Ian Williams

It is widely acknowledged that Britain has some of the world’s finest cyber capabilities. GCHQ is a global leader in those dark arts, and its offshoot, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), is making that expertise available to businesses and others in need of help with their digital defences. All the more shocking, then, that our political leaders seem so utterly clueless. They have pledged to make Britain the ‘safest place in the world to be online’, but instead are running around like stars in a digital age ‘Carry On’ movie. Exhibit number one is Matt Hancock.

Days after a nuclear power plant began spewing deadly radiation, the ruling Communist party pushed ahead with a huge and self-indulgent celebration of the sort that had become a hallmark of its rule. This was no time for bad news, and the party delayed, dithered and hid the truth about the deadly events that were unfolding.  That was the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. Soviet leaders allowed Kiev’s International Workers’ Day celebrations to go ahead. The participants, meanwhile, were oblivious to events at the stricken reactor just 60 miles away.

There can have been no more avid viewers of the CCTV footage of Matt Hancock’s snog and grope than China’s cyber spies, chuckling in some dark room in Beijing and asking each other, how can it have been so easy for somebody to obtain? MI5 seems to be asking itself the same question. Three days after the photographs and video were first published, it appears that nobody knows for sure how it was done. Did it come from somebody with access to the feed who downloaded it or filmed it on the screen with a mobile phone? Or was the camera hacked, because the dirty little secret of these devices is that they are not at all secure? Equally as worrying is Hancock’s claim that he didn’t even know there was a camera in his office.