A minister has been described as “ignorant” after he talked about “some little man in China”.
Mark Spencer is facing a backlash for comments he made during a live interview on Sky News.
He made the remark when he was asked about Liz Truss’s personal phone being hacked by agents suspected of working for the Kremlin.
The environment minister said Truss was “clearly” hacked and you had to be “super careful”.
When it was put to him that the concern was Truss had perhaps been speaking on a personal phone at the time of the breach, he said: “We all talk on personal phones, don’t we, you know?
“I ring my wife, maybe there’s some little man in China listening to the conversations between me and my wife.
“But, you know, you’ve just got to be careful about what information you use on which phone and you get a lot of help and support from the security services on that.”
Labour MP Sarah Owen, who is the first female MP of South East Asian/Chinese descent, hit back saying: “Mark Spencer once again showing his ignorance, on many levels.”
Owen, who is also the chair of East & South East Asians [ESEA] for Labour, told HuffPost UK: “Clearly government ministers like Mark Spencer do not understand the severity of the now repeated Conservative security breaches and that no amount of deflecting, even by throwing out the crass and archaic ‘little Chinese man’ trope, will distract us from the fact the PM chose to re-hire Braverman just six days after a ministerial code violation to one of the most sensitive positions of state.”
Another Labour MP Chris Bryant added: “Little man”? Honestly?”
The government is facing demands for a probe into reports that Truss’s phone was hacked as well as accusations of “ill discipline” and not taking national security “seriously enough”.
The Mail on Sunday reported that Kremlin agents who hacked Truss’s phone while she was foreign secretary are thought to have gained access to sensitive exchanges on Ukraine, as well as private conversations with Kwasi Kwarteng.
The newspaper also claimed details of the breach, apparently discovered when Truss was running for the Tory leadership in the summer, were “suppressed” by then-prime minister Boris Johnson and cabinet secretary Simon Case.
Lord Dannatt, former head of the British Army, told Times Radio that politicians failing to use secure means of communicating “is ill discipline and, frankly, reflects very poorly on their judgment”.
Levelling up secretary Michael Gove told Sky News’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday that the government had “very robust protocols” in place.