This blog was first posted on Sunday Morning 3rd December. Later on in the evening I added to it as you can see below and then finally on Monday Morning a further addition: The nature of political discourse means that lots gets said, but sadly far too little actually gets followed through. This morning on the Marr show Jacob Rees Mogg was interviewed following the re-tweets by Donald Trump. His comments which were clearly largely in defence of Donald Trump were perhaps also in defence of his colleague Nadine Dorries in the light of the above tweet. Rees-Mogg claimed that whilst he often used Twitter that is is a communication mechanism that should largely be ignored. The tweet above and the excerpt from the House of Commons handbook below it indicate that at least one of our 650 MPs is willing to publicly brag about their rejection of the rules that the other 3000 or so members of staff are obliged to follow. Indeed she is claiming that all of her employees and interns are expected to ignore the rules set out by the Palace of Westminster and implies the same was happening in the office of Damien Green 9 years ago. Perhaps Mr Rees Mogg takes the same line with his office and perhaps the three of them are merely the tip of the iceberg, or perhaps Jacob was oblivious of the tweet that Nadine made last evening. We will never know unless the Palace of Westminster conducts a thorough overhaul of their rules and investigates the behaviour of the office of each of the 650 MPs and 900 Lords and Ladies. The truth is that if the correspondence from constituents on one MPs computer was ‘hacked’ by an intern or employee who was given free reign over the device and captured information that was later misused, that the MP would surely face prosecution and in any other industry would face instant dismissal just for sharing the password.

Part 2 – Sunday Evening

This evening Nick Boles MP and one of the BBC Newsnight producers James Clayton have entered into the discussion. This is worrying on at least two levels. It proves that the failure of Nadine Dorries to adhere to the Parliamentary rules which all 650 MPs are supposed to adhere to goes much further than one MP and also that at least one influential person in the BBC who many of us look to for some level of scrutiny cannot understand why some of us who are concerned about Cyber Security are very disturbed by this whole set of problems. Perhaps the BBC is equally Cyber-vulnerable?

In the light of the above blog and a debate on twitter, I have attempted to create a Parliamentary petition on this subject. It is not likely to be very popular as cyber-security is a bit of a niche issue, but even if it gets to 10,000 signatures it will hopefully lead to Dorries, Boles and the rest of their colleagues reconsidering their behaviour.

Anyone wishing to sign the petition while we wait for the Parliamentary Authorities to check it out can do so by going to this link.