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!
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 Heaton-Harris MP (@chhcalling) November 9, 2022

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…

The Foreign Secretary is to become lead negotiator with the EU on the Northern Ireland Protocol, following the departure of Lord Frost.

Liz Truss will take over Ministerial responsibility for the UK’s relationship with the European Union with immediate effect.

She will become the UK’s co-chair of the Partnership Council and the Joint Committee, and will lead the ongoing negotiations to resolve the problems arising from the current operation of the Northern Ireland Protocol.

Chris Heaton-Harris will become Minister of State for Europe and will deputise for the Foreign Secretary as necessary on EU Exit and the Protocol.

The Queen has been pleased to approve the following appointments:

• Chris Heaton-Harris MP to be a Minister of State (Minister for Europe) in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office;
• Wendy Morton MP to be a Parliamentary Under Secretary of State in the Department for Transport.

Attendees at Transport for the North’s annual conference were blessed with a real treat today. Following Chris Heaton-Harris’s address (prerecorded, presumably because the trains ran too slowly), the hall’s sound system blared out house music at full volume as the audience eagerly awaited the next guest speaker. Here are the lyrics to “WATEVA & Fiveight’s – Get $”, as heard this morning:

“Money
Money
Money
Money
They took my f*@king money

Let’s get money, motherf*@ker, get money
Get money, motherf*@ker, get money
Let’s get money, motherf*@ker, get money
Get money, motherf*@ker, get money”

Former Corbyn and McDonnell spinner James Mills now runs TfN’s communications and engagement. Probably just a coincidence…