Harriet Harman accepts Kemi Badenoch’s apology over website hacking

Kemi Badenoch admitted to hacking a Labour MP’s website long before she decided to run for office

Harriet Harman has accepted an apology from a Tory high flyer after she admitted hacking into her website in an interview.

Kemi Badenoch confessed to the incident yesterday despite it technically being a criminal offence punishable by up to two years in jail.

Ms Badenoch – who introduced Theresa May at the Tory conference last year – was first elected last year and has been tipped as a future Prime Minister.

The MP launched the cyber-attack on the Labour MP’s site a decade ago in order to write pro-Tory propaganda under their name.

After she apologised for the incident last night, Ms Harman said: ‘Kemi Badenoch has written to me apologising.

‘I have accepted her apology.

.@KemiBadenoch has written to me apologising. I have accepted her apology.

— Harriet Harman (@HarrietHarman) April 8, 2018

Ms Badenoch’s confession, in an interview obtained by The Mail on Sunday, is particularly embarrassing for Downing Street because Ms Badenoch is a rising star who has been tasked by Theresa May with increasing the number of women and ethnic-minority MPs in the party.

Ms Badenoch, MP for Saffron Walden, Essex, made the admission when she was asked what was the ‘naughtiest’ thing she had ever done.

Harriet Harman says she has accepted the apology of Kemi Badenoch

She replied that before she became an MP she had ‘hacked into a Labour MP’s website’, adding: ‘I changed all the stuff in there to say nice things about the Tories.’

Last night, Ms Badenoch apologised for what she described as a ‘foolish prank’.

She declined to identify the Labour MP.

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Tory chairman Brandon Lewis is standing by Ms Badenoch.

A Tory HQ source described it as a case of ‘youthful exuberance’ which occurred before she was a candidate and involved ‘guessing a password’ rather than ‘real hacking’.

She was 28 when she committed the act.

Ms Badenoch, who was elected to Parliament for the first time at last year’s General Election, is being fast-tracked to the top by a Tory Party desperate to shed its ‘pale, stale and male’ image.

Her closeness to No 10 was illustrated on Friday evening when she was the guest speaker at the Prime Minister’s annual constituency dinner.

Footage of the interview was obtained by this newspaper from Core Politics, an online politics channel, which filmed it as part of a series of profiles of new MPs.

Ms Badenoch, 38, told the channel that she had mounted the cyber-attack ten years ago.

Under the 1990 Computer Misuse Act, a person is guilty of an offence if they ’cause a computer to perform any function with intent to secure access to any program or data held in any computer, or to enable any such access to be secured’ and ‘knows at the time that that is the case’.

Judges can hand down a fine or a prison sentence of two years for the offence.

Ms Badenoch was made a vice-chair of the party earlier this year, with responsibility for spearheading efforts to increase the diversity of Tory candidates for Commons seats.

Mrs May has asked her to find a ‘new generation’ of talented MPs from non-traditional backgrounds, with particular focus on women and ethnic-minority candidates.