the free movement of capital is not a neutral referee but a constitution for neoliberalism. That case was made here for forty years, by Benn, by Shore, by Castle, by Skinner, in pit villages and union halls, long before anyone in St Petersburg had a troll farm.

So when a Labour Prime Minister suggests the referendum was shaped by hostile foreign actors, he is not only insulting 17.4 million people. He is telling his own party something far more dangerous, which is that it need not account for why it lost them. If Leigh and Grimsby and Stoke voted as they did because of bots, there is no reckoning to be had over Iraq, over the pits, over the yards, over thirteen years in office that left wages flat and the heartlands hollow. If Reform’s rise is a Kremlin operation rather than a bill coming due, nobody in Labour has to read the bill.

The timing is not subtle either. This arrives as the Prime Minister prepares a difficult argument for closer alignment with Brussels, a month after he mused that Britain could one day consider rejoining, while Emily Thornberry floats the idea that a manifesto line could do the work of a second referendum. If the vote was tainted, the vote is lighter. Nobody has to say the result was illegitimate. The impression does the work, and the retraction keeps the fingerprints clean.

QUANTIFY IT 

Set the question of whether Russia tried to one side, and grant the Prime Minister everything he implied. Then answer the question that follows at once. How much? Influence has never been a quantity anyone has learned to measure. There is no unit for it, no baseline to measure against, and no way of separating a mind changed by a foreign account from a mind changed by a neighbour, a newspaper, a closed factory or thirty years of being ignored. The researchers who do this work for a living are candid about it. That is why Common Consultancy had to build a control from each account’s own posting history before it could say anything at all about the AfD, and why the honest finding was that nothing measurable had happened. 

Then look at who actually decided it. Lord Ashcroft’s referendum-day polling found 73 per cent of 18 to 24 year olds voting Remain, a majority of every age group over 45 voting Leave, and 60 per cent of the over-65s. The vote was carried by the oldest cohort in the country. These were people who had been arguing about Europe since the 1975 referendum, through Maastricht, through the ERM, through the Lisbon Treaty that no one was permitted to vote on. Their position was thirty years in the making, and they were the group least present on the platform where the troll farms are said to live. The suggestion is that a reply from a fake account changed minds that four decades of British politics had failed to change. 

Suppose, though, that it could be counted, and the answer came back at three per cent, or half of one. What then? There is no mechanism in British law that subtracts foreign influence from a result. The only coherent remedy is to annul the vote and hold it again, which is precisely the thing that nobody who raises this will say out loud. The claim is not made in order to be acted upon. It is made in order to hang there. 

And when a case does come with the receipts attached, the picture is not the one Westminster expects. In October 2020, Twitter under its former ownership blocked the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, locked the newspaper’s account and stopped the link being shared in private messages. Jack Dorsey later accepted the decision was wrong. The internal exchanges published as the Twitter Files showed staff could find no evidence the material had been hacked, which was the stated ground for suppressing it. Fifty-one former intelligence officials signed a letter saying the affair carried the marks of a Russian information operation. Michael Morell, the former acting CIA director who organised that letter, later told the House Judiciary Committee that the idea had been prompted by Antony Blinken, then an adviser to the Biden campaign. The material was authentic. The Russian operation was the letter. 

That is as documented as information control ever gets: named people, dated emails, a public apology. And still nobody can tell you what it was worth in votes. Not its authors, not its critics, not this paper. If the best evidenced case of suppression in the social media era cannot be converted into a margin, the ghost in the 2016 machine certainly cannot. Influence is the one charge that can never be disproved. That is exactly why it appeals to people who have lost an argument.

WHAT FOLLOWS THE STORY 

At the UN, Burnham announced a National Centre for Information Defence, a new state body to counter hostile information attacks. Be clear about the sequence. An unevidenced claim about the last referendum, abandoned by its author within two days, forms part of the public case for permanent machinery to police the information space before the next one. Nobody has explained who decides what counts as a hostile narrative, who audits that judgement, or what happens when the people being defended from disinformation turn out to be the people the government finds inconvenient. Ask Ian Shilling. Ask the Institute for Statecraft. Those are not technical questions. They are the whole question.

