About the Book
It was the biggest political scandal for a generation.
The Speaker of the House and five members of the Cabinet resigned.
The Legg enquiry ordered MPs to pay back over £1 million of wrongly claimed expenses. Three hundred and eighty-one MPs will be forced to pay back an average £3,000. Three MPs and one Lord face criminal charges.
No Expenses Spared is the fascinating account of the journalistic scoop that changed the face of British politics. It tells the story of one whistleblower and a small team of dedicated journalists who worked in secret to pore through more than a million expenses documents, braved the threat of legal action and political pressure to reveal the truth.
About the Authors
Robert Winnett is the deputy political editor of the Daily Telegraph. During his eleven-year career on Fleet Street, which started at the Sunday Times, he has been behind some of the country's biggest political scoops, including exposing the cash-for-honours scandal under Tony Blair and Derek Conway's controversial employment of his sons.
He has been shortlisted for three ‘scoop of the year’ awards at the British Press Awards and has won other prizes for his work, which has included reporting on the global credit crunch and several British general elections.
Gordon Rayner is chief reporter of the Daily Telegraph. He began his career at the Banbury Guardian before moving to the Sun and later the Daily Mail, where he helped uncover one of the biggest scandals of Tony Blair's premiership by revealing emails between Cherie Blair and the fraudster Peter Foster which proved No.10 had lied over the ‘Cheriegate’ affair.
During his fourteen years on national newspapers, Gordon has reported from more than twenty countries and covered many of the biggest stories of recent years, including the death of Princess Diana, the trial of Harold Shipman, the Soham murders, the 7/7 suicide bombings and the ongoing financial crisis.
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No Expenses Spared
Robert Winnett and Gordon Rayner
Cartoons by Matt
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NO EXPENSES SPARED
A CORGI BOOK: 9780552162227
First published in Great Britain
in 2009 by Bantam Press
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Corgi edition published 2010
Copyright © Telegraph Media Group Limited 2009, 2010
Matt cartoons copyright © Telegraph Media Group Limited 2009, 2010
Robert Winnett and Gordon Rayner have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the authors of this work.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
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Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Authors
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Prologue
1 Freedom of Information?
2 Basra
3 The Leak
4 The ‘Missing Disk’
5 The Cold Call
6 The Deal
7 The Plan
8 The Bunker
9 Decision Time
10 ‘Go Day’
11 Backlash
12 The Tories Get their Turn
13 Meltdown
14 The Moat
15 Payback
16 The Phantom Mortgage
17 The Resignations Begin
18 The Justice Minister, his House and ‘Osama bin Laden’
19 A Very British Revolution
20 The Duck House Discovery
21 Keeping It in the Family
22 A New Front
23 Brown on the Brink
24 A Sea of Black Ink
25 Charges
Epilogue
Appendix: The Expenses Files
The Claims MPs were told to repay
Acknowledgements
Although it is our names that appear on the cover, this book would not have been possible without the help and support of the team who worked on the investigation into MPs’ expenses.
The investigation itself could not have gone ahead had it not been for the courage and conviction of the Barclay family and Murdoch MacLennan, the chief executive of Telegraph Media Group, who backed their staff to the hilt. William Lewis, our editor, put his own neck on the block in deciding to go ahead with one of the riskiest stories in the Telegraph’s history; he also gave us limitless amounts of his time to provide his own recollections for this book and constant guidance during the writing process.
We are indebted to all those who worked in the bunker for their help in providing first-hand material and anecdotes for this book. In particular, thanks must go to reporters Holly Watt, Rosa Prince, Christopher Hope, Martin Beckford, Jon Swaine, Nick Allen and Caroline Gammell for their enthusiastic support throughout. Others who played vital roles in the bunker, including Duncan Hooper, Ian Douglas, Richard Oliver, Keith Hoggins, Himesh Patel and Veronica Hale, also deserve special mention.
News executives Tony Gallagher, Chris Evans and Matthew Bayley gave us vital help in reconstructing some of the key meetings which took place during the investigation, and also cast their expert eyes over the manuscript.
Arthur Wynn Davies, the Telegraph’s chief lawyer, has our gratitude for bringing his unrivalled experience and infectious good humour to the expenses project from start to finish.
Thanks also go to Andrew Porter, Andrew Pierce, Benedict Brogan and James Kirkup for their invaluable insights into what was going on in Parliament and in the wider world at the height of the investigation, and for so admirably representing the Telegraph by satisfying the countless requests for interviews during May, June and July.
