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They are also believed to have included highly sensitive discussions with senior international foreign ministers about the war in Ukraine, including detailed discussions about arms shipments.Foreign ministers text each other about Ukrainian arms shipments, who are we to argue with Dan’s covert sources?
Malcolm Armsteen wrote: ↑Sat Oct 29, 2022 6:32 pm How on earth dafuck does a minister get to use a 'civilian' phone for government business?
MisterMuncher wrote: ↑Sat Oct 29, 2022 9:23 pmNever underestimate just how naive/daft some people are when it comes to digital technology.Malcolm Armsteen wrote: ↑Sat Oct 29, 2022 6:32 pm How on earth dafuck does a minister get to use a 'civilian' phone for government business?
How on earth dafuck is another one doing it so soon afterwards?
It would appear in their haste to throw shit on Liz's head, they've accidentally revealed that the Tories have neither clue nor concern regarding security, operating at a level that is not remotely acceptable.
Also, a bigger issue, and one of terminology. People are rarely, if ever , "hacked" per se, but it's just come to mean any unauthorised access to someone's digital being. It's usually malware installed in ignorance via phishing (spear phishing in this case) or via social engineering. That no training is provided to avoid such obvious problems is *terrifying*
davidjay wrote: ↑Sat Oct 29, 2022 10:48 pmPICNIC* is an acronym in IT circles for a multitude of very good reasons. The real issue, as ever, isn't the stupid ones. It's the fuckers that think they know what they're doing.
Never underestimate just how naive/daft some people are when it comes to digital technology.
MisterMuncher wrote: ↑Sat Oct 29, 2022 10:52 pmThere's that, and there's also people who weren't brought up with new technology and have never had it explained to them properly. Some years ago, when viruses rather than hacking was the big problem, a colleague asked me what was wrong with his computer, because "I installed anti-virus software a couple of months ago". He seemed genuinely surprised when said that two or three month-old anti-virus was as much use as getting the year before last's flu jab, because no-one had ever told him.davidjay wrote: ↑Sat Oct 29, 2022 10:48 pmPICNIC* is an acronym in IT circles for a multitude of very good reasons. The real issue, as ever, isn't the stupid ones. It's the fuckers that think they know what they're doing.
Never underestimate just how naive/daft some people are when it comes to digital technology.
*Problem In Chair, Not In Computer.
Liz Truss hit the diplomatic stage with force in her first few months as international trade secretary, travelling to Washington, New Zealand, Australia, Japan and back to New York within her first eight weeks. Having honed her free-wheeling politics in the Treasury, it was time to go global.
On her first visit to Washington, Truss was given a clear brief ahead of a first meeting with her US counterpart. Robert Lighthizer had 30 years’ experience on the beat, a Trump-supporting protectionist who had first served the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) under Ronald Reagan. Truss had been in the job 14 days. “The officials kept telling her not to get her hopes up, don’t get overexcited, this is just a preliminary meeting,” one aide recalls. Warned there would be little discussion of the details of tariffs the US government had slapped on British goods such as gin, whisky and smoked salmon, in retaliation for EU aerospace subsidies, Truss was dismissive.
In a cramped room at the USTR, the pair sat across the table. Welcoming her to Washington, Lighthizer started with the usual diplomatic preliminaries. Truss was having none of it, interjecting immediately: “So what are we going to do about whisky tariffs, then?” One person present recalls: “It was the perfect example of Liz’s total misunderstanding of social context and social norms. Lighthizer would start saying something, just being nice, and Liz would just interrupt him and just go off on like a weird tangent about shortbread.” But was there a method to the madness? “It got to the point that it happened so many times, he started looking at his officials as a bit like ‘What the f*** is going on here?’ But she was just like a wrecking ball and didn’t really care about what was actually expected, or what people thought was possible, or what the civil servants were telling her. She just got straight to the point.”
Taken aback, Lighthizer responded to her questioning with a warning that there were many “dependents” in the way of movement. One attendee recalls: “Full credit: the wrecking ball was unusual but it was not a negative. There wouldn’t have been results if it wasn’t for her approach, they would have been happy to just sit there and prevaricate.” Truss was determined to make a speech in Washington and had co-ordinated with conservative allies at the Heritage Foundation, the king of the right-wing think tanks in DC.
