Westminster sexting and the honeytrap
The News Agents
Global
4.1 • 5.4K Ratings
🗓️ 10 April 2024
⏱️ 33 minutes
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Summary
William Wragg, the MP who found himself blackmailed by a person to whom he'd sent explicit photographs - last night resigned the Conservative party whip.
It means Sunak has lost another MP - Wragg will quit parliament anyway after the next election. He was the victim of a honeytrap which lured him into believing the messages he was receiving from a stranger.
But he was also unwise enough to share colleagues contact details when pressured by his blackmailer. Today we go back to the origins of the honeytrap story with the Politico journalist who broke the story, Aggie Chambre.
Later we look at Sunak's relationship with the voter - as revealed in this morning's LBC interview with various callers. What does it tell us about his campaigning strategy?
Editor: Tom Hughes
Producer: Laura FitzPatrick
Social Media Editor: Georgia Foxwell
Video Production: Shane Fennelly and Arvind Badewal
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The News Agents is brought to you by HSBC UK - https://www.hsbc.co.uk/
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Newsagents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity. |
| 0:08.2 | This is a global player original podcast. |
| 0:11.9 | It's a good reminder to everyone, but particularly those in public life, to obviously be careful |
| 0:16.0 | about unsolicited messages that they get. There's lots of bad actors we're seeing around the world |
| 0:20.4 | who are trying to cause damage to our democratic processes. As I said, there's a police |
| 0:25.6 | investigation that's happening. It's important that we work through these things in due time. |
| 0:30.2 | So he's resigned from all his various positions, including from the Conservative Party whip. |
| 0:35.5 | And the important thing here is we let the police investigation. That was the Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on LBC this morning, being asked about William Ragh, |
| 0:43.4 | who until last night was a Conservative MP. He has now resigned the Conservative Whip, |
| 0:49.6 | having found himself at the centre of a scandal which involved his sending not only sexually explicit |
| 0:57.2 | material of himself to an unknown person, but also as part of that, the numbers of his fellow |
| 1:04.5 | Conservative MPs to a person who he says was essentially blackmailing him. Yeah, and when this story broke about William Ragg on Thursday night, there was a mixture |
| 1:14.8 | of, I guess, sympathy, empathy for what Mr. Ragg had been through and anger that he had |
| 1:20.7 | released his colleagues' details, contact details, to the person who had solicited them. |
| 1:27.4 | And today we're going to go a little bit further |
| 1:29.5 | and try to find out where this story originated from with the journalist who first broke it |
| 1:35.7 | a week ago, Aggie Chambrey, who's at Politico, and try and understand what the Westminster |
| 1:41.7 | Honey Trap was all about and how she realized it was going on. Welcome to the |
| 1:48.0 | newsagents. The Newsagents. It's Lewis. It's Emily. And just to start then with what we know today |
| 1:58.0 | about William Ragg, he has resigned the whip, which means that he stays as an MP |
| 2:03.3 | until the next election, but he's no longer a conservative MP. He is not somebody that Rishi |
| 2:08.6 | Sunak can count as one of his parliamentary party. This follows his resignation from that famous |
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