Boris’s mobile seized over MI5 fear of ‘security risk’
BORIS JOHNSON may have conf i ded t hat he t hought Health Secretary Matt Hancock was ‘totally f****** hopeless’ but that also sums up MI5’s view of the PM’s mobile phone habits – which is why the device was confiscated, I can reveal.
Johnson had initially rebuffed pleas from the Cabinet Secretary to change his number. Weeks later, in April, it emerged that number had been freely available on the internet for the previous 15 years.
With Downing Street refusing to say if the personally chaotic PM had acquiesced and changed numbers, it was left to reporters to discover that he done when they found the trusty old one no longer worked. So what happened? I’m told the spooks, fearing a ‘massive security risk’, gave the go-ahead for Boris’s phone to be taken from him within 24 hours of
Numbergate being exposed. MI5 was not concerned over further booty calls from his pole dancer squeeze Jenni f er Arcuri or other deepthroats to whom Bori s may h a v e slipped the number over the years.
But there was certainly concern over a possible hack-attack from hostile states – or even friendly ones such as Saudi Arabia, after Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was suspected of accessing Amazon boss Jeff Bezos’s phone by planting spyware via a WhatsApp message.
But, most of all, I’m told our spies were worried about Johnson’s tendencdency, as last week’s leaks from Dominic Cummings demonstrated, to conduct so much Government business by WhatsApp on that old mobile. ‘ Someone t ook the phone away at t he behest o f t he spooks. They said it was a security risk,’ my source said. The protocol would be to then destroy it, another insider explained. Asked whether the PM’s new phone has any security pr o t e c t i o ns i ns t a l l e d, No10 pressed the mute button. Last night, Downing Street confirmed the PM’s old phone had been ‘taken away’ but insisted it was not done by MI5 but, wait for it, officials. Say no more. ‘ BEING abl e t o dri ve is crucial,’ said Margaret Ferrier in the Commons last week. There’s nothing like a bit of self-knowledge – for she was kicked out of the SNP last year and charged with culpable and reckless conduct for travelling from London to Glasgow by train after testing positive for Covid.
EVERY little helps – or so it seems for Labour MP Taiwo Owatemi, who says she’ll supplement her £82,000 salary with shifts as a pharmacist at Tesco.