Who else was caught up in the sexting honeytrap? That’s the question Westminster is asking today. It follows last night’s revelation that William Wragg, vice chair of the 1922 committee, was the source responsible for passing on MPs’ phone numbers to a man he met on the gay dating app Grindr. This man then used the numbers to target at least a dozen others.

Among them are believed to be three MPs including a serving minister, four political staffers, a former Tory MP and two political journalists. They were sent unsolicited flirtatious texts from senders calling themselves ‘Charlie’ or ‘Abi’ in a suspected spear-phishing attack. Two of the MPs are reported to have responded by sharing images of themselves.

The range of targets is all the more striking when one recalls the last major sexting scandal in Westminster in 2014. Brooks Newmark was forced to resign as a minister after being caught in a sting operation by the Sunday Mirror. He sent explicit pictures of himself to a ‘female party activist’ who was, in fact, a male undercover reporter posing as a woman to deliberately target Newmark.

That story was judged to be in the public interest as it showed a minister was opening himself to blackmail by sexting a total stranger. Ten years on, it is doubtful whether the lessons of that scandal have been properly absorbed, with Leicestershire Police now launching an investigation into reports of ‘malicious communications’.

Wragg said he provided the contact details because he feared the man had ‘compromising things on me’. Amid calls in some quarters to remove the Tory whip from him, government figures appear to be standing by him this afternoon, with Chancellor Jeremy Hunt praising his ‘courageous’ statement on the morning media round.

Some fellow Conservatives are privately less supportive. One former minister texts to point out how much ‘moralising’ Wragg did about Boris Johnson during partygate. Another MP says simply that Wragg has been a ‘bloody fool’ and asks whether he can retain his chairmanship of the Public Administration committee. If Wragg had not already announced that he was standing down at the next election it would likely be considered a resigning issue.

The sympathetic reaction to Wragg’s dilemma shows the grave misjudgment he made in not going to the police straight away. If he is willing to be forgiven for handing over colleagues’ phone numbers, he would probably have been forgiven even quicker for sending an indecent image of himself.