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We may have been in Easter recess the past couple of weeks, but on both sides of the party divide, there were those who did not get a rest from politics.

MP William Wragg undoubtedly had a dysfunctional week as the man at the centre of the Westminster honeytrap scandal.

He resigned the Conservative party whip as some colleagues looked on with a mixture of bemusement and anger at Number 10’s handling of the whole sorry affair.

Meanwhile, on the Labour side, deputy leader Angela Rayner can’t seem to shake off or shut down the persistent questions about whether she paid the right amount of tax when she sold her council house nearly a decade ago.

She insists she has done nothing wrong while there are Conservatives looking to weaponise the issue in this election year – with at least one local Tory councillor and other protesters this week hounding her on a visit to Teesside, with banners dubbing her a “tax dodger”‘ in the hope it will stick.

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This week in Electoral Dysfunction, Jess, Ruth and I chew over both the substance and the politics of these difficult situations and ask whether Number 10 and Labour are making tricky issues better or worse.

When it comes to Mr Wragg, who admitted sharing MPs’ and journalists’ phone numbers with someone he met on Grindr who had “compromising things” on him, there is widespread incredulity that a sitting MP would do such a thing, overlaid with some anger over Number 10’s handling of it – with some arguing that Rishi Sunak failed to move quickly enough to take control of the story, suspend Mr Wragg and look decisive.

Instead, ministers were dispatched to defend the MP as ”courageous”, while it was Mr Wragg himself who decided to give up the Tory whip his week. He is now sitting as an independent MP.

“Madness [to send pictures and give out personal details] and yet our leadership decided to defend him,” one former cabinet minister texted this week. “If it wasn’t so stupid. It would be genuinely funny. The script of the Thick Of It. A few of us messaged centre at weekend to say WTF. His resignation was inevitable.”

Ruth agrees, and says – while she has sympathy for Mr Wragg being in this “horrible situation” – that he is “somebody in an important job who has responsibilities” to the place he works and people with whom he works.

“The idea you throw all of that out of the window for a quick shag or to exchange a pic is so wilfully irresponsible that actually I don’t think [much of] the level of understanding, or acceptance or excuse that the government made on his behalf.

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Sexting MP ‘right to quit’

“I think it’s bad judgement and I think this is another one where you look at the judgement of the prime minister and go, you know this, this doesn’t fly.”

But aside from questions about the political handling from the centre – and there are issues around safeguarding a vulnerable MP, which I talk about in the pod – there are also wider questions, again, around MPs’ security in a world where contacts count and phone numbers are currency.

“People give numbers out all the time. Having people’s phone numbers is a massive currency in Westminster,” explains Jess, who points out that MPs are using personal phones in parliament.

“The trouble is that I think people think we have parliamentary phones but it’s just my personal phone, so they don’t own it. I’m way more careful about my parliamentary computer and the iPad they gave me.

“So I imagine what will come out of this is probably that we all have to have parliamentary-issued phones that are locked down by the security services. I imagine that’s where it’s going.”

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Starmer: Rayner tax story is ‘smear’

With a sex scandal engulfing the Conservatives once more, on the other side of the political divide, Ms Rayner is struggling to put to bed questions over whether she paid the right amount of tax when she sold her council house nearly a decade ago, before she became an MP.

Ms Rayner has made it clear she took tax advice at the time and has done nothing wrong, while Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has come out to defend her and accused the Tories of trying to smear her over a story with no substance.

Neither Ruth, Jess nor I think the story is getting much cut through, largely because of the complexity of it all, but that isn’t stopping the Conservatives pursuing Ms Rayner with real ferocity.

Ruth thinks the Tories are going in hard for a number of reasons.

First, she thinks Labour “hasn’t had this level of scrutiny for a long time”, so this is an opportunity for the party machine to “try to flex its muscles”. Second, Ms Rayner has been used as “an attack dog” for the party on these issues so “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander”.

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She also argues that “there is a purpose to man-mark her off the pitch”, but it won’t change the public’s view of Ms Rayner: “She’ll be a Marmite politician for the whole of her career because of the strength of her character. The people who love her will love her and the people who can’t stand her will turn the TV off when she comes on.”

Jess concedes the issue is hurting Ms Rayner but thinks she will ride it out and believes there’s a risk that “if it starts to look like the Conservatives are picking on her, it has a counter effect”.

