This one has received a lot of commentary online already – from the Daily Mail, 13 October:
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… was charged by Thames Valley Police in May this year along with Henry Hopwood-Phillips, a historian and geopolitical analyst. They both wrote for the The Critic magazine as freelance contributors.
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.
According to the article, Salem says that she was sent four images (Categories B and C) unsolicited, and that she reported them to the police. However, the backlog means that her defence will not be heard inside a courtroom until March 2028 – a concerning delay of 18 months that is apparently not untypical these days.
It is not clear how much significance we should attach to the description of Hopwood-Phillips as “taking” an indecent photograph, rather than “making” it – the latter term is usually used to refer to creating a copy. In the past day or so he has deleted his “Byzantine Ambassador” website and associated presence on Twitter/X; his writings and those of Salem remain on The Critic website, although in one instance an article that was formerly billed as co-authored is now attributed solely to Hopwood-Phillips. His associations formerly included the Traditional Britain Group, and 10 years ago the BBC News noted his contributions writing “travel and restaurant reviews” for a website, now regarded as a hoax, called Pravda International.
The charges against Salem were first reported on 10 October, but the articles then mysteriously disappeared: Mic Wright notes that pieces were deleted from the websites of the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and GB News, and that an article on LBC went the same way while he was writing.
None of these earlier pieces made the connection to Gove, although it was widely pointed out on social media – not least because of some now-obvious reputational management masquerading as journalism from a couple of weeks beforehand, when it was reported in the Daily Mail‘s gossip column that Gove and Salem had split up “some time ago”. Why were the earlier articles about Salem pulled, and why did such a more detailed account, bringing Hopwood-Phillips into it, then unexpectedly appear on the Daily Mail website a couple of days later? Such anomalies, of course, are manna to conspiracists, who are seldom inhibited by laws against passing prejudicial comment on live legal proceedings.
An article by Salem has also been deleted from the website of The Spectator, of which Gove is the editor – this was noted by Popbitch, under an intro that referred to “scandalous stories that won’t disappear off the internet for mysterious and nefarious reasons”. Salem has linked to it from her Substack.
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