Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris will appear in front of the European Scrutiny Committee tomorrow afternoon, just a day before MPs vote on the Stormont Brake element of the Windsor Framework Brexit deal in the House of Commons. The Committee’s chair, Sir Bill Cash, had previously invited Rishi Sunak, with Cash accusing the PM of dodging scrutiny by repeatedly skipped the invitation. As a compromise, he’s sent Heaton-Harris as his loyal lieutenant…
With the DUP voting against the deal, and the ERG expected to announce their own verdict tomorrow – also not looking positive – it won’t be smooth sailing for wise-cracking Heaton-Harris. Stay tuned…
After the brutal hacking of Education Secretary Gillian Keegan over Christmas, which saw her account fire out dozens of spam crypto links before being wiped entirely, Twitter hackers scored another victory this morning as they managed to get into Chris Heaton-Harris’s account. And Anna Soubry’s for good measure…
Just after 7am, Chris posted a number of confusing tweets calling for the freeing of a person called “mizz”, as well as posting a selfie of a man captioned, “imran khan poor p*ki and minecraft roleplayer”. Soubry fell victim to the same scammer, calling someone a “n*g n*g”…
While it did appear Heaton-Harris had managed to wrestle back control of his account a lot quicker than his cabinet counterpart managed – tweeting a confirmation of the hacking – a subsequent tweet about forcing all trans and homosexuals to work behind a bar for 10 years implies that’s not the case.
You would hope the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland had better security procedures in place…
Matt Hancock was so busy being humiliated on I’m A Celebrity last night, the Westminster bubble managed to miss the resignation of Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris.
Or, not quite.
A prankster emailed a number of news agencies and managed to get one with over 270,000 followers to tweet that he’d resigned for ‘personal reasons’. Heaton-Harris spotted this fake news early, and clarified via his own account that it was “tosh”
Hello Twitter!
— Chris Heaton-Harris MP (@chhcalling) November 9, 2022
Someone has sent a fake e-mail to press outlets saying I’ve resigned.
This is totally untrue. I hope one of @elonmusk first moves is to eliminate fake news on Twitter…
Very exciting I know, but complete and utter tosh.
Chris’s tagging of Elon managed to get the Twit in Chief to reply, asking for clarity on “What does a tosh look like?”
What does a tosh look like?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 10, 2022
Guido presumes HH’s team are busy workshopping a funny yet serious reply while they’ve got Elon’s attention.
Unfortunately for observers, Musk declined to commit to Heaton-Harris’s request for him to sort out fake news on the social media app. He’s far too busy experimenting with Twitter’s verification system for that…
