Felix Pope

Since he joined the Jewish Chronicle two years ago as a Junior Reporter, Felix Pope has been promoted twice and is now the paper’s Senior Reporter covering news and investigations. Working alongside the paper’s Investigations Editor this year, he helped to uncover a web of Iranian influence in the UK that saw academics on British campuses helping the Islamic regime develop technology that could be used in its drone and fighter jet programmes. Felix trawled through hundreds of academic papers to reveal collaborations between UK-based researchers and sanctioned Iranian institutions and spoke to Iranian military experts to confirm their significance. One publication discovered by him concerning drone engine research had been “supported by” Iran’s Ministry of Science, Research and Technology, whose former minister and current deputy minister are both on the UK sanctions list. Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy said the JC’s revelations were “deeply troubling” while Alicia Kearns MP, chair of the foreign affairs select committee, said she would write to the Education Secretary and Science and Technology Secretary to discuss the JC's report with them. After David Davis MP raised the investigation at Prime Minister’s Questions, Rishi Sunak announced a government inquiry into its findings. In another investigation, Felix revealed that a residential camp for British veterans suffering from PTSD was also a major organising centre of the far-right attended by former soldiers who have shared antisemitic propaganda and threatened armed violence. The JC’s revelations prompted Simon Fell MP, who sits on the home affairs select committee, to demand that the police and Home Office "scrutinise this camp very carefully". The story followed Felix’s splash revelation that Mark Collett, the leader of Patriotic Alternative, Britain’s largest far right group, had triggered calls to “burn down” and “drive out” the Board of Deputies of British Jews after its president visited a migrant camp in France. Since joining the JC, Felix has also travelled across Europe and Israel reporting on foreign affairs and covering the state of the global Jewish community amid war, terrorism, and rising antisemitism. In Poland, he profiled a former leading German neo-Nazi who has since converted to Judaism and renounced hatred. Felix’s interview with Yonatan Langer revealed the rising influence of the European far right and the threat to German democracy posed by extremists. Just weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he travelled to Kyiv and interviewed Jewish leaders about their preparations for war. Since then he has repeatedly met with and interviewed the country’s chief rabbi - in addition to the chief rabbis of Poland, Hungary and Moscow - to chart Putin’s catastrophic impact on eastern Europe’s Jews. In Israel, he reported from the scene of a terror attack; after the Turkish earthquake he was the first journalist to speak to relatives of a killed Jewish leader; when Africa’s oldest synagogue was attacked by a terrorist he interviewed survivors to reveal the Tunisian community’s resilience; and in Manchester he went undercover to expose a campaign of vandalism planned by anti-Israel extremists.