Why did he do it? Why would anyone be so stupid? That’s the question everyone started asking as soon as William Wragg revealed he had been part of a honeytrap scandal in which he shared the numbers of colleagues to a fraudster he had met on Grindr. The fraudster then contacted those MPs seeking explicit photos of them – which two then supplied. Wragg admitted he had handed over the phone numbers because “he had stuff on me”, adding: “I’ve hurt people by being weak. I was scared. I’m mortified. I’m so sorry that my weakness has caused other people hurt.” That word, “weakness”, is the answer to those questions. Wragg seems to have been a victim of fraud, something anyone can fall prey to: it’s just whether the fraudster has found their weakness. Everyone has one, too: whether it’s the pensioner feeling a little dissatisfied with their standard of living who succumbs to a
Bitcoin scam, or the slightly anxious parent who responds to a “hi mum, it’s me, I’ve lost my phone” message from an unknown number. The real question is whether MPs are more likely to be susceptible to this fraud because of the kind of people they are – or indeed because of the Westminster world they inhabit. Of course, the general population is at risk of these kinds of spear-phishing scams, too. It’s just that politicians are – to use a rather too apposite word – much more exposed than the general population. The stakes are much higher if someone has embarrassing information about you when a lot of people know who you are. For some people, the sensible response would be to not allow yourself to be embarrassed in the first place, which is why so many people seem baffled by the situation Wragg ended up in. But then again, even those of us who are baffled have
Friends who’ve been victims of fraud, or who would have to give quite a full answer if they were being vetted by a government department to the question of whether there was anything in their personal life which might make them more vulnerable to blackmail or bribery. It’s just that most of those friends don’t end up in Parliament and therefore in a position where they are a much more valuable target for fraudsters. It’s also not as though MPs don’t think about cyber threats. They are alert to hacking and other interference from hostile states. The Speaker gives regular updates on cyber targeting and hacking of parliamentarians. But do the authorities really need to tell MPs not to share compromising material on themselves with a phone number they don’t even recognise, as in the case of two of the MPs whose numbers Wragg passed on ? It’s easy to see this as being akin to having to train politicians on how to cross the road safely. Read Next A timeline of Tory sleaze scandals as party in turmoil after Crispin Blunt arrest It’s here that the unique position of MPs and the culture in Westminster come into play, and explain why some of them don’t just play it safe all the time. Being an MP can be a lonely life, and a highly abnormal one, too: not just in terms of the long hours and a life split between central
London and a constituency elsewhere, but also in terms of the amount of time politicians spend with one another in a highly charged environment. There is also a tendency often hard-wired into politicos to be risk-takers: from the start of your political career onwards, you can get locked into a dopamine cycle that rewards high-stakes moves. While that cycle starts with trying to win your seat and climbing up the parliamentary greasy pole, it can easily extend to a personal life, too. The fear of being found out becomes part of the enjoyment of embarrassing behaviour in someone’s private life, and with each risk that they take without being exposed, the circle becomes more vicious – until the devastation caused by just one risk too far. There were at least three MPs in this one case, who took a risk that at the time was too hard to resist. Wragg’s Conservative colleague Charles Walker often observes that Parliament acts like a tin opener on existing vulnerabilities, prising the lid off quickly and bringing mental health problems, weaknesses in marriages and addictions to a crisis point quicker than for someone outside Westminster. It is a pressure cooker and one filled with people who aren’t, quite frankly, behaving particularly normally either. Wragg himself has previously been open about the impact politics has had on his mental health, and explained that he was standing down at the next
election because he worried about the “risk of being institutionalised”. The sad truth is that Wragg and all his colleagues took that risk at the very start of their careers.