Home Office mentors are gathering information on their clients in “confidential” deradicalisation meetings and sharing it with police to investigate the people they are counselling.

Paid mentors routinely file an “intervention session report”.

The mentors’ reports provide a “vulnerability assessment” of a client, their “capability” of carrying out a violent act and “new relevant background information”.

This details the personal material that was obtained, including their “susceptibility to indoctrination” and the state of their “mental health”.

The detailed assessments, carried out under the Channel mentoring programme, are part of the government’s Prevent agenda.

“Channel is there to deradicalise and safeguard people from extremism, not serve as a tool for intelligence gathering to advance police investigations into people who we claim to be helping,” a senior Home Office official said.

“These conversations are supposed to be confidential. That is not how the programme should functioning. It’s completely underhand.”

Confidential

The Home Office describes Channel as a “confidential, voluntary safeguarding programme”.

In one case information obtained by a mentor about a mentally ill client was shared with police.

During intervention sessions at Barnet Hospital in north London, Mohammed Hamza Ghani, a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, told his mentor that he downloaded extremist Al Qaeda literature online by using software to prevent him being traced.

When Ghani was arrested in January after making a threatening call to 999, he was confronted with, and admitted to, eight terrorism offences that related to downloading Inspire magazine, an Al Qaeda publication.

Police sought the cooperation of Ghani’s mentor to bolster the criminal case against him. In May he was sentenced to 28 months in prison.

Who feels relieved at the death of Jeffrey Epstein?

Prince Andrew’s child abusing friend is dead. Jeffrey Epstein apparently killed himself in jail a day after the royal was named in court papers detailing the financier’s crimes.

Epstein was awaiting trial accused of abusing and arranging sex with dozens of girls.

He was close friends with the Duke of York during the period he carried out his abuse.

Hundreds of court papers relating to the paedophile’s crimes were released the day before he died. They included documents that alleged Andrew had intimate relations with Epstein’s 17 year old “sex slave” and had groped another woman’s breast.

Prince Andrew is accused of having sex with teenager Virginia Roberts Giuffre. The Duke is further accused of touching the breast of Johanna Sjoberg, then an Epstein victim.

Andrew had allegedly just been presented with a Spitting Image puppet of himself.

The documents also shed some light on the extent of Epstein’s crimes.

One message left in 2005 noted that a girl planned to come to the house later than planned because “she needs to stay in school”.

Alfredo Rodriguez, a former butler who worked for Epstein in 2004 and 2005, testified that he was asked by Epstein to arrange for roses to be sent to the school of a girl who had given massages.

One of those he molested said, “Jeffrey lived his life on his terms and now he’s ended it on his terms too.

“Justice was not served before, and it will not be served now. I hope he rots in hell. The world is now a safer place. There will be a lot of powerful men—and some women—breathing a hefty sigh of relief now that he’s taken their secrets to the grave.”

A Hong Kong boss buys minor royals

Members of the royal family have been paid hundreds of thousands of pounds by a Hong Kong boss.

Zara Tindall, her brother Peter Phillips, and the Duchess of York have forged lucrative ties with Johnny Hon.

Tindall, the queen’s granddaughter, was paid £100,000 a year as a non-executive director of Hon’s Global Group between August 2016 and March last year.

Two weeks ago Phillips, the son of Princess Anne, attended a dinner to launch the Global Group Premier Racing Club in Hong Kong.

The Duchess of York has also worked for Hon. She was paid £72,000 a year from June 2017 to October 2018 to advise on film and entertainment activities.

He is a member of a legislative committee in China’s Heilongjiang province and is vice chairman of Hong Kong’s pro-Chinese government New People’s Party.

Rape victims asked for school records

A rape victim was “put on trial” by police who demanded she give them access to her primary school records from 25 years ago or face having her case dropped.

The woman, 32, was attacked by a stranger as she walked home from a bus stop in London in 2011. Eight years later the DNA profile of a man arrested over another rape matched that of her attacker.

When police came to her house they asked her to sign forms giving detectives access to personal information dating back almost three decades, including her school and university records and confidential therapy notes.

She signed the papers after being told that if she did not, the case could be dropped.

In another case, last year in Newcastle, a sexual assault victim had her school record used against her in court. It stated she had forged her mother’s signature to get out of lessons as a teenager.

Ukip new leader much like the last

Richard Braine has been elected as the new leader of Ukip, receiving 53 percent of the vote. He is the party’s fifth leader in three years. Ukip was wiped out at the European elections in May.

Dick calls his party a “far-moderate voice of common sense”. But he thinks Nazi Tommy Robinson is a “cutting edge free speech advocate”.

Truss in wrong job?

New ministers are asked by staff for likes and dislikes. Liz Truss said she disliked foreign travel and making speeches.

Which will cramp her style somewhat in her role as International Trade Secretary.