‘William Wragg sexting scandal feels straight out of Russian and Chinese playbooks,’ writes Nigel Nelson

The answer, of course, is d which is exactly what Bosworth Tory PM Luke Evans did, while the BBC’s chief political correspondent, Henry Zeffman, tried the blocking and unblocking tease in c which only encouraged more messages.

We still do not know how many victims of ‘Charlie’ or ‘Abi’ chose option a, and Conservative MP William Wragg fueled the whole sordid business by opting for b.

Westminster was initially sympathetic to the mess he got himself into, not least because of his own acknowledged mental health issues. But Jeremy Hunt went full OTT by calling him “courageous”.

This was a red Wragg to the bullies. Behind-the-scenes the 36-year-old MP was being told his position was untenable.

In effect, he fired himself by quitting the prestigious chairmanship of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Select Committee and his post as vice-chair of the Conservative backbench 1922 Committee. He has now also resigned the Tory whip.

While providing a diversion for MPs during a quiet Easter recess, this affair also marks a behavioural sea change. There was a time when MPs who got up to sexual allsorts had only tabloid newspapers to fear.

Now they voluntarily expose themselves - in both meanings of the word - which doesn’t set much of an example to our children, especially when parents go to such great pains to warn of the dangers of sexting.

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Information is oddly lacking to explain who might be behind this scam. Blackmailers perhaps? If so, we need to know if any money changed hands. And it does seem too extensive to be pranksters getting their kicks out of embarrassing MPs.

That leaves a hostile foreign state as the culprit which is being downplayed, too. But this affair does make it timely to look at just what Russia and China do get up to.

Russia has had a policy since the Cold War of planting disinformation and fake news to destabilise Western institutions and sow mistrust in their governments. Social media has made that job easier.

Making Britain's legislators look like naive fools would be straight out of the Moscow cyber warfare playbook. And the pandemic allowed Russia to amplify Covid conspiracy theories to discredit our vaccines and promote its own Sputnik V jabs.

China got in on the act with so-called “wolf warrior diplomacy”. Chinese diplomats tended to keep a low profile until Covid came along. Then they were ordered to up their game.

Their job was to deflect world finger-pointing that the virus might have escaped from one of China’s labs. So they put it about that America developed Covid as a bioweapon.

​Nato has for years had a strategic comms centre in the Latvian capital, Riga, monitoring and disabling Russian auto-generated “bikini bots” aimed at the West.

These robot trolls are fronted by stolen pictures of scantily-clad young women to use as bait. Nato bot-watchers know one as “Robotic Jana”, in real life an unsuspecting Bulgarian ex-beauty queen.

Each bot can spew out 144 messages a day – one every 10 minutes for 24 hours – adding up to millions of tweets and posts.

They can even stoke up friction between opposing groups by posing as, say, Islamist extremists on one hand and neo-Nazis on the other. Instead of weapons of mass destruction, these are weapons of mass division.

The bots interfered in the 2016 US presidential election by repeating Donald Trump’s tweets hundreds of thousands of times.

This, of course, begs the question of whether we do anything similar to the Russians? I have never been able to establish a satisfactory answer to this in the secretive briefings I’ve received in the darker corners of Whitehall. But our spooks do admit to having a few tricks up their sleeves.

As a security source told me: “If you can persuade the Russian population the West is going to disable every ATM there will be a run on the banks.

“It doesn’t matter we can’t do it. All you need to do is make people think you can.”

There may be another tell-tale sign. Vladimir Putin is often pictured half-undressed displaying a bare torso. So perhaps our cyber warriors are already hard at work after all.