Despite the speech being drafted by civil servants, Truss was clear with all staff: “Don’t tell No 10 what’s in the speech.” But her own department had tried to put the kibosh on it themselves, serving up a watery mishmash of platitudes for her to deliver. Truss was furious and stayed up “knocking back espressos” until 3am in the bar of the hotel, rewriting the speech herself with one of her special advisers, Nerissa Chesterfield (whom Rishi Sunak has just appointed his press secretary), and her head of news, Joe Watts, “the only civil servant in the building Liz trusted at the beginning”, according to one ally. Rewrite after rewrite hardened the speech that was eventually titled “Why the time is now for a US-UK free trade deal”.
The final draft was incendiary, going against everything No 10 had warned Trade not to push before an election: a sweeping free trade agreement that would infuriate every vested interest group going.
Up at 6am and spotted in the hotel gym with Dominic Raab, who was then foreign secretary and was also visiting Washington, Truss arrived at breakfast to a grim-faced team. “What time do you want me to send this over to No 10?” Chesterfield asked, “because they need to see it before you give it or there is going to be trouble.” “Hold it as long as possible,” Truss ordered. “You deal with them.” Ever more angry, senior staff in Downing Street, five hours ahead, were already fielding calls from journalists about a speech they had not seen.
Press secretary Rob Oxley was first to contact Truss’s team, demanding answers. Next was Lee Cain, No 10’s communications chief, before eventually even Eddie Lister, the chief of staff, was demanding to see a draft of the remarks. When the speech was sent, Truss’s allies say, “all hell broke loose”. “There was a lot of unhappiness,” one Downing Street official recalls. “ ‘Edit this out. What the f*** has gone on, why haven’t you told us about this? This is all really, really unhelpful. We said don’t push the US trade deal too hard, blah, blah, blah,’ ” was the summary of those on the receiving end.
But Truss was holding firm: “So a couple of changes to make them happy, but I am not going to change the fundamentals.” Within hours, she was on stage.
Two years later, a British former diplomat, Alexandra Hall Hall, who at the time was Brexit counsellor at the British embassy in Washington, would claim Truss told the Heritage Foundation at an off-the-record private lunch after the main speech that the only people worried about a no-deal Brexit were “farmers with a few turnips in the back of their truck”. Truss’s allies claim they “do not recognise those words”. But on the day, despite No 10’s paranoia, the speech flew broadly under the radar. Amid a painfully delayed flight and over chicken burgers in Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, Truss conceded to her aides: “I think we’ve got away with it.” After she’d spent a day Instagramming her way round New York, her husband, Hugh O’Leary, and their two daughters, Liberty and Frances — then 13 and 10 — joined her for the weekend. But Truss, unchained on the global stage, was only just warming up.
As the trade secretary arrived at Wellington International Airport, Laura Clarke, the British high commissioner in New Zealand, was there waiting to meet her. Except Truss was nowhere to be seen. Fired up after double espressos on the flight, she had disappeared to find the perfect spot for a landing photograph. A travelling official recalls: “She’d had so much coffee and just wasn’t interested in meeting the ambassador.” Spads and officials awkwardly greeted the high commissioner, while Truss sought a location with better light that was not just the outside of an airport. In a breach of protocol, it was left to Watts to break the ice, asking Clarke nervously: “Would you mind coming to have a photograph with the trade secretary?” Photo duties fell to Chesterfield, while Sophie Jarvis, another special adviser, tried to soothe worried officials about the tight schedule of meetings ahead. “You could tell Clarke was thinking, “What the f***?” as we held things up for like 20 minutes, looking for a decent place to take a picture.”
In the end the snap was taken in front of the high commissioner’s SUV with a Union Jack on the front. Only after Truss was satisfied with it was the convoy allowed to leave. Relations were not any easier in the car. Keen to brief the minister on her impending meetings with her Kiwi counterparts, Clarke began talking about the day and firing off trade stats. But Truss was glued to her phone, checking with her press team the draft tweets that included kiwi emojis, completely ignoring the briefing. “She just looked up after a few minutes and told Clarke: ‘I’m doing my social media’ ” — bringing the conversation to an abrupt end. When some minutes later Truss was happy enough to send the vital tweet, she put her phone down and turned back to Clarke, declaring: “I’m ready for my briefing now.”
“They were obviously rather perplexed about the priorities there,” says one person in the car that day.
Truss landed in Sydney in a similar whirlwind. With just six hours scheduled in Australia’s biggest city, the minister had her priorities and the civil service itinerary was swiftly shredded. On arrival, Truss insisted the convoy be diverted to a café in the suburbs she had read about that served British coffee. When this tiny café was found, it was barely big enough for two people to sit down — let alone the entourage of seven. “We drove around the houses for ages because Liz insisted on a picture in this typical area of Sydney — insisting that it was ironic that the hipster coffee capital of the world was relying on British imports,” says a former aide. In the end the photographer had to stand outside in the rain, snapping Truss, British espresso and a sausage roll in hand, through the window. Outside, aides and officials huddled under umbrellas. A mystery surrounds what happened to the pictures, which were never featured on either Truss’s prolific Twitter feed or her carefully curated Instagram account; perhaps they fell foul of her tough editorial standards.