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But, in a similar way to the Beergate story that hounded Sir Keir and Ms Rayner during 2021 – they were accused, and cleared, of breaking lockdown rules in Durham – the Conservatives show little sign of letting go of Ms Rayner or her tax affairs until they have wrung every single drop out of it.

And if, in an election year, they can try to make “tax dodger” land – or at least disrupt her campaigning – Conservative campaign headquarters will chalk it up as a win.

So while the hope from Ms Rayner’s and Sir Keir’s respective offices is that the story will burn itself out, it may be that Ms Rayner, in the end, has to do more to put it properly to bed: on that, all three of us agree.

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Why Boris’s best mate is off to Reform

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Why Boris's best mate is off to Reform

👉Listen to Politics at Sam and Anne’s on your podcast app👈       

Former Conservative chairman and friend of Boris Johnson – Sir Jake Berry – is defecting to Reform UK, causing more problems for Tory leader Kemi Badenoch.

On today’s episode, Sky News’ Sam Coates and Politico’s Anne McElvoy discuss if his defection will divide parts of Reform policy.

Elsewhere, the Anglo-French summit gets under way, with Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer hoping to announce a migration deal with French President Emmanuel Macron to deter small boat crossings.

Plus, chatter around Whitehall that No10 are considering a pre-summer reshuffle, but will it have any value?

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Australia to test CBDCs, stablecoins in next stage of crypto play

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Australia to test CBDCs, stablecoins in next stage of crypto play

Australia to test CBDCs, stablecoins in next stage of crypto play

The trial is part of Project Acacia, an initiative from the RBA exploring how digital money and tokenization could support financial markets in Australia.

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Starmer and Macron agree need for ‘new deterrent’ to stop small boat crossings

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Starmer and Macron agree need for 'new deterrent' to stop small boat crossings

Sir Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron have agreed the need for a “new deterrent” to deter small boats crossings in the Channel, Downing Street has said.

The prime minister met Mr Macron this afternoon as part of the French president’s state visit to the UK, which began on Tuesday.

High up the agenda for the two leaders is the need to tackle small boat crossings in the Channel, which Mr Macron said yesterday was a “burden” for both the UK and France.

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The small boats crisis is a pressing issue for the prime minister, given that more than 20,000 migrants crossed the English Channel to the UK in the first six months of this year – a rise of almost 50% on the number crossing in 2024.

Sir Keir is hoping he can reach a deal for a one-in one-out return treaty with France, ahead of the UK-France summit on Thursday, which will involve ministerial teams from both nations.

The deal would see those crossing the Channel illegally sent back to France in exchange for Britain taking in any asylum seeker with a family connection in the UK.

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However, it is understood the deal is still in the balance, with some EU countries unhappy about France and the UK agreeing on a bilateral deal.

French newspaper Le Monde reports that up to 50 small boat migrants could be sent back to France each week, starting from August, as part of an agreement between Sir Keir and Mr Macron.

A statement from Downing Street said: “The prime minister met the French President Emmanuel Macron in Downing Street this afternoon.

“They reflected on the state visit of the president so far, agreeing that it had been an important representation of the deep ties between our two countries.

“Moving on to discuss joint working, they shared their desire to deepen our partnership further – from joint leadership in support of Ukraine to strengthening our defence collaboration and increasing bilateral trade and investment.”

It added: “The leaders agreed tackling the threat of irregular migration and small boat crossings is a shared priority that requires shared solutions.

“The prime minister spoke of his government’s toughening of the system in the past year to ensure rules are respected and enforced, including a massive surge in illegal working arrests to end the false promise of jobs that are used to sell spaces on boats.

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“The two leaders agreed on the need to go further and make progress on new and innovative solutions, including a new deterrent to break the business model of these gangs.”

Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, seized on the statement to criticise Labour for scrapping the Conservatives’ Rwanda plan, which the Tories claim would have sent asylum seekers “entering the UK illegally” to Rwanda.

He said in an online post: “We had a deterrent ready to go, where every single illegal immigrant arriving over the Channel would be sent to Rwanda.

“But Starmer cancelled this before it had a chance to start.

“Now, a year later, he’s realised he made a massive mistake. That’s why numbers have surged and this year so far has been the worst in history for illegal channel crossings.

“Starmer is weak and incompetent and he’s lost control of our borders.”

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