Grant Shapps will not be entering the Ministry of Defence with any personal devises containing the TikTok app, his team has said.
Mr Shapps was appointed as the UK’s new Defence Secretary yesterday, a surprise appointment given his name hadn’t been floated by Government sources or the commentariat prior to the night before.
A keen TikTok user, Mr Shapps has rejected calls to stop using the Chinese-owned TikTok social media platform despite widespread security concerns.
In March, Deputy PM Oliver Dowden announced a ban on civil servants and government officials downloading TikTok onto their phones after a Cabinet Office security review.
The review found that Government policy on tech security needed tightening up in light of the amount of data harvested by social media apps, and the sensitivity of some of that data stored on government devices.
A week later, Parliament also banned the use of TikTok from its internal wifi system over similar security concerns.
Despite the ban, at the time Grant Shapps vowed he would not be deleting his presence on the app.
He argued that he is concerned politicians who choose not to engage with the public on the platforms they actually use “are unlikely to continue to represent these voters for long”.
At the time a spokesperson clarified he has never used TikTok on any government-provided devices, though questions remained about his use on his personal phone.
This afternoon, Mr Shapps’ spokesperson told the Express that, along with the MoD that maintains a long-standing official TikTok account, “Grant knows that TikTok can be a valuable tool for communicating with his constituents”.
They added: “Aware of security concerns, he doesn’t have the app on his phone and the account is instead managed by his constituency staff”.
The Express understands Mr Shapps has not had the app downloaded to his personal phone since purchasing a new one last year.
In March, Sir Iain Duncan Smith said the Government ban didn’t go far enough.
The China security hawk MP noted that most of the UK’s allies have already implemented such a ban, but we “can’t stop there”.
He added: “The reality is that even though government phones will have this taken out of them… the key thing here is that private telephones remain on their desks. Private phones are used for communications.”
“I honestly don’t believe… that these phones will never be used for government business. They will be, they are, and there’s no way of stopping that to some degree.
“So can he not now say any government minister or senior official that has their private phone with TikTok should remove it because that gets rid of the risk?”