Russia does real harm to this country, and a serious government would fight it with published evidence, named findings and institutions that can be held to account. Burnham had that chance on Sunday. Instead he offered a rumour with a red box around it, and when the country asked to see the working, he told Parliament he had never meant it. Publish the assessment or withdraw the claim. Send it to the Intelligence and Security Committee, where it belongs, and let them tell Parliament what the security services actually said in July. Until then this was not a revelation about Moscow. It was an alibi for Westminster, and a licence for every lazy partisan in the country to answer an argument they cannot win by telling a working man he does not exist. They would sooner you believe that the heartlands were hacked than admit that they were abandoned.

Beyond The Line

Since 21 September 2025, the United Kingdom has recognised Palestine as a sovereign state. That state is at peace with His Majesty, and the State of Israel is at war with it. Enlistment by a British citizen in the Israeli Defense Forces is therefore a criminal offence under the Foreign Enlistment Act 1870. Any policy of not prosecuting dual nationals who had been conscripted would still not be the law, and anyone else would be bang to rights. Or do we have two-tier justice? Britain has named and condemned the Israeli ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, an ideology that gave rise to ethnic cleansing must by definition be racist, Britain has welcomed the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Navi Pillay, Pillay chaired the Commission of Inquiry that found Israel to be committing genocide in Gaza, an ideology that gave rise to genocide must by definition be racist, and Hamza Yusuf, Dania Akkad, Shaimaa Marwan and Phil Miller write:

A British man fought for the Israeli army in Gaza when war crimes appear to have been committed, a four-month investigation by Declassified has found. Jonathan Burman, who is in his mid-20s and from Manchester, posted photographs on his Instagram account showing him fighting in Khan Younis early in the conflict. Newly discovered images show Burman standing in front of a primary school in Gaza that had been set on fire, as a fellow soldier smiles beside him. They were posted on his private Instagram account in January 2024, six weeks after the Israeli army violently occupied the school.

The photographs were shared exclusively with Declassified by a source seriously concerned by Burman’s behaviour. It comes as a UN commission said that any Israeli soldier who fought in Gaza after October 2023 should be considered a war crimes suspect. Analysis of Israeli army documents links Burman to a unit that repeatedly destroyed residential buildings in Gaza. A former Israeli soldier who served in the same battalion as Burman and left Gaza on ethical grounds told Declassified that it was an “absolute apocalypse”.

“You could just go and do whatever you want…You could burn down those houses and have no consequences whatsoever,” he said. Under the fourth Geneva Convention, which Israel has ratified, the “extensive destruction…of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly” constitutes a war crime. An Israeli military spokesperson claimed that weapons were found in the school in Burman’s photographs but could only produce video footage from a raid on a different school in Gaza. Burman did not respond to a request for comment.

The burning school

Burman’s photographs are believed to have been taken at Al-Farabi primary school in the Bani Suheila district of Khan Younis, southern Gaza, according to six witnesses and experts interviewed by Declassified. Palestinian civilians who sheltered at the school early in the war told Declassified they believed it would provide safety as it was run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Satellite imagery from November 2023 shows the school’s playground covered in white tarpaulins and the initials “UN” clearly visible on the roof.

However, the civilians said they had to flee the site in mid-December 2023 when the Israeli army moved in. Ayman Sahmoud, 56, said he and his family sought shelter at the school that month after being forced to flee their home under relentless bombardment and Israeli evacuation orders. “We left our home with nothing,” he recalled. “We abandoned everything behind us. When we arrived at the school, it was already overflowing with displaced families…We could barely find a place to sleep.”

Sahmoud described the days he spent inside the school as among the hardest of the war. The bombardment, he said, never ceased. The force from repeated airstrikes at a plot adjacent to the school constantly shook the building. Satellite imagery shows the area around the school was systematically demolished. “After some time, the Israeli military bombed the school’s main gate,” he said. “Two people were killed right before our eyes. At that moment, we understood the message was clear: we had to evacuate the school completely.”

