Tawny Owl admonishing her Brownies about their marshmallow toasting skills would have sounded more stern than the Deputy PM
THERE can’t be many laughs to be had working at the Ministry of National Defence on Changan Street, Beijing. Repartee is generally discouraged. Ditto practical jokes. The last clerk to slide a whoopee cushion under the secretary-commissar’s third permanent secretary may now be found counting bricks on the Great Wall of China (Mongolia border section).
Ministry officials go whole decades without cracking a smile. But yesterday should have brought a little light relief. If the Comrades tuned to the right TV channel they will have seen Oliver ‘Olive’ Dowden, British Deputy Prime Minister, making a Commons statement and saying how jolly cross he was about Chinese cyber warfare.
A Brownie pack Tawny Owl admonishing her Brownies about their marshmallowtoasting skills would have sounded more stern. Even the ghastliest waxwork in Changan Street must have started wheezing at wet Olive. Even better, MPs worked themselves into a vortex of indignation, even though the Chinese bugging efforts were a total flop.
Mr Dowden described a ‘persistent pattern’ of Chinese efforts to penetrate MPs’ computer systems. The Electoral Commission was also targeted. Blimey, they must have been desperate. The Electoral Commission is as boring as you can get.
Two Chinese people were going to be sanctioned. Olive also identified a group involved. This outfit was called ‘A.P.T. 31’ and Mr Dowden kept saying the name. As dastardly monikers go, ‘ A.P.T. 31’ is not wildly sinister. It’s not ‘Smersh’ or ‘The Fellowship of the Black Stone’, is it? Sounds more like a country road in the Dordogne. ‘Venetia and Bernard recommended a delightful little bistro near Limeuil off the A.P.T. 31.’ AS
Mr Dowden flapped his hands it became apparent that Red China’s fiendish stratagems had not yet flattened the walls of civilisation. Mr Dowden said they had been ‘entirely unsuccessful’. Oh. So why make a parliamentary statement? Would it not have made more sense to let the Chinese think they had succeeded and instead feed them all sorts of bogus intelligence?
Beijing’s IT aces hadn’t even managed to smuggle past the passwords of Tory backbencher Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) and the SNP’s Stewart McDonald (Glasgow South). Fine fellows both, but neither is exactly Admiral Jellicoe. I may be wrong. Mr Loughton may be one of MI6’s finest but intelligence officers do not normally carry bags of jelly babies in their pockets as he does. As for Mr McDonald, are the Chinese sure they had the right one? There’s another SNP MP called Stewart McDonald. Crafty, eh? One of them must be a spy.
Like Sir Iain Duncan Smith (Con, Chingford), Messrs Loughton and McDonald may have been quietly delighted to have been targeted but had to affect fury. Sir Iain said Mr Dowden sounded like ‘an elephant giving birth to a mouse’. Mr McDonald (Agent Sporran, we call him in the trade) cried that Mr Dowden had ‘turned up at a gunfight with a wooden spoon’.
Olive fanned his face and became a bit squeaky. He spoke of ‘quantumencrypted information’ and ‘powerful computers’ and ‘building tools’. Everyone adopted a terribly serious face. We kept being told the mischief was being done by ‘statesponsored actors’. They can certainly be a confounded nuisance: Brian Blessed, Fiona Shaw, Simon Callow. Labour’s response was led by Pat McFadden, the Gromyko of Wolverhampton. Unremittingly glum. Makes President Xi Jinping look like Sir Ken Dodd. Mr McFadden and a few opposition MPs complained about Lord Cameron being too close to Beijing. The Foreign Secretary later paralysed them with his poison-tipped chopstick.
Sir Michael Ellis (Con, Northampton North), the kingdom’s leading monarchist groveller, produced an almost entirely gratuitous mention of the Royal Family. Alexander Stafford (Con, Rother Valley) hinted that China may want to influence council elections in, er, Rotherham. Dean Russell (Con, Watford) spoke of ‘rumour bombs’. Sir Benjamin Bradshaw (Lab, Exeter) ran a stressy hand through his greying fringe. He’s starting to look like Indira Gandhi. And Suella Braverman complained that China was ‘hostile’. Suella the peace dove!