Assistance required please

Yesterday I was going about my daily business when I first heard the disturbing news that the Cabinet Office has inadvertently published the home addresses of over 1,000 people who feature in New Year’s Honours List on the gov.uk website – see here for a representative report upon the incident by Martin Beckford and Mark Hookham that appears today upon the website of the – DAILY MAIL

It is, of course, of scant consolation that, after the catastrophic error had been exposed on the internet at about 11.00pm on Friday night, it was removed only a few hours later.

One wonders quite how in the modern world – with technological advances happening so swiftly that ordinary folk find it hard to keep up – those in government and the Civil Service, whom you’d think would be fully concentrated upon and engaged in the constant ongoing battle between the schoolboy hackers, malcontents, even the forces of foreign powers with dubious intent and those who patrol the Dark Web seeking to take advantage and create havoc wherever they can (on the one hand) and those who responsible for protecting both each nation’s populations, state secrets and our personal right to privacy (on the other), can be routinely making the sorts of cock-up that some 8 year-old kid playing the second King in your local primary school’s key Nativity Play manger scene would be thoroughly ashamed of.

The excuses “Murphy’s Law”, “human error” and/or “stuff happens” just won’t wash. There are algorithms and robotic security system available in high street staples like PC World and Carphone Warehouse that could do the business for less than a couple of hundred quid.

I am left wondering whether by any chance any tech-savvy Ruster, or possibly (unlikely I know) one who happened to be still up at their computer at 11.00pm or thereabouts on Friday night, has a ‘screen snapshot’ of the List in question.

Tapping this out in my office on board my 100 metre superyacht moored off Nice as I am, I’m slightly concerned – having in September declined an offer of the KCB (The Most Honourable Order of the Bath) for the third year running – that the home addresses of not only those who have received honours in the New Year’s Honour List, but also those who have declined one have been accidentally included and therefore compromised.

Anyone who may be able to help me in this respect can contact me by emailing me c/o the Rust at the usual email address. Thanking you in advance …