Text gaffes? I can teach the PM a thing or two

OH DEAR, those darned text messages are causing trouble again. First David Cameron was placed in the stocks for his begging Greensill messages. Now they’ve jumped out to bite Boris. He must be yearning for those days of W. H. Auden’s Night Mail when ‘the chatty, the catty, the boring, adoring, the cold and official and the heart’s outpouring’ were safely contained on paper.

The PM’s amusingly unenthusiastic text comments about Matt Hancock’s performance in the early days of the pandemic – summed up as ‘f****** hopeless’ – may have been dragged out by his old mucker Dom Cummings as supposed evidence of the chaos of No 10. But, frankly, who has not run into problems with our digital comms, knowing there’s a minefield lurking on someone’s phone if they choose to share it.

Only yesterday I pinged off a text to someone thinking he alone would read it, only to discover I had mistakenly sent it as a group text. Moments later an unintended recipient replied: ‘Not for me I think?’ Fortunately, on this occasion, I was only banging on about train timetables but that’s not always been the case when I’ve sent something to the wrong person.

I once shared my views by email on an Italian fashion house who were threatening to pull their advertising out of Vogue if we didn’t run a massive story on them. I included a number of choice phrases about their bullying tactics.

The email was intended for a colleague but instead I’d sent it straight to the designers’ inbox, and still remember the sense of icy horror when I realised the mistake. It certainly wasn’t a moment for a jokey ‘Whoops!’

Surely most of us have been guilty of sending something off, misspelt and ungrammatical, in the heat of the moment using words which, with more consideration, we might have realised were less than wise.

In my rational moments I remember the sage advice to never send emails or texts at night but rather wait, reread them in the morning and ask: Does this still seem like a good idea?

However, an equal number of times I have woken to find a bruised response to something I sent off around midnight with the utter conviction that the better part of a bottle of wine tends to bring.