The next stop in Sydney would become a defining image of Truss’s boosterish style of promoting both Brexit Britain and herself. With the rain still pouring, it took many, many goes to get the final snap of Truss on a British-made Brompton bike with a Union Jack umbrella in a car park near Sydney Harbour Bridge, with the opera house in the background. Freedom of information requests would later reveal a £1,483 freelance photographer was hired for the trip — but the picture went around the world. “Get on your bike and look for exports,” Truss tweeted. While it was nearly as widely mocked online as her speech on pork markets and cheese, her defenders insist the photograph struck exactly the right tone. One ally says: “That picture, more than any press release, more than anything she could have done or said, just explained what her job was, and that’s what she got. As much as you can take the piss out of her for doing photoshoots left right and centre, she did have a total understanding of how to make the best out of the brief and got the fact it was her job to go out there and sell, sell, sell.”
Another former adviser recalls: “Liz to her core is a retail politician. She understands what speaks to people: a bit of the Boris stuff, the positivity, but also how to shape an agenda. One of the big struggles that we did have in trade was so many people outside London just don’t understand what trade is. So she was trying to communicate what it meant in a very simple way.”
But beyond the photos, staff worried that Truss had a lack of patience for the more tedious elements of her diplomatic role. A far from unusual complaint from former staff was that “sometimes she could be demanding and borderline rude to people”. After the coffee shop detour and the Sydney Harbour photoshoot, the team were now 90 minutes late for a reception organised with British non-alcoholic gin brand Seedlip. Hundreds of expats, including one of her former teachers, and dozens of British businesses were at the event. “She got a photo pouring a cocktail and glad-handed a few people and then was like, ‘Right, we need to get our flight’. We still had hours until take-off, but she was just like, ‘I’m done’. There was no interest whatsoever, so we left after about half an hour,” one official complained.
Yet when she reached Canberra for meetings with the Australian prime minister Scott Morrison and his ministers the next morning, Truss was in full charm- offensive mode. She met almost every senior member of the Liberal government but struck up a particular rapport with Bridget McKenzie, then the agriculture minister. Noticing a photograph on the wall showing 1920s women armed with shotguns and captioned “Ladies who shoot lunch”, Truss was tickled pink. “Do you shoot? You must come over and shoot in Norfolk,” she declared. “Her eyes lit up,” recalls one present. “She loved the whole girl-power vibe.”
Conversations between private offices continued for months afterwards, trying, unsuccessfully, to sort the trip. Aides say that when Truss was interested in someone, she would “move heaven and earth” to be as charming as possible. But if she was bored or lost interest in a meeting or event, “she wouldn’t even try to hide it”.
While there were ups and downs in the whistlestop diplomacy, as in Washington the previous month, it was only a matter of time before a row broke out with No 10. On this occasion, the time zones and a very boozy ball played havoc. If Truss had got away with being outspoken in DC, her press conference in Canberra permanently marked her card with the comms team in Downing Street. After talks with her Australian counterpart Simon Birmingham, the pair faced questions from the press — a first for Truss on the world stage. “We did a bit of prep on her statement at the top of the presser, but in hindsight we were woefully underprepared for the questions . . . that’s where it all started going wrong,” one of the travelling entourage recalls. When asked if a future trade deal between Australia and the UK could include a loosening of visas for Aussies to come and work in Britain, Truss strayed wildly off her patch. She told reporters: “We’ve been clear on the fact that we want to adopt the Australian-based points system in terms of our new immigration system as we leave the European Union. We’ve recently made an announcement that we’re extending the work period after foreign students come to the UK for two years. But, of course, our two countries have a special link and a historic relationship, and it’s certainly something that we will be looking at as part of our free-trade negotiations.” When the quote hit the wires that evening in Britain, once again “all hell broke loose”.
Chesterfield was on the receiving end of a full Malcolm Tucker-esque barrage from No 10, which was furious Truss was straying outside her brief. “ ‘What the f*** are you doing, why has she said that, this is going cause us mayhem, this is not what we need’ ” was the general gist. Jarvis, Watts and Chesterfield took the brunt of the fallout that evening: “The calls carried on literally all night as they tried to row back from the comments with little success.” Truss, meanwhile, was guest of honour at Canberra’s Midwinter Ball, a highlight of the political season. Out until 3am, and somewhat worse for wear, Truss returned to the hotel to find her team trying to patch up the damage.