Thank you to Rhidian Wynn Davies for helping us shape this book into its final form; to Matt Pritchett, the Telegraph’s peerless cartoonist, for allowing us to reproduce his work; and to Bill Scott-Kerr, Simon Thorogood and everyone at Bantam Press for steering us so expertly through the editing process.
Others at the Telegraph who played their part in the hugely complex expenses investigation are too numerous to name individually here, but they know who they are, and they can rest assured we appreciate the efforts of each and every one.
Lastly, our thanks must go to John Wick for his professionalism in handling such delicate material and his help in enabling us to tell the full story of how the leak of the expenses data came about
.
Robert Winnett and Gordon Rayner
London, September 2009
Prologue
Thursday, 7 May 2009
MICHAEL ELLAM HAD been expecting a relatively quiet day when he arrived for work at 8 a.m. sharp – or at least, as quiet a day as was possible for anyone working in the hothouse environment of 10 Downing Street. The Prime Minister’s director of communications, a career civil servant who had worked for Gordon Brown ever since he became Chancellor in 1997, had spent the previous fortnight handling a deluge of media enquiries about the government’s reluctance to allow Gurkha veterans to settle in the UK, but the furore had finally abated after the Prime Minister had held a private meeting with the Gurkhas’ campaign leader, the actress Joanna Lumley.
Ellam had already read the morning’s newspapers before he left home, and had been satisfied to see that they were generally positive from the Prime Minister’s point of view, giving him credit for finally doing right by the Gurkhas, one of the British Army’s most distinguished regiments. Crisis over, he thought to himself. So when he received a text message on his mobile phone from Robert Winnett, the deputy political editor of the Daily Telegraph, just after 1 p.m., it certainly didn’t set off any alarm bells, even though Winnett’s text urged him to call back ‘ASAP’. He phoned Winnett back around fifteen minutes later, no doubt expecting to field a straightforward question about one or two loose ends in the Gurkha story.
In fact, Winnett was about to fire the starting gun in what would become the biggest parliamentary scandal in centuries.
‘What’s up?’ Ellam asked.
Trying his best to keep any emotion out of his voice, Winnett replied: ‘What it is, I’ve got some questions about the Prime Minister’s personal expenses claims which I need to email to a secure email address, so I just wondered if you could give me the best address to send it to?’
‘I’d hope all of the email addresses in Downing Street were secure,’ joked Ellam, before suggesting the letter should be sent to his own No. 10 email account so he could draw it to the Prime Minister’s attention.
Despite his light-hearted response, Ellam knew from Winnett’s mention of ‘expenses’ that this could spell trouble. Like everyone else working in Westminster, he was aware of a rumour that a copy of a computer disk containing the details of expenses claims made by all 646 Members of Parliament over a four-year period had gone missing several weeks earlier. MPs had spent the past four years fighting demands for the information to be released until, after losing a controversial High Court case, Parliament had agreed to publish the details later in the year. Even so, much of the information in the expenses claims was to be censored (on grounds of ‘security’, that familiar parliamentary fallback), so that many of the most compromising and embarrassing details of what MPs had been up to would never see the light of day.
Or at least, that had been the plan. But the rumour was that the missing disk contained the full, unexpurgated version of the expenses claims, and MPs were in no doubt about the damage that information could cause if it were made public.
Although Ellam was no doubt confident that the Prime Minister had been scrupulous with his own expenses, the fact that the Telegraph was asking questions about Brown’s claims – signalling that the paper believed it was on to something – could not be good news.
Did this mean that the Telegraph had the disk? Would any other members of the government be getting phone calls from the newspaper? And what exactly was it that the Telegraph thought the Prime Minister had done?
Ellam didn’t have to wait long to find out. At 1.22 p.m., within a minute of putting the phone down on Ellam, Winnett pressed the ‘send’ button on his computer.
The email he sent contained a formal, carefully worded letter presenting details of the Prime Minister’s expenses claims and inviting him to explain how they fell within the rules. They included the fact that Brown had paid his brother, Andrew, more than £6,000 of taxpayers’ money to pass on to a cleaner; that he had switched the designation of his ‘second’ home from his London house to his house in Scotland; and that he had claimed twice for the same £153 plumber’s bill. It was a dry, precise, narrowly drawn communication giving little indication of the fact that Winnett and a team of nine other reporters had for some time been quietly sitting on the journalistic equivalent of an atomic bomb. For the previous week, they had spent every waking hour in a back room at the Telegraph’s head office above Victoria railway station, working in such secrecy that only a handful of people outside the room had any idea what they were up to.
