Influenced, Helen Lewis Has Left the Chat, Left the Chat: No 2. Fax Machines and Foxy Natashas
Influenced, Helen Lewis Has Left the Chat, Left the Chat: No 2. Fax Machines and Foxy Natashas
Everyone at Westminster is addicted to WhatsApp. Should we be worried?
In 2016, amid the post-EU referendum chaos, one man had an idea. His name was Steve Baker, and he was a low-profile Tory MP. But his WhatsApp group - the home of the hard Brexiteers - soon became the most powerful force in British politics. Sam Coates of Sky News thinks that political WhatsApp groups like Baker’s helped bring down three Conservative prime ministers in a row.
The second of these, Boris Johnson, was a “WhatsApp addict”, according to his former chief of staff Dominic Cummings. And so, during Covid when Number 10 was still using fax machines to get NHS data, everyone turned to instant messaging instead. Forget “sofa government”, this was even more informal - as well as faster, more fluid and full of swearing.
But, Helen Lewis asks Cummings, is this really the best way to govern a country? What about the possibility of leaks, hacks - and conveniently lost messages when an inquiry rolls around?
Well worth a listen as it puts a lot of recent events in context.
It's shocking how primitive the IT systems were/are.
Here in the U.S., a lot of the medical and insurance industries still use fax machines. It's nuts.