The “honeytrap” scandal in Westminster brings to mind Bertrand Russell’s observation about democracy having “at least one merit, namely, that a Member of Parliament cannot be stupider than his constituents, for the more stupid he is, the more stupid they were to elect him”.
For William Wragg’s constituents in Manchester, though, it must come as a consolation to discover that they are not the only ones who could fall for phishing messages, though theirs are more likely to come via email from distressed Nigerian heiresses rather than on encrypted platforms such as WhatsApp, which give its users an illusion of privacy and safety. But while the embarrassment of a few Westminster insiders provides endless opportunities for tabloid amusement, it masks a more serious problem: the way the pathological addiction to WhatsApp of Britain’s ruling elite has undermined democratic institutions and conventions.
One of the most compelling lessons of the Covid experience was seeing what happened when an administration responds to a crisis by resorting to what its critics (and even Boris Johnson’s one-time communications chief) described as “government by WhatsApp”.
In his evidence to the Covid inquiry, Sir David Omand (a former head of GCHQ and one-time permanent secretary at the Home Office) called for an end to reliance on a platform that “might suit gossip and informal exchanges but is inappropriate for important decision-making”. Grownup government and making intelligent strategic choices involves dealing with complexity and nuance. Neither fits neatly into a WhatsApp exchange. This point was underlined by some of the exchanges seen by the inquiry, including one in which Dominic Cummings is complaining to the then prime minister about the tardiness of the rollout of the UK’s Covid testing. Johnson’s reply: “Totally [redacted] hopeless.”
What is also significant is that there was no official record of this conversation, which means that Britain’s hitherto excellent system for keeping public records of discussions within government between ministers, civil servants and their advisers is being undermined.
When future historians working on this period in the UK go to the Public Records Office, they may find inexplicable gaps in the documentary record. Even more extraordinary is that the Cabinet Office insistence in 2021 that ministers and civil servants are required by policy to set instant messaging chats to delete automatically still stands, having survived an appeal for judicial review in 2022.
Perhaps the targets of the honeytrap “spear-phishing” exploits were unaware of this. More likely, though, is that many MPs and policymakers innocently believe that moving their exchanges from email to WhatsApp means that they are free from the torment of freedom of information requests. If that is indeed what they think, then the Information Commissioner’s Office has bad news for them: they’re not.
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