A suggestion that Truss should call Lister to apologise for the comments was met with short shrift by a tired minister. “Oh, I don’t care,” Truss told them. “She literally didn’t give two monkeys. Her calculation at the time was, ‘I’m still new to this job, the whole cabinet is new, they’re not going to start firing people for minor things like that’, and in the short term she was probably right.” But on the plane to the next leg of the trip in Tokyo there was bad blood at the lack of care over the mess, with Truss preferring to regale her team with stories and gossip from the ball. “She just doesn’t care when people are angry with her,” said one official on that trip. “But she did notice that Chesterfield had taken the barrage from London particularly badly.” “Don’t let these bullies upset you, Nerissa. Don’t worry about it, you’re doing a great job,” Truss said, before finally getting some sleep.
While formal trade talks with Japan had begun, they were still at a very early technical level when Truss became trade secretary. So her first visit there was broadly ceremonial — which came as a relief after the gruelling five days down under. “We had been on the plane longer than we had been on the ground by this point, so everyone was knackered,” an official recalls. Everyone, that is, except the minister, who used the light diplomatic schedule to convene yet another photoshoot. At Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo, the busiest pedestrian crossing in the world, Truss spent more than an hour perfecting a shot of her walking. By now The Telegraph was in tow, so many cameras and videographers were there to capture the moment. “It was so dangerous, there was traffic everywhere and she just kept bowling through it, take after take, even when the traffic was still coming,” a witness says. Another ally on the trip recalls: “She was just so focused on looking straight down the camera lens for a fantastic photo, but I really don’t think it was worth ten shots and also getting run over.” While the image did not gain the same notoriety as the one in Sydney Harbour, Truss’s team defended it: “It was a famous monument of that country and there she is, selling Britain.”
With six days on the road and only one major row triggered, the last night in Tokyo was time to party. After a reception celebrating that year’s rugby World Cup, sushi was sought, with shoes off and cushions on the floor. Protestations from the principal private secretary that he didn’t eat raw fish fell on deaf ears. “Liz was just rolling her eyes as he tried to explain to a waitress who spoke very little English that he would like his salmon cooked,” one present says. At the boss’s insistence, it was on to cocktails at the top-floor bar at the Park Hyatt hotel, made famous by Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation. “We were all pretty smashed by the time Liz suggested karaoke.” The team suspected that Truss had not slept when she was downstairs waiting for them all at six the next morning. With sore heads all round, having only got in less than two hours before, Truss joked to her struggling aides: “Well, you look awful.”
No sooner had they returned to London it was wheels up again for New York and the United Nations general assembly. Before the summit started, there was the obligatory photoshoot. An English-made Mini had been acquired for Truss to pose with, promoting British car sales across the pond. But when she arrived, her face fell. “Let’s put this under Brooklyn Bridge for the shot,” she suggested. “Poor Joe Watts had his head in his hands, you could see him just trying to work out how the hell that was going to happen. You can’t just park a car under Brooklyn Bridge,” a colleague recalls. An official was ordered into the Mini and drove it to what she thought was a better spot nearby, as aides panicked. Eventually Truss got a picture, but she was not happy. “In the car into the city she was reviewing the shots, and was very down on them. We all thought they were great; you had the Mini, you had her, you had the skyline — it was a pretty good shot. She wasn’t upset with her staff per se, but you could just tell she saw it as a wasted opportunity. She was strangely cut up about that one,” recalls another trade official. A double-page spread of the image in that week’s Daily Express may have allayed some concerns.
But Truss had bigger matters on her mind as she arrived in New York. Johnson was to meet President Trump the next afternoon. “I have to get into that bilat [bilateral meeting],” she told her private office and Spads. “Get me in the room for the Trump meeting.” But overtures to No 10 had fallen on deaf ears. With every possible lever pulled by Truss’s team, they were yet to get her in the room. Frantic phone calls to Lister, Cain and political secretary Ben Gascoigne all met a firm no. An aide recalls: “She was putting pressure on all of us to speak to everyone and sort it out, but by the night before, it was clear we were getting nowhere.” On the morning of Tuesday, September 24, Truss was due to speak at a business breakfast with Johnson. A change of tack was needed. “I need to speak to Boris first thing,” Truss told aides that evening. Wanting to look the part, she instructed a junior official from her private office to book her a blow-dry in her hotel room for 7am.
