The Employment Minister and MP for Epsom and Ewell was at the centre of a political storm last week amid claims socialist activists had ‘hacked’ his email account.

Chris Grayling initially accused anti-capitalist campaigners of pressuring firms to pull out of his department’s new work experience scheme, going so far as to suggest they had hacked his email.

However this week Mr Grayling defended the scheme and clarified that his email had not been ‘hacked’ but ‘hijacked’ to lodge a complaint with Tesco over the scheme.

He said: "Out of the blue I got an automated response from Tesco saying thank you for your complaint and explaining what they were doing with the work experience scheme. They are not quite sure what the mechanism was but they had hijacked my email account to lodge a complaint with Tesco. The campaign was using fake email accounts to lodge complaints and one of them was mine. I assume that they used an automated system to register a complaint and inserted my email address as where it had come from. They didn’t actually hack into the Parliamentary systems email - that would obviously have been a massive security breach."

The scheme, which encourages young people to take up two to eight weeks of unpaid work experience with a potential employer while continuing to receive benefits has attracted strong criticism with some branding it ‘slave labour.’ Speaking to the Epsom Guardian this week, Mr Grayling said: "I hope we are winning the argument and nobody involved nationally has pulled out. I think that there’s been a pretty good push back this week and I’m absolutely convinced we are right. We are doing some very different and controversial things in welfare reform - the work experience scheme is not one of them. It’s a simple scheme designed to get young people into work places to demonstrate what they can do. Almost half of them come off benefits afterwards. The idea that this is anything but a really positive scheme to help young people is absurd."