The US Defence Secretary has denied mishandling classified information, after he allegedly shared military plans for airstrikes on Houthi terrorists in a group chat that mistakenly included the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic. Pete Hegseth insisted that “nobody was texting war plans” and described the journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg, as “deceitful and highly discredited”. Labour has been accused of turning a “blind eye to slavery”, says The Guardian, by ordering MPs to support the removal of an amendment to the Great British Energy bill which would stop the government buying solar panels and other materials manufactured using forced labour in China. Ministers have given the green light to the £10bn Lower Thames Crossing, a 14-mile road and tunnel between Kent and Essex. The long-awaited project infamously has a planning document that runs to 359,070 pages, says the FT, “equivalent to nearly 300 times the complete works of William Shakespeare”.

Team Trump’s “clownish” group chat

Earlier this month, says Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic, I received a connection request on the encrypted messaging app Signal from a user called Michael Waltz. I assumed it wasn’t the Michael Waltz, Donald Trump’s national security adviser. But to my surprise, he later added me to a group chat with several other very senior officials: Vice President JD Vance, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth and several others. Before long they were discussing the Pentagon’s top-secret plans to bomb the Houthi terrorists disrupting Red Sea shipping. Vance pushed back, complaining that this was Europe’s problem because only 3% of US trade runs through the Suez Canal compared to 40% of European trade. “I fully share your loathing of European free-loading,” Hegseth responded. “It’s PATHETIC.” The next morning, Hegseth posted operational details of the imminent attack: targets, weapons, sequencing. At the designated hour, I watched in astonishment as the air strikes took place.

This really is a “jaw-dropping” scandal, says Mark Antonio Wright in National Review, like something out of the Armando Iannucci satire Veep. Waltz responded to updates from the attacks with “embarrassing attaboy” emojis: 👊🇺🇸🔥. At one point Hegseth even bragged that their plans hadn’t been leaked, writing that operational security was “clean”. It was obviously “clownish” of Waltz to use an unsecured system to discuss a national security operation – and to inadvertently invite a prominent journalist to join them. But the more egregious error was Hegseth laying out highly classified operational details as if he were writing a shopping list. He has to go. One of the most profound indictments of Joe Biden’s presidency was that he never fired anyone of note, no matter how embarrassing – or catastrophic – their mistakes. “Will there be accountability under Trump?”