At 10.45 a.m. six senior Daily Telegraph executives had assembled for one final meeting in the editor’s office to decide whether to press ahead.
The letters to the ministers were ready to be sent; once they had gone, there could be no turning back. The Telegraph was a traditionally cautious newspaper, conservative with a small ‘c’. To take on the entire political class in such an aggressive and direct way was not a decision to be taken lightly. The issue of whether the authorities would try to stop the newspaper in its tracks remained a very real concern, and the dispatch of the letters carried a high risk of triggering legal action – or, worse, an unannounced police raid.
Wynn Davies sat in the middle of the editor’s glass-walled office, visible but not audible to everyone in the newsroom outside.
‘Can you give me any sort of guarantee that we won’t be injuncted?’ Lewis asked.
‘No, but I’m confident we’re on solid ground.’
‘What about the chances of the police being called in?’
Wynn Davies said it was highly unlikely the police would get involved, but that, in the event they were, they should be sent to see the paper’s executive director (editorial), Richard Ellis, who would politely inform the officers that they would need a warrant to search the building.
Lewis listened intently to what each person had to say, but as much as anything he was looking at their body language, watching for clues as to whether any of them had serious doubts.
No one did. The Telegraph had to press on, they all agreed.
Although everyone in the room was calm and businesslike, pulses were racing as each of them contemplated what was at stake.
Lewis then began ‘scenario planning’, working out how the paper could get the story out even if the police were called in or the courts tried to injunct. Rhidian Wynn Davies, the Telegraph’s consulting editor and Arthur’s son, was tasked with finding a secure location off-site for a copy of the disk in case all the copies in the office were seized.
‘Don’t worry, Rhids,’ Lewis reassured him with a smile. ‘If you get nicked you’ll be in a cell next to me.’
Plans were also laid out for publishing the expenses stories online even if an injunction was granted. A team of reporters and production staff would be scrambled to an off-site location where they could load stories on to the Telegraph’s website.
‘If we’re going to go ahead with this, we have to do it no matter what,’ said Lewis.
Meanwhile an in-house cameraman was told to be ready to film the police if they searched the office.
Lewis then called Winnett in. ‘We’re on,’ he said. ‘Let’s get the letters out.’
As Winnett returned to the back corridor to brief the reporting team, Lewis strolled across to the circular table in the centre of the newsroom known as ‘the hub’, where executives were gathering for the midday editorial conference.
The expenses story remained so hush-hush that most of the departmental heads were still completely in the dark, and on what was otherwise a desperately quiet news day, Matthew Bayley, the Telegraph’s news editor, went through the motions of preparing a ‘dummy’ newspaper he knew would almost certainly never see the light of day.
‘I’m embarrassed at how bad the news list is today,’ Bayley said as he began listing one dull story after another.
‘Well, we’ll just have to hope something better comes along later, won’t we?’ said a smirking Lewis as he wound up the conference twenty minutes later.
Lewis had arranged to have lunch that day with Nick Robinson, the BBC’s political editor, and Andrew Porter, the Daily Telegraph’s political editor, at Santini’s, a favourite of the England football manager Fabio Capello. As the three chatted about the state of the nation, Lewis was as tense as he had ever been, waiting for news from the office as Robinson grilled him on whether the Telegraph would be giving its unequivocal support to the Conservative Party at the next election.
Back at the office, Winnett was about to send the first, vital email to Michael Ellam. As he did so, five of the reporters sitting around him began making identical phone calls to the staff of twelve other Cabinet ministers – and, for good measure, the former Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott. The calls were followed up by emails similar to that sent to Ellam, all of which had been written during the course of that morning and approved by Arthur Wynn Davies. Within an hour, fourteen of the most senior politicians in the country had been placed on notice that their expenses claims were about to made public. They included Alistair Darling, the Chancellor; David Miliband, the foreign secretary; Andy Burnham, the culture secretary; Geoff Hoon, the transport secretary; Hazel Blears, the communities secretary; and Paul Murphy, the Welsh secretary. One by one, Whitehall departments discovered that ministers might be in trouble; and one by one they alerted Downing Street, where it soon became obvious to Michael Ellam, and to the Prime Minister, that instead of having a quiet end to the week, they were about to be swamped.
As soon as he had received the email from Winnett, Ellam had called Michael Dugher, Brown’s press aide, and asked him to leave his lunch and return to Downing Street that very minute to coordinate the government’s response to the Telegraph’s allegations. Dugher spoke to each minister involved – or their advisers – and told them they would each have to compose their own response to the Telegraph’s questions, though they should all stress that they had not broken any rules and explain the justification for claims where they could.
