Senior politicians like Truss and Braverman are taking risks with digital security

Editorial: It is too late for most of them to face any kind of censure. But not for all

One doubts whether, even now, many of them really think they’ve done anything wrong. But they most certainly have (AP/Getty)

Tony Blair didn’t get his first mobile phone until after he’d left office in 2007. A year later, on becoming president, Barack Obama was asked to give up his Blackberry and refused. Hillary Clinton, as is rather well known, occasionally used her own private email account.

While he was prime minister, Boris Johnson carried on using the same mobile phone number he has had for decades. It was well known to practically everyone in politics and the media, who had been texting him on it for years, and had been hiding in plain sight on some corner of the internet. He is, apparently, using it again now.

Suella Braverman has not merely been emailing classified documents to people who are not cleared to see them, via her private Gmail account. She has also been accidentally emailing said documents to people she did not even intend to send them to, and then sending a follow-up email asking them to “delete and ignore”.

And now we learn that Liz Truss’s mobile phone was hacked by Russian agents, who will have been able to read its contents. We do not know precisely what these comprised, but we do know that for most of her time as foreign secretary she was plotting to become prime minister, so it is likely that Vladimir Putin and his pals have read messages that are deeply embarrassing to the now ex-PM.

On Sunday morning, Michael Gove was made to look rather foolish when he repeated the claim that Ms Braverman had been completely upfront about her email-based error, only to be shown further emails from the then (and now once more) home secretary that make her account of events near impossible to believe, by demonstrating that she did not come clean, but rather was caught.

Mr Gove has form of his own in this regard. While education secretary, he and his team, including Dominic Cummings, would email each other from private Gmail accounts. One can well understand the temptation. Digital conversations have to a large extent replaced actual conversations, but government emails can all be subject to freedom of information requests. It is, on a human level, not surprising that senior politicians and their advisers might wish to have digital conversations that remain private.

But they should also understand that the risks are not small. That security does matter, and that hostile actors are all over this stuff, and the prizes they might find are large.

Ms Truss did not want to sack Ms Braverman. Her doing so was a key moment in the destabilisation of her premiership, which ended the following day. She was sacked because her transgressions were not unserious, and the subsequent attempts – by Rishi Sunak, among others – to play down the seriousness of what she had done only served to render the government itself unserious.

The question that has arisen in light of the news of Ms Truss’s mobile phone hack is whether or not she ignored security advice and chose to take her phone to Moscow. No answer has yet been forthcoming.

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These are not trifling matters. People in senior positions of power should understand very clearly the risks they are taking, and they should not take them. One doubts whether, even now, many of them really think they’ve done anything wrong. But they most certainly have.

It is too late for most of them to face any kind of censure. But not for all. It is well known that Ms Braverman is back at the Home Office not because Mr Sunak “believes in second chances” or “redemption”, as other ministers have claimed. She is there because she backed him in the leadership contest, and had she not done so, he might very well not have won it.

People are not stupid. If the prime minister wishes to minimise the damaging effects of this saga, he would be wise to be entirely honest about it: to spell out precisely what his home secretary did and, more importantly, what measures he has taken to ensure that it won’t happen again, and that any further breaches receive proper sanction.

The gradual, very public collapse of phoney stories is what did for Mr Sunak’s predecessor. He should not make the same mistake.