My mistakenly sent texts have hurt feelings. But I haven't been this stupid

Sadly, I only have Find My Phone to assist me in my hour of panic.

Gallagher had staffers, all looking for it. Up and down. Up and down. That search is utterly traumatising! Who has my phone? Who is looking at it? Aargh.

Would I have returned the phone if I'd found it? Sure - but not before going through it, where possible. Turns out there was never any risk of a nosy parker finding it. It was locked in Gallagher's office. Very safe there. No chanceal of adding yourself to various group chats marked Albo, Jimbo and me. Or FedBudge PC small group.

Speaking of group chats, turns out Pete Hegseth and I also have something in common. Neither of us is really the right fit to be US Secretary of Defence.

I mean, it's metaphorically wild that someone with as few qualifications as Hegseth gets to be in his position.

His main credential? Buddying up to Donald Trump. Hegseth has always been a hideous conservative, somewhat along the lines of Cory Bernardi. He once edited a student newspaper which argued that the New York Times's decision to publish same-sex marriage announcements would somehow encourage bestiality. Bernardi vibes right there.

So far no hint that's happening. Meanwhile, Hegseth's had three wives in 15 years. Same as Trump! To me, that reveals a complete inability to manage relationships, which I'd argue you need for being in his new position. Also, there's those allegations of alcohol abuse, sexual misconduct, financial mismanagement. He's got the latter two in common with the Felon-In-Chief. Pete is the president's pick (or captain's call as we would describe it here), the president another person uniquely unqualified for his job.

Anyhow, it turns out there is something else Hegseth and I have in common.

We've been in group chats with those who should not be in those group chats. We've said things in those group chats we shouldn't have - at least not to everyone in the group. And it's all gone to hell in a Signal message. Or in my case, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger or fecking emails.

How'd I do this bit of utter stupidity?

You know, when you are complaining about someone, that's the name that comes to mind when you are adding people into the chat or into the To: field. You forget who is in the existing group chat. Or that all your colleagues in that email chain.

At least all I've done is hurt people's feelings. A couple of times. OK, maybe more than a couple. Also, I've inadvertently warned someone they were about to be sacked.

And, ah, I also told a senior colleague that a young person we'd hired was not really cut out to be a journalist. Except that I didn't send that message to the senior colleague but to the young person who was the subject of the message.

A few minutes later, I got a message in return. "I know. How do I get out of here?" Dear god, I was so embarrassed but at least the news wasn't a surprise to the recipient.

I have not, however, shared state secrets with a complete stranger who turned out to be the editor-in-chief of remarkable US publication The Atlantic. Hooeeee.

ICYMI as the young people say ... Jeffrey Goldberg, the venerated and venerable editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, saw a Signal message on his phone. Any old person can have it. Me too.

And it's got this excellent disappearing message facility - just set the number of minutes before it goes poof!

No wonder politicians love it (and here, not all government agencies have quite sorted the archiving of these messages when they just disappear).

It's not top-notch-safe because any old person can have it! As 40-year veteran White House and national security correspondent David E Sanger wrote: "[It is] an unclassified commercial app that, while encrypted, was far from the heavily protected, classified internal systems used by the Pentagon." Bet you just can't add anyone into those heavily protected systems.

Goldberg had been added - mistakenly - to group chat Houthi PC [possibly standing for principals committee] Small Group. I'm in a lot of group chats. Sometimes, I can be away from my phone for five minutes and there will be dozens of notifications.

But this particular group chat turned out to be planning for airstrikes against Houthis. Just to explain, in case you are not as obsessed with US politics as I am, Goldberg is a journalist.

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Journalists would be the very last people you would want to add to a chat group like that. The others in the thread turned out to be Hegseth, Vice-President JD Vance, Trump adviser Stephen Miller and national security adviser Michael Waltz, the bozo who added Goldberg in the first place.

Some or all of those lying liars who lie have said over the last few days that nothing in that group chat was classified. In response, The Atlantic published the full chat on Thursday morning Australian time.

Look, I'm no natsec pointyhead but I'm guessing that ahead-of-time information about planned bombings would be classified, right? Right? Ooh, "THE FIRST BOMBS WILL DEFINITELY DROP" at 2.15pm.

Tom Richardson, military historian at UNSW Canberra, is blunt on this: "Their argument is that they are the classification authority, so they decide. But even if someone hasn't slapped a top-secret label on that, of course, it's incredibly sensitive."

But in the usual Trump bullshit way, it's all deny and delay. Shame no one's being deposed.

I do have worries though. I worry that somehow these lying liars will twist what happened and chuck Jeffrey Goldberg in jail, as if their incompetence is somehow his fault.

Not sure how the Trump administration will marry that narrative with the president's recent description of this as a harmless glitch.

I only wish that we could describe the Trump administration in the same way. ICYMI he's now trying to change US voting laws. This could be eternal Trump. You'd hate to see it.