Meanwhile Joe Irvin, the Prime Minister’s political director, headed a small team which was given the unlikely task of sitting down and going through Brown’s own expenses.
Less than a mile away, at the Telegraph’s offices, tension was mounting by the minute as the investigation team busily wrote up their stories on the individual ministers, constantly checking the clock as they waited for the first response to come in.
Aside from the concerns over whether the Cabinet ministers – or even the parliamentary authorities – would try to injunct the Telegraph, Lewis had a lingering unease about whether the entire disk could turn out to be a fake. The Sunday Times, where Lewis had once worked, had been the victim of one of the most elaborate hoaxes in history when it published details in the early 1980s of a document which appeared to be Hitler’s newly discovered personal diaries. The ‘Hitler diaries’ fiasco had passed into infamy and had become a case study for every journalism student on the importance of checking source material. More recently, Piers Morgan had lost his job as editor of the Daily Mirror after publishing what turned out to be faked photographs of British soldiers assaulting Iraqi prisoners; and in 1996 the Sun had been hugely embarrassed by its publication of stills from a video of the Princess of Wales canoodling with James Hewitt which turned out to have been staged by lookalikes.
It remains every editor’s worst fear that they will become the unwitting victim of the next big hoax, and Lewis was determined it wasn’t going to be him. It had all seemed too easy, he kept saying to himself. Surely there had to be a catch?
The expenses team’s back office, which had become known, rather unimaginatively, as ‘the bunker’, began to resemble an operations room in a black-and-white war film as executives anxiously walked in and out, asking, ‘Any news?’ like commanding officers waiting to hear if a top-secret bombing raid had been successful. ‘Not yet,’ was the repeated refrain.
*
During the endless discussions about who might try to stop the Telegraph publishing the expenses story, one minister’s name kept cropping up: Jack Straw, the justice secretary.
Straw knew all about injunctions. Newspapers had been prevented from identifying him or members of his family in a 1998 story about his son selling cannabis after the Attorney General obtained an injunction (which was later overturned by a judge). He was also almost uniquely placed to understand the significance of what was happening. He had been home secretary when the government took the controversial decision to introduce the Freedom of Information Act whi
ch had led to the expenses data being compiled electronically. And he had been Leader of the House when the Commons decided to attempt to block the release of information about MPs’ expenses. He was now the head of the department that oversaw the freedom of information legislation; and, in his additional role as Lord Chancellor, he would also oversee any government attempt to block publication by the Telegraph.
Straw was sitting in the back seat of his ministerial car on the way to Whitemoor prison in Cambridgeshire when his travelling companion, his special adviser Mark Davies, pulled his BlackBerry out of his pocket and read him an email which had arrived from the Telegraph’s chief reporter, Gordon Rayner, at 1.50 p.m. The email contained five questions about Straw’s expenses, the most damaging of which was a query over why he had overclaimed for council tax for four years on his second home in his constituency of Blackburn.
Straw didn’t need reminding that he had claimed a 50 per cent council tax discount from his local authority while simultaneously billing the taxpayer for the full, undiscounted total. Straw had pocketed £1,500 over and above what he should have claimed. He had eventually paid back the money, sending a cheque to the parliamentary authorities in July 2008 – only to realize weeks later that he hadn’t repaid enough. He sent a second cheque to cover the outstanding balance with a letter which said: ‘Sorry – accountancy does not appear to be my strongest suit.’ Although Straw had repaid the money, his government department had prosecuted people for similar transgressions, making this a hugely embarrassing disclosure.
So it was somewhat to the surprise of the Telegraph team that it was Straw who was first with his response.
At 2.24 p.m., as the reporters in the bunker were wolfing down sandwiches from the local Pret a Manger, a message popped up in the corner of Rayner’s screen to say he had an email from Mark Davies.
‘Straw’s responded,’ Rayner tried, less than successfully, to announce to the room through a mouthful of dolphin-friendly tuna.
The reply from Straw’s office was remarkably straightforward. ‘Suffice to say, Jack takes this very seriously,’ it began. ‘He applies very high standards to the way he carries out his obligations.’ He had made ‘errors’ in claiming his council tax, it went on, and had also overclaimed around £200 in mortgage interest ‘in error’.
There were no threats of action, no threats of police involvement and no suggestion that the documents were faked.
‘Blimey, he’s admitted everything,’ said Rosa Prince, the Telegraph’s political correspondent, as she read the message which Rayner had forwarded to the other reporters, as well as to Wynn Davies.