That same morning a political bomb detonated in Westminster. The government had been defeated in the Supreme Court, with an attempt to suspend parliament to avoid Brexit rows ruled illegal by the highest judges in the land. As Lady Hale read her withering verdict in London, Johnson’s entire government wobbled under mounting calls to resign. He was mobbed by the travelling press pack, holed up in his hotel suite, working out a response.
Down the corridor, Truss was having a crisis too: the hairdresser had failed to turn up. The young private secretary responsible for organising had got “absolutely smashed” the night before and been found hugging the lavatory of a New York dive bar in the small hours, but the team had tried to cover for him. “Liz had probably overestimated the powers of this lad in his twenties in terms of sorting out a blow-dry in a foreign city, or indeed knowing what a blow-dry was,” one official recalls. “It’s safe to say he was not flavour of the month that day, though. A few weeks later he got booted off to somewhere else in Whitehall.” A frantic Truss turned up at Sophie Jarvis’s room to borrow her hairdryer “absolutely seething” and still livid that she had not yet wangled her way into the Trump meeting. “You can’t have Lighthizer in there and not me,” she complained.
Over at Hudson Yards — a development designed in part by the British designer Thomas Heatherwick — Johnson’s business breakfast was a carnival of chaos. Appearing for the first time publicly since the Supreme Court news had dropped, Johnson was met by shouts from broadcasters, full of questions as the British team arrived to meet and greet some of the most powerful executives in New York. While some aides desperately tried to keep Truss away from the baying press pack, others tried to keep her on track with meeting people including billionaire BlackRock boss Larry Fink. “There were certain people she just had to meet that day, but she had absolutely no interest. There were serious big cheeses there but she only wanted to collar Boris.”
With Johnson ushered to waiting cameras to address the TV news back home, Truss missed her moment before his speech. And after he addressed the news from London during his remarks, he was mobbed by businesspeople wanting their 30 seconds with power. A witness recalls: “Liz was watching like a hawk for the entire half-hour he was talking. Eventually Boris’s security people got in there to ease him out because he was on a time constraint, so they began to pull him away towards a back entrance. And Liz just follows the entourage.” With Truss disappearing for ten minutes down a back staircase, her team were left bewildered as to where she had gone.
“Finally she emerged back in the room like the cat that got the cream,” an aide says. “She was grinning ear to ear when she told us, ‘We’re in. I’ve sorted it and none of you f***ers did anything!’ And she was absolutely correct. Liz knew she would get Boris to say yes if she could just get in front of him, and so she did and he folded after two minutes. It was genuinely impressive.” Where officials stood in her path, Truss the wrecking ball had struck again.
With the invitation secured, a scramble followed for accreditation from the United Nations HQ, where the talks were to take place later that day. With Johnson and Trump at the top of a diplomatic horseshoe, Truss was nestled between ambassador Karen Pierce and chief of staff Eddie Lister in the third-best seat on the British side. Sources say very little trade was discussed in the meeting, and that every time Trump brought conversation around to it, Johnson wanted to talk about Iran. But that seemed to matter little to Truss. As she came out of the meeting, the first thing she said to her team was: “Get the pictures.”
By the time Boris Johnson appointed Liz Truss as his foreign secretary in September 2021 — her second major job, with extensive travel — she had become very particular about what she expected from officials on a foreign trip. While not a formal “rider” in the style of a travelling rock star, orders were sent ahead to embassies around the world with details of what she would expect on a visit:
• Double espressos served in a flat-white-sized takeaway cup.
• No big-brand coffee, independent producers only, except Pret if in the UK.
• No pre-made or plastic-packed sandwiches — nothing to be served that has not been freshly prepared.
• Bagels or sushi for lunch — absolutely no mayonnaise on anything, ever.
• A bottle of sauvignon blanc provided in the fridge of any overnight accommodation.
Kirsty Buchanan, a former aide, once remarked: “She drinks about 42,000 espressos a day or she used to when I worked for her … she would sit there with a massive meatball sub or eat three croissants for breakfast. She would carb up; frankly no woman in her forties should be eating that much and getting away with it.” Other aides note a long-suffering espresso machine was lugged from department to department each reshuffle, while another former staffer was at pains to point out that under no circumstances was the foreign secretary to be served fruit for breakfast.
It has been reported that Truss, when serving as foreign secretary, had her personal phone hacked by agents suspected on behalf of Russia. The security breach, which resulted in the hackers gaining access to her private messages and sensitive information relating to government, was discovered during the Tory leadership contest but was allegedly suppressed by Johnson and Simon Case, the cabinet secretary.
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