He said Israeli aircraft dropped leaflets ordering all displaced residents to leave immediately, forcing his family and many others to flee once again, this time toward the city of Rafah, leaving behind most of their belongings. According to Sahmoud, some families had nowhere else to go and remained inside the school until Israeli forces surrounded the area and compelled them to leave.

‘Survived by a miracle’ 

Randa Abu Assi, 42, remained inside the school until the very last moments in December 2023, despite the intensifying bombardment around it. She said the airstrikes targeting the nearby plot of land were so intense that shrapnel tore through the school building, injuring several displaced people sheltering inside. “My foot was struck by shrapnel,” she said. “My son, Bahaa, 21 years old, was also wounded by shrapnel that remains lodged in both of his legs to this day.” Randa explained that many families gradually left the school, while she and a small number of displaced people remained until staying there became impossible. “We fled under fire and survived by a miracle,” she said, adding that they later learned Israeli forces had stormed the school on 12 December 2023.

Arabic news reports corroborate her account of Israeli troops entering the school on that date. Al Jazeera journalist Ismail Abu Omar wrote on Telegram the following day: “Last night, [Israeli] occupation forces released the citizens they had detained and arrested from Al-Farabi School in Bani Suheila, east of Khan Yunis, while keeping three individuals in custody. “Those released had been subjected to heavy gunfire inside the school and recounted the brutality and harshness of the occupation soldiers’ treatment; they were blindfolded, forced to strip off their clothes in the cold weather, made to walk long distances barefoot, and subjected to insults and profanity.” Another journalist, Muthanna Al-Najjar, reported on Telegram that Palestinians detained in the school described “atrocious and brutal treatment” by Israeli soldiers. 

Geolocation 

The school is beyond the ‘Yellow Line’ in Gaza, meaning it is still occupied by the Israeli military following last year’s ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas. This made it too dangerous for Declassified to visit the school in person, however Sahmoud, Abu Assi and a third witness all confirmed that the building seen in Burman’s photograph was Al-Farabi School. The third witness, Duha Abu Assi, 28, said her family sheltered there later in the conflict, until they were forced to evacuate in May 2025. Her brother, Hamada, was killed by Israeli forces as he left the school while trying to find food as a famine unfolded in Gaza. She provided a photograph taken of her brother before his death. The background shows part of the walls of Al-Farabi school, along with some of the same distinctive graffiti in Burman’s photo.

Along with verification by multiple witnesses in Gaza, Declassified showed the photo of Burman posing at the school to three geolocation experts, who all identified it as Al-Farabi school. They used a video filmed by Reuters in April 2024 of a wrecked school in Khan Younis with the same graffiti seen in Burman’s photo and matched the unusual layout of that school to satellite imagery of Gaza. Ryan Geitner from Airwars said: “Reviewing footage from Reuters and the photos posted to social media, we have a high level of certainty that this is the same location. Satellite imagery indicates that the school suffered major damage in the months after November 2023, signs of which are visible in both sets of material.”

Different school 

Jonathan Burman and the Israeli Embassy in London did not respond to a request for comment about his photographs, but Declassified put our findings to the IDF’s international press desk. In a phone call, an IDF spokeswoman referred us to a bulletin the army had issued on 13 December 2023 about the 55th Brigade’s Reconnaissance Battalion. It said “A terrorist cell operating inside a school in Khan Yunis was elimintated [sic] by the IDF…During the operation, the troops engaged with a terrorist cell that fired at the troops with firearms and RPG style anti-tank missiles. The troops killed the terrorists during the battle. In the area of the school, the troops located long-range rockets and an underground combat compound. Furthermore, IDF troops directed an IAF [Israeli Air Force] strike on the compound, and additional observation and control centers belonging to the Hamas terrorist organization.”

