🔴 It was 1am when the pictures were published online of Matt Hancock and his aide Gina Coladangelo in an intimate embrace in his ministerial office.
Just three minutes later the health secretary and aides began a frantic scramble to save his political career
📞Hancock had been expecting the news to break, having received a call from Victoria Newton, the editor of the Sun at 6.53pm on June 24
📕In his book he says he phoned Mr Johnson to inform him of the affair before setting off home to tell his wife, Martha, and their children
💬Messages reveal he was also discussing media strategy with Damon Poole, his special adviser
As they wait to see the story, they note that the newspaper will be printing pictures of the couple telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/03/0…
📰As soon as he sees the front page at 1am, Mr Hancock seems to think that the revelations are not as bad as anticipated and asks to “keep the focus on the appointment” of Ms Coladangelo as a non-executive director [NED] in his department telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/03/0…
⏰ At 6am the same day, Hancock set up a WhatsApp group called “Crisis Management” with Mr Poole and Ms Coladangelo telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/03/0…
🔴 Beth Rigby, Sky’s political editor, messaged Mr Poole with questions about social distancing rules, which Hancock says he doesn’t want to acknowledge breaking
💬 Mr Poole sends over a link about the law at the time, when Britain was Step 2, and Mr Hancock says that their affair was “arguably charitable”, which was one of the exemptions telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/03/0…
📞It is only during a Zoom call with his “boss” Boris Johnson that he suggests apologising for the first time telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/03/0…
Here's the latest on the global tech outage from reporter @matthfield:
Television channels, airports and banks around the world have been knocked offline in a massive outage causing Windows computers to suddenly shut down.
Sky News’s breakfast show was not on air on Friday morning, replaced by archive footage.
Downdetector, a website which monitors outages, reported sudden spikes in problems with websites including Microsoft applications, banking websites and airline apps.
On Ryanair’s website, the company urged passengers to arrive at airports three hours early blaming a “third party IT issue, which is outside Ryanair’s control and affect all airlines operating across the network”.
Our Senior Technology Reporter @GazTheJourno will be here from 1pm today to answer all of your questions!
Drop them below 👇
✍️ @GazTheJourno: Elon Musk has always wanted to create a company called X.
The first X was in fact an online bank he set up in the late 1990s - and its CEO was Peter Thiel. That company later became PayPal and was bought by eBay in 2002.
@GazTheJourno 🗣️ @GazTheJourno: Twitter’s blue bird logo has been with the site since its creation in 2006. Its branding has always been twee(t!), featuring the bird doing cutesy things including lifting up the fail whale on its ‘site over capacity’ page back in the 2010s… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
🇺🇦 Elderly and vulnerable Ukrainians were taken into Russian territory, stripped of their citizenship, forced to give blood and left in agony from botched medical procedures, a Telegraph investigation has found.
🔴 Elderly and vulnerable Ukrainians were taken into Russian territory, stripped of their citizenship, forced to give blood and left in agony from botched medical procedures.
Oleg Andreev, 65, who is paralysed, was taken by Russian invaders occupying his village in eastern Ukraine. Mr Andreev said his wheelchair was stolen by a Russian soldier, who used it for an
injured comrade.
🇺🇦 Exclusive: Alexander Lukashenko implicated in alleged war crime as boys and girls as young as six are taken to camps in 'forced deportation'
Read this exclusive in full from @sophia_yan, @Nat_Vasilyeva, and @VerityBowman here 👇
@sophia_yan @Nat_Vasilyeva @VerityBowman It is estimated that 2,150 Ukrainian children have been taken to at least four camps in Belarus since September 2022, with numbers expected to reach 3,000 by autumn this year.
Three of the “camps” are in the Minsk region, namely the Ostroshitsky Gorodok Sanatorium, the Zubrenok national children’s educational and health centre, and Dubrava children’s camp. The fourth site is the Golden Sands Sanatorium in the Gomel region.
🔴NEW: The US was concerned about what would happen to Russia’s nuclear weapons during the armed coup staged by Yevgeny Prigozhin, an official has said.