How deep does the ‘honeytrap’ plot go?

It is not quite a week since the (now ex-Conservative) MP William Wragg confessed to the press that he’d been the victim of a “honeytrap” blackmail plot. Someone he’d met on the Grindr dating website had pressured him into giving the contact numbers for (about 20) politicians and journalists. Some have come out and described the strange, unsolicited messages and/or rude photographs sent to them.

After initially treating Wragg as a victim and taking no action against him, there are reports that some in the cabinet believe there should have been more serious consequences for his foolishness. Other colleagues and former colleagues have been even less generous. It appears that Wragg is in an emotionally vulnerable position and his allies feel that a duty of care and some compassion would be appropriate.

In the last few days, Wragg has voluntarily stepped down from his positions as vice-chair of the backbench 1922 Committee and chair of the House of Commons select committee on public administration and constitutional affairs, in which role Wragg was seen asking the prime minister if he was “part of the deep state”. He has now also renounced the Conservative whip, reportedly of his own accord. He announced in November 2022 that he would not contest the next election; his seat will, in any case, almost certainly fall to the Liberal Democrats. It’s not clear if Wragg remains a now ironic member of the Conservative Common Sense Group: probably not.

It’s fair to say there remain more questions than answers about the Wragg imbroglio...

We know some but not all of the names. The most recent to emerge is that of Andrea Jenkyns MP, who branded Wragg an “idiot” for “compromising security”. She has revealed she was targeted with a “spear-phishing” text: “It was worded identically, mentioning ‘Conference’. Unlike some MPs I am not happy with #Wragg as a mother with a young child who only recently had threats, it’s unforgivable of him to compromise the security of fellow MPs. Action is needed!”.

The MP for Bosworth, Dr Luke Evans, said he had been a “victim of cyberflashing” after being sent an image of a naked woman. Henry Zeffman, a BBC journalist, has written a full account of his own disquieting experiences. Harry Yorke, a journalist with The Sunday Times, has also told how he received flirtatious messages.

Unknown, but surely unlikely to stay that way. The nearer the individual concerned is to sensitive areas of foreign, security and defence policy, the worse it will be for a government struggling to maintain credibility and gain some political traction. There’s a whiff of the Profumo affair and 1960s spy scandals about this case, though that may prove fanciful. The point is that the secrecy surrounding the details of what has happened is generating understandable speculation, which in turn is destabilising and distracting the government.

Possibly related, possibly not, but it has a similar “honeytrap” dimension, if the published details are accurate. It’s not been denied, anyway. In May last year, it was reported that a Tory MP rang a party manager asking for help to be rescued from a brothel. He apparently feared he was the victim of a foreign sting operation. His 4am plea was words to the effect that: “I’m in a brothel. I don’t know how I got here and I can’t find my clothes.” Said to be someone in a marginal seat targeted by Labour, nothing has been heard since.

The Metropolitan Police and Leicestershire Police (in the Evans case), to our knowledge, plus probably the security services. The parliamentary authorities are also reviewing procedures.

This type of operation is quite reminiscent of the Cold War and the way that Soviet agents would try to inveigle unwitting Western diplomats, civil servants and politicians into being secretly photographed or filmed in compromising, career-ending sexual romps of various kinds. Indeed it has been rumoured that Vladimir Putin has just such “kompromat” material involving Donald Trump, something mentioned in the 2016 Steele dossier into Russian interference in Western democracies.

The former president has acknowledged the rumours but denied them. He said, in a bit of a ramble at a rally last year, referencing himself: “He was with four hookers. You think that was good to go up and tell my wife, ‘It’s not true, darling, I love you very much. It’s not true. Actually, that one she didn’t believe because she said, ‘He’s a germophobe, he’s not into that, you know’. He’s not into golden showers, as they say they called it, he’s not. I don’t like that idea. No, I thought that would be a big problem, I was going to have a rough night but that one she was very good on.”

So, Wragg is possibly the victim of a hostile foreign power but some official sources suggest it was a “rogue whackjob”. We don’t even know what, if any, information Wragg gave his blackmailer, nor what, if anything, the others did to “Charlie” and “Abi”, the aliases used.

The prominent writer and former culture secretary Nadine Dorries thinks so. She suggests that Wragg has been protected by “Tory high command” for political reasons because of his role in ending Johnson’s premiership: “When, on the rare occasion, his name has popped up in the media, it’s been because he’s a) being disloyal; b) complaining that the whips are bullying him; or c) attempting to remove a ­sitting prime minister ... I have always believed the ­deviousness of Wragg runs deep – a Gollum-like character since the day he arrived in Westminster in 2015.”

There may well be further revelations that will tarnish the Conservatives’ image as a competent party, and may even trigger a security scare. Parliament returns next week and it will be interesting to see how far the opposition parties push it. All the MPs identified so far have been Conservatives but the scandal may go wider than that. As for Wragg, the Tory whips have made it clear his public service is at an end, at the age of 36.