The spokeswoman included a link to “video footage of the activity in the school”. Airwars reviewed the video for Declassified and geolocated the footage to a different school, 1.9km north east of Al-Farabi, called Imam Muhammad bin Saleh Al-Uthaymeen private school. It means the IDF has not provided any evidence to explain or justify why Al-Farabi school was in flames when the photographs of Burman were taken there. Further analysis by the Hind Rajab Foundation of where Burman’s unit was deployed in Gaza suggests he may not have been stationed at the school until 8 January 2024. This would suggest the school was set alight several weeks after the IDF had cleared it of Palestinians. Under the Geneva Convention, the “extensive destruction of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly” constitutes a war crime.

‘A wild west’ 

The damage to Al-Farabi school is not the only incident of concern that Burman might have been involved with. Another photo he posted and captioned “Khan Yunis” shows him on one knee with a rifle in his hand, amid the rubble of residential houses with a bed strewn on its side and a partially buried toddler bike. His boots are a shade of red, a colour associated with Israeli paratroopers. The IDF’s press office indicated to Declassified that Burman was from the 55th Reserve Paratrooper Brigade, which is known as “the tip of the spear”.

This assessment was confirmed by the Hind Rajab Foundation, who analysed Israeli army documents and found evidence suggesting Burman was in the 55th Brigade’s 66th Battalion, B company. Yuval Green served in this same battalion as a medic. While he was in a different company and does not recall meeting Burman, Green has important insight into the battalion’s mindset. The 66th Battalion’s commander Ofir Adani gave a speech before they entered Gaza in which he told his men: “I want you to be angry. I want you to rage. I want you to have a deep sense of revenge. Anyone who messes with us should die. He and his family. And his relatives. And everyone who supported him.” 

Green remembers hearing this speech at the time and explained: “When you look at the atmosphere of Israel after the 7th October, everything went nuts. People have been apathetic towards the suffering of Palestinians for so long, they had no idea what was going on in Gaza. And the way people spoke after this was just insane. And they’re speaking about killing all the Gazans. Some of the people just really are driven by crazy, insane religious ideas. They’re extremists who believe that Jews should live everywhere around ancient Israel. And this was just an opportunity for them to kill as many Gazans as they can and kick them out and get their lands. They’re saying this quite clearly.”

Green said that as well as Adani giving several speeches like this, Ezra Yachin, a 98-year-old who was involved in a Zionist militia’s 1948 Deir Yassin massacre of Palestinians, gave a speech to his company before they entered Gaza. “This guy comes to us, a group of soldiers, and he’s just telling the story of how he massacred villagers…and no one blinks an eye. And I think this shows you very very well what type of atmosphere we’ve had before we went into Gaza. The writing was on the wall.” Although we do not have a recording of Yachin’s speech, there is footage from another incident where this “motivational speaker” told soldiers: “Erase them, their families, mothers and children. These animals can no longer live.”

When asked how he felt seeing photos of Jonathan Burman in front of the burning school, Green said he “felt awful. [It] really takes me back to one of the worst times of my life. This destruction is just so difficult to see. Look at their smiles. It’s just, you know, that’s the first time they’re burning down a building. For them, it’s some type of a crazy experience. And they don’t think about the consequences because it’s a place without rules.” When asked if burning a school could be justified had the IDF found weapons there, Green responded: “I personally don’t think so. You know, I don’t. Is it helpful to burn down a school? Ever?” 

While Green did not personally see schools being attacked, he did see widespread damage to residential properties. “Fifty days after we went into Gaza, they’re telling us to burn down the houses we were at. And I go to my commander and ask him, why are we burning down those houses? And he has no good answer. Absolutely no good answer. If you were to destroy a house in London, you live in a country of law. You live in an organized country. No one can just go and burn down the house. But this war zone is a wild west. No rules. Absolute apocalypse. So you could just go and do whatever you want. You can go and steal whatever you want from those houses. You could burn down those houses and have no consequences whatsoever. And I went to him and I told him, if we’re burning down those houses, I’m leaving the next day. I’m not willing to be a part of it. This is the last straw. And, that’s what happened. They burnt down the houses. I went back, and this was it.”

