Six days after his involvement in the honeytrap sexting scandal was revealed, Will Wragg has now resigned the Tory whip. It follows his decision on Monday night to quit his roles as vice chairman of the 1922 committee and the public administration select committee. Wragg had previously announced in late 2022 that he would be standing down at the next election meaning he looks likely to sit out his last few months in parliament sitting as an independent. A statement from the whips’ office made clear that Wragg was ‘voluntarily relinquishing’ the whip.
So, why now? Within government there is a sense that the initially supportive reaction of Wragg was somewhat misjudged. Jeremy Hunt praised the Hazel Grove MP as ‘courageous’ on the Friday morning’s media round, the day after the Times broke the news of Wragg’s involvement in the phishing attack. Friends of Wragg agreed that he was a ‘victim’ in this, with Charles Walker telling the BBC that he ‘had been subject to a sting operation by a very clever and manipulative operator.’ Walker said that ‘that there’s a lot of compassion out there’ adding ‘I’m not excusing what Will has done, but I do think that he is a victim in this along with all the others.’
Yet this week, the mood has appeared to harden against Wragg. Following his resignation of the whip, party chairman Richard Holden told Sky that it is ‘the right thing to have done’ and that ‘It’s quite clear his career in public life is at an end.’ Within some quarters, there was irritation that Wragg was a distraction from the Tory attacks on Angela Rayner’s tax affairs. It is hoped that Wragg’s resignation will take the heat out of the affair for the Conservatives, even if he ‘voluntarily’ quit rather than having the whip removed. An example of this was offered by Rishi Sunak’s phone-in on LBC today. The Prime Minister easily brushed off criticism about why he allowed Wragg to resign by saying ‘People can judge me if they want to judge me on that, that’s fine, I accept that’ before turning the question to the ‘weakness’ of Starmer over the Rayner saga.
Wragg’s continued presence in the parliamentary party also risked becoming a factional issue for Sunak. He was one of the first to call for Boris Johnson to quit over partygate and was equally quick to demand that Liz Truss resign after the mini-Budget, even mocking her ‘deep state’ claims at a liaison committee meeting last month. It is therefore unsurprising that Johnson’s allies like Andrea Jenkyns, Sir Conor Burns, Lord Goldsmith and Nadine Dorries have led the public Tory criticism of Wragg since the scandal broke. Dorries has been particularly vocal, tweeting yesterday afternoon that ‘Wragg still has the whip because No.10 are terrified of what he could reveal if they remove it – the pack of cards may come tumbling down.’
With Wragg’s resignation of the party whip, Downing Street hope that it will draw a line under this affair, allow them to continue landing attacks on Rayner while avoiding the nightmare of yet another by-election involving Tory sleaze.
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