Tory vice-chairman ‘sorry’ for hacking Labour MP’s website
PS BET YOU DIDN’T MENTION THAT WHEN YOU SAW THE PM ON FRIDAY!
A TORY MP tipped as a future Prime Minister has admitted breaking the law by hacking into a Labour opponent’s website.
Kemi Badenoch, a newly appointed vice-chairman of the party, confessed that she launched the cyber-attack on the Labour MP’s site to write pro-Tory propaganda under their name.
Hacking into websites is a criminal offence – and can be punished with a prison sentence of up to two years.
Her confession, in an interview obtained by The Mail on Sunday, is particularly embarrassing for Downing Street as Ms Badenoch is a rising star who has been tasked by Theresa May with raising the number of women and ethnicminority MPs in the party.
Ms Badenoch, MP for Saffron Walden, Essex, made the admission when asked what was the ‘naughtiest’ thing she had ever done. She replied that before she became an MP she had ‘hacked into a Labour MP’s website’, adding: ‘I changed all the stuff in there to say nice things about the Tories.’
Last night, Ms Badenoch apologised for what she described as a ‘foolish prank’. She declined to identify the Labour MP.
Tory chairman Brandon Lewis is standing by Ms Badenoch. A Tory HQ source described it as a case of ‘youthful exuberance’ which occurred before she was a candidate and involved ‘guessing a password’ rather than ‘real hacking’. She was 28 at the time. Ms Badenoch, elected to Parliament for the first time at last year’s General Election, is being fasttracked to the top by a Tory Party desperate to shed its ‘pale, stale and male’ image.
Her closeness to No10 was illustrated on Friday evening when she was the guest speaker at the Prime Minister’s annual constituency dinner.
Footage of the interview was obtained by this newspaper from Core Politics, an online politics channel, which filmed it as part of a series of profiles of new MPs. Ms Badenoch, 38, told the channel that she had mounted the cyber-attack ten years ago.
Under the 1990 Computer Misuse Act, a person is guilty of an offence if they ‘cause a computer to perform any function with intent to secure access to any program or data held in any computer, or to enable any such access to be secured’ and ‘knows at the time that that is the case’.
Judges are empowered to hand down a fine or a prison sentence of two years for the offence.
Ms Badenoch was made a vice-chairman of the party earlier this year, with responsibility for spearheading efforts to increase the diversity of Tory candidates.
Mrs May has asked her to find a ‘new generation’ of talented MPs from non-traditional backgrounds, with particular focus on women and ethnic-minority candidates.
Born in London, but raised in Nigeria, Ms Badenoch moved back to the UK when she was 16 and studied for engineering and law degrees. She impressed the constituency selectors by citing Margaret Thatcher as her political hero, going on to
‘The naughtiest thing she had ever done’
win the seat with a majority of nearly 25,000 in June.
She backed Brexit in her maiden Commons speech, describing it as ‘the greatestever vote of confidence in the project of the United Kingdom’, and hailed the ‘British dream’ that allowed her to go from immigrant to MP.
Ms Badenoch was also given the plum role of introducing Mrs May for her party conference speech last year, leading her to be tipped as a future leader. Of her interview confession, she said: ‘This was a foolish prank over a decade ago, for which I apologise.’
The video of the interview can be seen at mailonsunday. co.uk/kemivideo.