Burman’s war

Despite the 55th Brigade’s apparent pattern of destruction, Burman’s photos on Instagram show him relaxing, laughing, playing musical instruments and enjoying food and drink with other soldiers. On 31 December 2023, he posted a picture of him in his military uniform sitting on an armchair in what appears to be the ruins of a house, with the caption “happy new year”. The location he places is the “Gaza Strip”. He reflected on his time in the military on 31 January 2024 in an Instagram post where he said “I’ve been out of Gaza for a few days now.”

Israeli Army Radio reported that the 55th Brigade had been withdrawn from Gaza on 28 January 2024, with footage emerging on social media that day apparently showing them driving out of the strip. As well as fighting in Gaza, he appears to have fought in Lebanon and Syria as well. On 23 November 2024, he posted a picture looking over some valleys, locating it as Lebanon. In another post from the next day, he is seen sitting at a balcony with his weapon by his side, sipping a coffee. “Always time for a coffee”, reads the caption, making clear the photo was taken in Lebanon.

Meanwhile, a post on 6 October 2025 shows him in Syria. The timing of his deployments are consistent with the 55th Brigade. His involvement in Gaza has ostensibly not hindered his ability to return to Britain and watch his favourite club. On 17 May this year, his social media showed he attended a match at Old Trafford, Manchester United’s home ground. Burman seemingly grew up in Manchester, attending Altrincham Grammar School for Boys until graduating in summer 2018. He moved to Israel in 2019 and joined the IDF.

‘Almost confessional’

Burman is among more than 2,000 British nationals who served in the Israeli army during the genocide in Gaza, as recently revealed by Declassified. The UK government does not track British nationals that served, and returning soldiers have not been questioned about their activities. The Metropolitan Police recently declined to investigate 10 British nationals accused of committing war crimes in Gaza, before making a U-turn and reopening a probe into four of them. More than 25,000 people have signed a letter calling for the UK government to track the movements of Britons who have served in the Israeli army, screen them at ports of entry, and support thorough war crimes investigations. The public letter has been signed by prominent human rights experts, politicians, activists, lawyers, journalists, including Zack Polanski and Jeremy Corbyn. Green told Declassified:

“When I look outside of Israel now, I see many people furious with Israel. And for good reason. It’s also easy from their perspective to confuse between supporting Palestine and supporting the end of the suffering in Gaza and the West Bank and actually supporting terror. But I say, please don’t choose to support the violence. What happened on the 7th October has been one of the biggest traumas of our life. It has started this new horrible wave of violence. This is not the solution. Resisting in this way is not the right solution.” 

This means Palestinians must rely on international institutions to deliver them justice. Chris Sidoti is an Australian human rights lawyer who serves on the UN’s Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory. In this role he has worked alongside Nobel Peace Prize winner Navi Pillay. Sidoti told us:

“The methodology that Declassified UK has used is exactly the methodology that we use in conducting our own investigations. We have found that there are very large numbers of digital material published by Israeli soldiers or soldiers serving with the Israeli forces about their exploits. The boastfulness of these soldiers is quite incredible but they produce material like the material that you describe that put themselves at places where war crimes have been committed or at least serious events have occurred that give rise to the possibility of war crimes, crimes against humanity and post it openly on social media accounts. So that information is important information, it’s almost confessional information and in many cases it is confessional. I note that you’re not saying this person is guilty of war crimes, we don’t say that either, we say that the evidence is sufficient to support further investigation and prosecution where warranted. I think that’s exactly correct.”

Sidoti said the Met police’s war crimes unit should now be looking into Jonathan Burman, commenting: “There is the obligation that when this person is within the jurisdiction of that state there should be an investigation and prosecution when warranted.”