The Telegraph did indeed have the computer disk, and the information the reporters discovered on it left them in no doubt that they were working on the story of a lifetime. Even for such a cynical, world-weary breed as national newspaper journalists, the details of what MPs had been claiming on their expenses had been startling. They were genuinely shocked to discover that many of the most senior members of the government, including Cabinet ministers, had been blatantly playing the system for years to squeeze every last penny they could out of the taxpayer.
Parliament had set up a system of expenses and allowances which enabled MPs to claim for the costs of running a second home. On the face of it, this seemed only reasonable: the vast majority of MPs represented constituencies that were not within easy reach of London, meaning they had to stay overnight in the capital during the months that Parliament was sitting. But some ministers had claimed thousands of pounds in expenses to furnish and help pay for one of their properties, before arbitrarily shifting the designation of ‘second home’ from their London base to their constituency home so they could furnish that property too. Others appeared to have avoided paying capital gains tax by switching the designation when they came to sell their second home so that they could tell the taxman it was, in fact, their main home and exempt from tax. With each passing day the reporters had discovered another scam, until they were faced with a mind-boggling array of ingenious ways in which MPs had managed to milk a publicly funded system which was so inadequately policed by civil servants that it almost seemed to have been designed to be abused.
On another level, the reporters had been amazed at the bizarre, the trivial and the downright baffling items which many MPs had put on their expenses: a 5p carrier bag, a packet of HobNobs, a glittery toilet seat, a jar of Branston Pickle. Some parsimonious MPs submitted such detailed and lengthy expenses claims that it was hard to imagine they had much time left to do anything else. One had even put in a phone bill for a single penny.
*
Thursday, 7 May had been designated as ‘go day’ for the Daily Telegraph’s expenses investigation by the editor, William Lewis, but he was acutely aware that the newspaper was entering uncharted territory in which many obstacles would still have to be overcome before any of the stories could go to press.
Until now, an ambitious newspaper investigation might have culminated in a single government minister being exposed for an apparent abuse of his or her position. The Telegraph was about to hold no fewer than thirteen members of the Cabinet up to such scrutiny in a single day, with the intention of doing the same again with a new set of ministers or MPs every day for a week or more. And while many newspaper investigations might spend weeks looking into the activities of one person, the Telegraph’s reporting team had spent precisely one week checking out dozens of MPs, having obtained the information on 29 April. The pace of the investigation had raised concerns among everyone involved that important material might have been overlooked, or that mistakes might have been made by reporters who were all on a steep learning curve.
By 7 May the reporting team had only looked at a fraction of the material on the disk – but an agreement with the man who had passed the disk on to the newspaper meant publication had to go ahead by the end of that week, if at all: so Lewis knew he had no option but to press ahead. The team would just have to carry on combing through the documents on the disk as they went along.
Lewis had told
Winnett and his team to spend that morning preparing email letters to all of the ministers he intended to feature in the next day’s paper – but not to send them. Yet.
At this point in the operation the spotlight fell on one of its central figures: Arthur Wynn Davies, the paper’s highly experienced chief in-house lawyer. Approaching his sixty-fifth birthday, he might have been expected to be looking forward to a relaxing retirement in his native north Wales. But Wynn Davies, rake-thin and hyperactive, a newspaperman first and a lawyer second, was as excited as any of the reporters about what he knew might be journalistic history in the making. After more than thirty years as a barrister in the press world, he still got as much of a buzz from working on a big breaking news story as a trainee reporter would in their first week on the job.
Wynn Davies had endured a sleepless night as he went over and over the possible ways in which the government or Parliament might try to scupper the story. At the very least, he reckoned the authorities would seek a High Court injunction on the grounds that the disk was ‘stolen’ and publication might threaten the privacy of MPs or break data protection laws. The worst-case scenario was that the police would be called in to investigate how the Telegraph came to be in possession of the disk. Key members of staff might even find themselves under arrest. But despite the legal complexities, Wynn Davies was certain in his own mind that the way in which the Telegraph had obtained the information and what it was about to do with it were legitimate. He felt strongly that publication of the material was in the public interest and that any attempt to gag the paper could be seen off. To be doubly sure, it was essential that the Telegraph be in a position to convince a judge that each of the MPs it was about to expose had been given a decent opportunity to respond to the allegations so that due weight could be given to what they had to say.
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