AT this point, is really anybody surprised that Liz Truss’s phone was hacked by Kremlin agents? It’s a shocking story which raises serious questions about our national security. But if there’s anyone you would expect to be vulnerable to cyber warfare it is surely the bungling former prime minister.

She gives off very strong vibes that she’s the kind of person who uses the word “password” for her passwords and 1234 for all her key code needs.

She’s the Facebook auntie who copies and pastes a status to protect herself from Mark Zuckerberg’s latest wheeze. She’s the gullible idiot that enters into a lengthy correspondence with a far-away prince who has temporarily lost access to his bank account and needs her help to secure a bumper pay-out.

You can understand why she was the chosen target is what I’m saying.

The National: Liz Truss became the shortest-ever serving prime minister of the UKLiz Truss became the shortest-ever serving prime minister of the UK

According to The Mail On Sunday, this security breach happened during the Conservative leadership contest. At the time, Truss was the Foreign Secretary, so you would think the fact the Russians were found to have been rooting around in her phone would be worth a mention. Apparently not.

According to The Mail, the details of the hack were suppressed by the then prime minister Boris Johnson and Cabinet Secretary Simon Case. The paper reported that Johnson was told of the breach “immediately” and it was agreed with the Cabinet Secretary that there should be a “total news blackout” on the leak.

Sources say that up to a year’s worth of messages were downloaded, including highly sensitive discussions with international foreign ministers about the war in Ukraine, as well as information about arms shipments to the country. But why was this sensitive government business being conducted on Truss’s personal phone in the first place?

All the Russians should have been able to glean from snooping on Truss’s personal phone was what she was having for dinner on any given day, some bitching about colleagues, and maybe an unfiltered selfie or two.

That agents believed to be working on behalf of a hostile state not only managed to access the device of a foreign secretary and wannabe prime minister, but also found a treasure trove of sensitive information, should have been front-page news.

I don’t know about you, but that feels like something that even the dusty Conservative membership might want to know about before choosing our next PM.

Truss is said to have been mindful of the fact that these explosive revelations could derail her chances of taking the top job and “had trouble sleeping” until Case stepped in to spare her blushes.

That shouldn’t be how it works. Transparency shouldn’t be something that incompetent senior politicians are able to opt out of because it might be harmful to their personal political ambitions.

To make matters worse, it seems that even now the news blackout is continuing.

A government spokesman refused to be drawn on the specifics of the story, offering a mealy-mouthed statement that served only to highlight that it still doesn’t fully understand how reckless it has been with our national security.

“We do not comment on individuals’ security arrangements,” he said. “The government has robust systems in place to protect against cyber threats. That includes regular security briefings for ministers and advice on protecting their personal data.”

It seems as though the newly re-instated Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s lax approach to security is part of a troubling pattern. Which perhaps makes Rishi Sunak’s decision to welcome her back into the fold so soon after her sacking a little more easy to understand.

They’re all at it. Ministers conducting government business on personal devices seems to be standard practice for a government that has long since taken its eye off the ball when it comes to national security.

No doubt Rishi Sunak will seek to distance himself from the incompetence of his predecessor. He’ll insist that these mistakes were made a long time ago – two whole prime ministers ago – and claim his government will do things differently.

But until we know the full facts of what exactly has happened here, we can have no confidence at all that the necessary steps have been taken to safeguard senior politicians against hacking from hostile states.

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We can’t be sure Truss is the only senior minister to have been targeted. And given all that has happened, we can have no faith whatsoever that she was the only minister daft enough to discuss national security over WhatsApp.

And yet, despite all the chaos and incompetent leadership that this shambolic Tory party has subjected us to in recent years, they still refuse to allow us to have our say in a General Election.

The UK is a laughing stock.

Our allies and enemies alike know where our points of weakness are. The main one being that we are led by a bunch of politicians who care more about their own fortunes than the interests of the country.