Liberal Arts

Lack of coverage is lack of scrutiny, so it was welcome to see Mike Martin on Newsnight. Intelligence Corps, Political Officer in Helmand Province, commissioned to write a PhD on the conflict, ordered not to publish it because it was so critical, resigned his commission to publish it anyway, and now an MP for the Liberal Democrats. In general, though, since they have far more seats in the House of Commons than all smaller parties and Independents put together, most or all of which they are predicted to retain, and since they lead more councils than the Conservatives, then the Lib Dems are scandalously under-scrutinised. But at least David Maddox writes:

The Lib Dems are attempting to evict a 71-year-old founding member of the party who is suffering from incurable cancer from her home to pay its legal bill in a dispute against her. Jo Hayes was a member of the party for 34 years, served on the party’s federal board and was regional chair for the East of England. She is due to appear at the county court in Chelmsford on Wednesday where the party will ask the judge to evict her from her home so it can be sold.

Ms Hayes, a barrister, has been diagnosed with multiple myeloma, an incurable cancer of blood plasma cells, and has told The Independent that she is fearful of being left homeless if she is evicted. She said: “It is worrying because I can’t think of a landlord who’d particularly want me as a tenant, since I’ve got all these health problems, and I don’t terribly want to fall over and break something because it won’t heal.”

The dispute began after Ms Hayes was expelled in 2022 shortly before she was due to stand in the election to be the party’s federal president after a complaint by the then incumbent president Lord Mark Pack who was subsequently reelected for a second term. The expulsion happened after she had questioned some of the party’s policies on issues relating to the Equalities Act in regards to trans rights. Ms Hayes attempted to challenge her expulsion but failed to get it overturned in the high court and now the party is pursuing costs. She told The Independent that she still denies the claims against her but was unable to challenge those in the court hearing.

The party has suffered a string of legal losses recently including admitting that it had breached the human rights of former award winning BBC journalist David Campanale when the Sutton and Cheem constituency party deselected him for being a Christian ahead of the 2024 election. A judge is set to consider damages awarded to Mr Campanale in January. The party also lost in court against Natale Bird, a domestic abuse survivor, and was forced to pay her damages of £14,000 after barring her from being a candidate for Wakefield over her gender critical views. The party was also forced to allow Liberal Voice for Women back into its conference. And the party was also sued for discrimination by one of its former councillors Avril Coelho, a disability activist who was expelled.

Ms Hayes will argue that the party is pursuing her because it is faced with bills for damages against others. She said: “The party thought I was rich so were surprised that I did not just have the money which is why they put a charge on my house. They should have know that I wasn’t wealthy given the amount of pro bono work I did for them.” She will also complain that the party chose to use some of the most expensive lawyers in its cases. She said: “One of the things I would have done had I been president would have been to resolve these cases and not use such expensive lawyers.”

Ms Hayes maintains that a liberal party should be able to contain both trans activists and those with gender critical views. “The problem is that it is not a liberal party any more,” she said. She has accused Sir Ed Davey of “weak leadership” and has claimed that the party is “run by a clique.” A Lib Dem spokesperson said: “This is an ongoing legal case so it would not be appropriate to comment.”

Crime and Security, Defence

Archived here, it is pointedly Rebecca Camber, Crime and Security Editor and Mark Nicol, Defence Editor who write in the Daily Mail:

An Oxford University lecturer who was in a relationship with Tory peer Michael Gove is facing trial on child abuse image charges. Dr Lola Salem, 33, who until recently was the girlfriend of the former Cabinet minister, has been charged with possessing multiple indecent photographs of a child. She has now been suspended by Oxford’s Oriel College, where she has been a lecturer in music since 2022. This means she is no longer allowed to teach students at either Oriel or Wadham and St Catherine’s Colleges, where she previously lectured in French.

She has pleaded not guilty to the offences. There was a short procedural hearing in her case at Oxford Crown Court on September 30, at which a date for her trial was set in March 2028. Salem was the girlfriend of Lord Gove for more than two years. But the Daily Mail’s Eden Confidential diary revealed earlier this month that they had split. Lord Gove confirmed to the Mail last night: ‘We are no longer in a relationship.’ News of their romance emerged when the pair arrived together at The Spectator summer party in July 2024, shortly before the Tory peer was named editor of the magazine. Months later, the 59-year-old former Cabinet minister, who is 25 years older than Salem, was photographed kissing her at the London celebrity hotspot J Sheekey. The alleged offences took place before Lord Gove met Salem.

