It's almost as if I hadn't already posted the links to the Employment Tribunal and High Court judgements on gov.uk and bailii.org in my original post 
I will also repeat that, IMHO, there is no reason why knowledge of this background should detract from the work that Hopkins did at the MoJ, her persistence in trying to get the the Prison Service to recognise that the SOTP was doing more harm than good and her achievement in bringing it to public attention via her Employment Tribunal against the MoJ.
I stumbled across the Liverpool Echo article (the original, not the archived version) last year and was staggered. Like PP I thought it could not be true and that Hopkins must have been "fitted up" to discredit her. So I went looking for the court documents referred to in the article.
That is when the peculiar timeline struck me.
Although information about Hopkins's arrest became public knowledge in 2020 and her case against the MoJ was in 2019 (Aha! they seek to discredit her after she has embarrassed them in court!) her arrest was in 2018, two years after she had left the MoJ and a year before she took the MoJ to an Employment Tribunal.
So the "fitted up to discredit her after she embarrassed them" theory is not supported by the timeline.
Unless I have missed something, there is also nothing in the 2020 Judgement to suggest that Hopkins disputes that on 29 July 2018:
"(she) hired a car under HMRC corporate policy and, when the car was stopped by the Police later that day due to it being driven erratically, a 15-year-old male who did not hold a driving licence, was not insured to drive the car, and was under the influence of cannabis, was driving the car. Hopkins was in the rear of the car at the time."
When Merseyside Police arrest her on August 15, 2018, it is on suspicion of paying a schoolboy aged 13-15 for sexual services and three other offences relating to the July 29th incident.
But by Sept 2020, two years later and after taking both the MoJ and HMRC to court in high profile cases, the police were still "investigating" and she had not been charged with anything.
Rather than being "fitted up", was she being protected? Or is it normal for a case involving "suspicion" of sexual abuse of a drugged child in a Government vehicle to take over two years to be investigated?
If Hopkins had been male and the child had been female, would some PP be so keen to hand-wave away these allegations, with "I thank you Keith/Kevin/whatever Hopkins. May your torch be ever on to shine light in dark corners."
Really?
The allegation is that Hopkins is a "John" and, since we do not talk of "child prostitution" on FWR, that she sexually abused a drugged child.
This does not take away from what she did to expose the failings of SOTA and the culture within the MoJ and Prison Service and those achievements were rightly celebrated at the time. She had some bottle to take that case against the MoJ with these allegations hanging over her.
(By contrast, her case against HMRC was completely irrational.)
What I want to know is: what happened next?
Did the Police close the case without bringing any charges?
Is she still waiting to know if charges will be brought?
Has she been charged and is awaiting trial?
If it went to trial, what was the outcome?
I suppose we might never know, unless the Liverpool Echo decides to do some digging.