We have a defence secretary who used 1,2,3,4 as his pass code…

…so what are we worried about, asks Tom Peck. The nation’s security is in safe hands. Grant Shapps is more devious than this looks. After all, Grant Shapps isn’t the only name he’s ever used…

Shapps’s bizarre digital past is well documented (PA Wire)

Grant Shapps is almost certainly the first digital concept ever to be appointed secretary of state for defence. It is certainly a risky move from Rishi Sunak, but in these febrile times of cyber warfare, there’s a chance it could pay off.

Putin, after all, has already defeated the analogue method. To take but one of Shapps’s many recent predecessors in the role who were forced to resign in disgrace, Gavin Williamson told Russia to shut up and go away – but it was, somewhat inevitably, he who had to go away, after he was found to be incapable of shutting up.

(Gavin Williamson was fired from his job for leaking information from the National Security Council. It is important, for legal reasons, to state that he denies doing this. But it is also important, for truth-based reasons, to add that those denials were not believed by the people who had the actual evidence in front of them, who then sacked him.)

Shapps, on the other hand, is unplayable. He slides around the digital universe like dishonest quicksilver – evading, multiplying, leaving all the while an extremely obvious trace of all the terrible things he may have done, but which somehow never seem to catch up with him.

It is well known that Russia, China and other hostile states have huge state-backed hacking enterprises, scouring the internet for state secrets. They will, you have to suspect, be thrilled that the UK has appointed a defence secretary whose YouTube account was once hacked because the password was “1234”.

Where history proceeds from here is frankly terrifying. Imagine the disappointment when nuclear Armageddon was not able to averted because the codes had been changed to Grant Shapps’s date of birth.

Or perhaps just the disappointment on President Zelensky’s face when the UK’s generously provided Storm Shadow missiles turn around in mid-air and head right back toward wherever they were fired from, because some Russian hacker had a little guess and found that, yes, the password really was P@ssw0rd.

Of course, none of this will actually happen. For such events to have taken place, you first have to believe that when Grant Shapps claimed more than 10 years ago to have been hacked, he was telling the truth. What he, or rather his account, was doing on YouTube was posting pro-Tory comments underneath Liberal Democrat videos. An alternative explanation – one that Shapps vigorously denies – is that he was simply accidentally posting under his own account, rather than whatever alias he had set up to discredit the Lib Dems.

Naturally, it’s hard to know which to believe, or what to expect from a man who used to attend “get rich quick” conventions in Las Vegas under the name Michael Green, from which he sold pointless books and software to the gullible and the vulnerable.

In late 2012, I happened to attend one of those conferences – the National Achievers Congress – in London, mainly because I had been covering the London Olympics at the time and was still writing about what one of its two keynote speakers, Seb Coe, was up to. The other one was an aspiring US politician called Donald Trump.

I won’t bore you with the details other than to say that every single person who attends these events, with their thousand-dollar tickets, claiming to have anything useful to sell to the weird and desperate people that go to them is about as venal and shameless as it’s possible to be. Whether Shapps had himself worked this out, who can say, but he had certainly worked out it would not be a good idea to use his own name.

Shapps’s bizarre digital past is well documented. Anyone on Twitter 10 years or so ago will know what it’s like to be followed and unfollowed multiple times by a moderately famous Tory MP from Welwyn Garden City called Grant Shapps, who was spending his time doing the sort of thing that is usually the preserve of strange 12-year-old boys, and using bot software to aggressively follow and then unfollow again, hundreds of thousands of accounts in the hope they’ll follow you back.

Naturally, Shapps denies all this, and arguably that makes him the best man for the job. It has been pointed out many times over that he is now on his fifth cabinet job in over a year. But this is the one he’s been training for since day one. He’s been defending the transparently indefensible all his life, and somehow getting away with it. Defending the UK will be straightforward by comparison.