Salem has been charged with having in her possession between May 19, 2021 and February 13, 2023 three category B indecent images of children, which is the second most serious type. She is also accused of having a less serious category C indecent image of a child between April 6, 2021 and February 13, 2023. The academic denied the charges at a pre-trial hearing earlier this year and remains on bail ahead of her trial, which is expected to last two to three days. It is understood that she will argue in her defence that she was sent the four images unsolicited and that she reported them to the police.

Salem was charged by Thames Valley Police in May this year along with Henry Hopwood-Phillips, a historian and geopolitical analyst with whom she worked at The Critic magazine. Hopwood-Phillips, 39, founded a Singapore-based political consultancy that specialises in analysing China’s geopolitics. In June he admitted two counts of taking an indecent photograph and two counts of distributing indecent photographs of a child at High Wycombe Magistrates’ Court. He was handed a 15-month suspended sentence, a sexual harm prevention order and made subject to lifetime sex offender notification requirements.

Born in France, Salem was a talented singer as a child and trained at Maîtrise de Radio France, a prestigious children's choir school operated by the French public broadcaster. She was educated in Paris, excelling in her musicology studies at the École Normale Supérieure before taking an aesthetics and art philosophy degree at La Sorbonne, where she won a young scholar prize. Salem then moved to Oxford to obtain a PhD [it is not called that at Oxford, bah!] in music, specialising in how female singers shaped operatic repertoire and institutional practice at the Paris Opera, before she became a Marshall Research Fellow. Between 2021 and 2023, she worked as head of development at the Canterbury Institute, an independent centre for research and learning in Oxford, before lecturing in French at Wadham and St Catherine’s Colleges between 2022 and 2024.

In 2023 she was selected as a Civic Future Fellow and later became a member of the Civic Future Leadership School, an organisation training individuals for potential public office founded by Munira Mirza, the former head of the Downing Street policy unit under Boris Johnson. According to a page listing her achievements on Oriel College’s website, which has since been deleted, Salem has ‘taught music papers across the University of Oxford since 2018’ and is considered an expert on ‘contemporary debates about the governance of the arts and the future of cultural institutions’. She describes herself as a ‘researcher, cultural and institutional strategist’, and on LinkedIn she highlights her relationships with ‘senior decision-makers’ in the UK. A spokesman for Oriel College said: ‘Oriel College was made aware of serious charges against an employee in June 2026. This employee was suspended, pending the outcome of legal proceedings.’

Stop The Rot About Bots

Zack Polanski could not hypnotise women to make their breasts larger, and Vladimir Putin could not hypnotise Britons to vote for Brexit. But Putin has never made any such claim, while Polanski has never been accused of success. If Russia did swing the referendum, then to what effect? Has Britain been noticeably pro-Russian in the last 10 years?

Keir Starmer whipped Labour MPs to vote for the Brexit deal, so was he a Russian asset? As for interference in the 2019 General Election, in what interest? There was an attempt, which felt purely ceremonial and pro forma, to blame the Russians for the leak of the detailed threat to the National Health Service from a UK-US trade agreement negotiated by Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. But would Andy Burnham have supported those terms? In any case, and although the leak probably did prevent the sellout of the NHS, Johnson still won the Election.

Burnham now claims never to have suggested that Russian mind games had decided the referendum for Leave. But we all heard him say it. Not only that, but Ed Davey congratulated him on the floor of the House of Commons for telling a lie that Burnham denied that he had ever told. The Liberal Democrats have far more MPs than all smaller parties and Independents put together, most or all of which they are predicted to hold next time, and they lead more councils than the Conservatives. You do wonder why some Lib Dems wanted a new Leader. And then you see something like that. Still, what the present plotters really want is to abandon support for the triple lock. Think on.