Tweet by Sarah Helm, wife of national security adviser Jonathan Powell, ‘does not meet criminal threshold’

No further action will be taken against Sarah Helm, the wife of the prime minister’s national security adviser, after she was accused of supporting the banned protest group Palestine Action.

Helm, a journalist and author who is married to Jonathan Powell, posted on X on Thursday: “God help us authors who support Palestine and Palestine Action.”

Author Sarah Helm, married to Jonathan Powell, wrote to back novelist Sally Rooney’s support of proscribed direct action group

The UK’s national security adviser, Jonathan Powell, is under pressure to distance himself from a comment made by his wife, the award-winning writer Sarah Helm, in support of Palestine Action.

The post was made in defence of the critically acclaimed Irish novelist Sally Rooney, who said she had been forced to pull her books from shelves in the UK after pledging proceeds from their sales to Palestine Action.

The Normal People author’s determination to support Palestine Action, even if it means that her books are withdrawn from sale in the UK, makes a mockery of Britain’s terrorism laws

It’s hard to think of a published author in living memory who risked arrest in the UK for their political beliefs, hard to think of one whose books could be published anywhere but here. Sally Rooney went into this debacle with her eyes open: she said last July that royalties from her books, and their BBC adaptations, would be used to support Palestine Action.

Rooney’s courage is not so much in risking imprisonment, since there is a fix for that, which is what she’s doing – avoiding the UK. Rather, she has chosen the thorniest possible path for this cause. Authors can write essays and sign letters in support of the Palestinian people; actors can voice it in interviews, musicians can say it from the stage, and there is always a cost to it, whether it’s in plain sight and they’ve been kicked off a global tour, or it’s behind closed doors and they are simply excluded from opportunities. But such actions, even if they logically suggest support for a proscribed organisation, don’t entail actively breaking the terrorism laws. Rooney had taken a financial hit anyway, by pledging support for Palestine Action with her royalties; but that’s a price at least you can count. The lost sales and opportunities that ripple out from being effectively both barred from and banned in the UK are innumerable.