There’s a familiar pattern in Westminster these days. An MP writes in haste a message to colleagues on WhatsApp. The contents leak to the press. Then there’s embarrassment, a public ticking off or – if really bad – the sack. The Labour MP Andrew Gwynne is the latest to experience this. Keir Starmer’s health minister was sacked and had the whip suspended after the Mail on Sunday revealed a secret WhatsApp group by the name of “Trigger me Timbers”.

In messages published by the Mail, Gwynne is alleged to have penned a “joke” reply to a 72-year-old-constituent that read: “Dear resident, Fuck your bins. I’m re-elected and without your vote. Screw you. PS: Hopefully you’ll have croaked it by the all-outs.” There’s more too – with Gwynne accused of making sexist comments about the deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, and racist comments about the Labour veteran Diane Abbott. Naturally, others in the group are now also under suspicion. Despite a hasty apology from the 29-year-old 2024 intaker Oliver Ryan for “not speaking out at the time”, the Labour MP for Burnley has had the whip suspended after the party’s investigation. “How stupid can you get?” asks a member of the new intake.

While Gwynne’s comments are on the more extreme end of misjudged WhatsApp comments, he is just the latest politico to have their words on the encrypted messaging platform catch up with them. Mark Twain is believed to have said that two people can keep a shared secret if one of them is dead. Yet today’s politicians happily share their private – sometimes dark – thoughts with hundreds of colleagues at any one time.

The Gwynne scandal presents two immediate problems to No 10. First, it’s a distraction in the week that was meant to see Keir Starmer finally take the fight on immigration to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. Second, after a tricky start to government, it’s more grist to the mill to the theory that despite Starmer’s promise to clean up politics while in opposition, this Labour government isn’t so different to the Tory sleaze that dominated the Conservatives’ final years.

It won’t be of much comfort to Starmer in No 10, but the problem of WhatsApp in Westminster is a cross-party issue. Over the past 10 years, the WhatsApp group has grown in influence and changed how Westminster works – not always for the better.

Speak to a member of David Cameron’s No 10 and they will offer various reasons as to why that period of Tory government was relatively calm compared with what followed under his successors. Putting the challenges of delivering Brexit to one side, they will say there was another key difference: the dominance of WhatsApp in Westminster. While there was the odd WhatsApp group in the Cameron years (one by his inner circle called “Team Victory”), most communication was done by email or text.

“We didn’t know how lucky we were,” says a former minister. Then it started to change. “Twitter allowed us to be fools in public,” says another. “Then WhatsApp allowed us to be fools in private, or so we thought – but actually that’s public too.” This is the crux of the issue: despite all the evidence to the contrary, MPs still take the view that they can say things on WhatsApp that they wouldn’t dare utter in a speech, type in an email or probably say in a pub.

Yet over the past few years, messaging service has usurped all of the above as the preferred method of communication for many politicos. As was evidenced in the Covid inquiry, the pandemic saw the creation of “government by WhatsApp” with various processes ditched on the grounds that quick decisions were made.

In that time, there have been plenty of embarrassing WhatsApp conversations coming to light. The former cabinet secretary Simon Case described the then prime minister Boris Johnson’s wife Carrie as “the real person in charge”. During his time in No 10, Dominic Cummings described the cabinet as “useless fuckpigs”. During the coup against Johnson in 2021, Nadine Dorries was kicked out after calling on MPs to show “a bit of loyalty” to her former boss. Labour have had their problems too – the effort to oust Jeremy Corbyn began from an innocent sounding WhatsApp group titled “Birthday Club”, which eventually led to a break away group that went on to form Change UK. “It allows for plotting at any time of day; you don’t even need to go out,” notes a former government whip.

Each political tribe tends to have a WhatsApp group to organise. For the whips’s office it’s a logistical nightmare. It also feeds a sense of factionalism – with individuals often preaching to the choir. Even now, new Labour MPs are forming their own tribes. The group that winds up remaining Tory MPs is the “Conservative 2019 WhatsApp group” where many of the former MPs who lost their seats last year still merrily type away their regrets and frustrations. One member said: “Not a day goes by when I don’t think, ‘What I am reading. Oh god I would not have said that,’ or ‘What a shame life has not moved on for these people – they still think they are MPs.’”

The biggest problem is the attitude to WhatsApp. MPs – like so many people in the country – say things there that they would never consider saying in a speech, in an email or even during a conversation at work. “There’s a certain thrill from it,” admits a Labour MP. “Getting a response when you make a witty aside.”

Many take the fact that they are technically encrypted as carte blanche to say whatever springs to mind at any moment in time. But the opposite is true. “If you want a message out, you should not tweet but put it on an MP WhatsApp group,” says one Labour MP. So true; which journalist doesn’t get excited about the idea of an exclusive?

There is risk limitation. These days most MPs and politicos have disappearing messages on – some senior figures in both parties are known to have a 24-hour limit. However, even if the message disappears within hours it doesn’t really matter if it’s gone to more than a handful of people.

Gwynne has discovered this the hard way. And he won’t be the last.

• Katy Balls is the Spectator’s political editor

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