Signal failure

The offspring of riches: Pride, vanity, ostentation, arrogance, tyranny

Oops. Although, as cock-ups go, the adding of a journalist to a secret US Government chat-group is about as far from ‘oops’ as I am from being elected President of France (maybe I’m just not in the right WhatsApp groups).

There is, of course, always a thought at the back of one’s mind, one that resurfaces every time we get a news story about secret documents left in the back of a taxi. Just how ‘accidental’ was it that the folder marked TOP SECRET, FOR YOUR EYES ONLY, DO NOT LEAVE ON THE TUBE was, in fact, left on the tube, in the back of a taxi, or on the shelf in the phone box (remember those?). I’m pretty sure that some of those accidental leaks were not accidental at all.

This thought did occur to me when I heard about how Atlantic magazine editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was accidentally added to a Signal group chat with 18 other people, including the Vice President and the Defence Secretary of the USA. To be honest, that sounds pretty cool, apart from the whole world-security thing. But then I got really excited when Sir Matthew Pinsent replied to one of my tweets, so I’m easily impressed. Goldberg initially thought the whole thing was a wind-up, and it was only when the stuff that was mentioned in the chat – a raid on Houti rebels in Yemen – actually happened that he realised something wasn’t quite right.

This could be a monumental mess-up, an example of what can happen when you over promote people on the grounds of their support for you rather than their actual abilities. Or, there’s a very small chance that it could be a deliberate leak, in order to really hammer how the message that the current administration thinks Europe is a bunch of cheese-eating, wine-swigging, garlic-scoffing freeloaders, expecting the US to bail them out with their lovely dollars.

The reactions since then, however, make me more inclined to think it’s the former than the latter. Trump has, true to form, resorted to attacking Goldberg. Had he kept quiet and not, along with his spokespeople, accused Goldberg of lying, the messages might have stayed on the Signal chat. As it is, The Atlantic magazine has now published them in full, so we can all see with what disdain two of the most powerful people in the States regard us and our European neighbours. Thanks guys. Mike Waltz, the National Security Advisor, has put his hand up to having added Goldberg’s number in error, and Elon Musk is apparently one of the ‘finest minds’ that have been tasked with working out what happened. So that’s all right then.

Trump and his acolytes have been given this amazing gift by the American people. They have been trusted with the opportunity to make their country great again, (whatever that means), to take the lead in making the world a better place. Instead, they appear to be of the mindset that ‘it’s my new toy, and I’ll break it if I want to’.

It almost makes you wistful for the days of our own erstwhile Defence Secretary, the chocolate fireguard that was Gavin Williamson. Almost. Allow me to leave you with the incomparable Tracy Ullman, Queen of Satire.