Ex-UK PM claims bug found in toilet after Netanyahu ‘visit’

Boris Johnson has described an allegedly suspicious incident in his new memoir

A UK security team found a listening device in the personal lavatory of then-foreign secretary Boris Johnson back in 2017, after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used the facility, the former British politician has reportedly claimed in his memoir.

The incident allegedly occurred at the British Foreign Office, which, according to Johnson, has a bathroom similar to “the gents in a posh London club,” located in a “secret annex” used by the foreign secretary, as reported by The Telegraph on Thursday. Netanyahu was in the building on an official visit, and apparently made a toilet trip while there.

“Thither Bibi repaired for a while, and it may or may not be a coincidence but I am told that later, when they were doing a regular sweep for bugs, they found a listening device in the thunderbox,” Johnson wrote.

The politician – who served as UK prime minister from 2019 to 2022 – declined to give the newspaper further details, saying that everything that can be made public is already in the memoir, titled Unleashed.

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The Telegraph compared the episode to the discovery in 2018 of so-called IMSI-catchers, or StingRay surveillance devices in Washington DC, which were reportedly pinned on the Israeli intelligence service Mossad's attempts to hack the phone of then US president Donald Trump.

Several such devices, which mimic a regular cell tower to trick a mobile phone into revealing its unique ID number, were found near several sensitive locations in the US capital, including the White House.

Johnson has reportedly been in talks with former senior UK Conservative figures about a potentially lucrative executive role in the Tory-linked Telegraph media group as part of a takeover bid. The paper, for which he used to write a column, is now publishing a series of exclusives from his memoir. 

The most recent excerpt included a revelation that in 2021, as British prime minister, his government considered a raid on the Netherlands to secure some 5 million doses of the Oxford AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine, over which the UK and the EU were in dispute.