‘Unbelievable,’ added Christopher Hope, the paper’s Whitehall editor. ‘Looks like we’re on, then!’
The justice secretary admitting that he had overclaimed public money would normally be one of the biggest scoops of a reporter’s career. But everyone in the room knew that this was just the start.
As Lewis got back from lunch, a copy of the Jack Straw email was thrust into his hand by Chris Evans, the Telegraph’s head of news.
It was only as he read the words in front of him that Lewis’s fears of a hoax finally dissipated, and he felt the tension in his body easing. ‘Well, that’s it then,’ he said to Evans.
At the same time Arthur Wynn Davies rushed into the bunker, smiling and waving a printout of the email above his head.
‘We’re in business!’ he proclaimed.
Freedom of Information?
February 2004
CHAPTER 1
MORE THAN FIVE years before the Telegraph’s expenses investigation began, freelance journalist Heather Brooke sat in her makeshift office in the corner of a friend’s attic painting studio, picked up the phone and dialled the number for the switchboard at the Houses of Parliament.
‘Hello, is it possible to speak to someone who deals with freedom of information requests?’ she asked, in her distinctive mid-Atlantic accent.
‘What’s that?’ came the reply.
‘There was a law passed four years ago,’ the reporter continued. ‘It lets members of the public have access to information and I’d like to speak to the person in charge of that.’
‘Um, I don’t know who that would be,’ said the switchboard operator. ‘I’ll put you through to the public enquiry office.’
Oh joy, thought Brooke. They haven’t got a clue.
Parliament had passed its first Freedom of Information Act as long ago as 2000, and its full provisions were due to come into force at the beginning of 2005. Brooke was interested in finding out how MPs were spending public money, and had decided to see whether Parliament, having had four years to prepare for the new Act to come into use, might already be in a position to help. But her enquiries were quickly leading her to the conclusion that Parliament was nowhere near ready for the introduction of the Act. From the way she was bounced between various departments, it seemed that few people had even heard of it.
Brooke had been born and raised in Seattle, though she had dual British–American nationality through her parents, who had moved to the US from their native Liverpool. It was during a previous life as an intern on The Spokesman–Review, a small-town daily newspaper in Spokane, Washington State, that Brooke had first developed a taste for exposing the expenses claims of politicians. America’s long-established freedom of information laws allowed her to dig through public records in the state capital, Olympia, to find out what local representatives had been spending public money on. Although she found little evidence of malfeasance, Brooke saw the relative honesty of local politicians as proof that transparency was a vital weapon in preventing abuses in public office.
From Spokane, Brooke had moved on to the Spartanburg Herald–Journal in South Carolina, but fell out of love with journalism after covering more than three hundred murders, telling friends she felt ‘burnt out’. A move to England, where she had been shocked at how difficult it was to get access to information held by officialdom, gave her the idea of writing a guide to using the forthcoming Freedom of Information Act, and she had become an expert in navigating this fiendishly complex piece of legislation, which seemed to some as if it had been designed to confound and frustrate those who tried to use it, rather than to encourage greater openness.
It was against this background that Brooke, by now aged in her mid-thirties, made her first approach to Parliament in February 2004 from her temporary office in Putney, south London, where her documents and ring binders competed for space with easels and painting materials belonging to her artist friend.
Brooke was particularly interested in the issue of MPs’ expenses, which had already provided a rich seam of newspaper stories guaranteed to provoke outrage among a British public who had an inherent distrust of politicians and believed they were all on the take. The most controversial element of what the MPs could claim for was something called the additional costs allowance (ACA), which gave them the right to claim up to £23,038 a year (at 2007/8 levels) for maintaining a second home.
Although MPs earn a good living (their basic salary in 2007/8 was £64,766), it was deemed insufficient for them to afford the cost of homes both in their constituencies – where they were expected to spend weekends and Parliament’s long periods of recess – and in London, one of the world’s most expensive cities. Successive governments had shied away from the idea of giving MPs a large pay rise to enable them to shoulder the expense of two homes, and so an alternative system was devised to allow them to claim the costs of their second home – including the interest on their mortgage – on expenses, in the same way that Joe Public might claim a train fare or a lunch.
Brooke was one of the first journalists to make a direct request to Parliament for details of MPs’ expenses. Having got nowhere with her telephone enquiries, she eventually received an email from Judy Wilson, Parliament’s data protection officer, who said she would also be handling FoI requests. Brooke called her and asked if she would be able to repeat the exercise she had carried out in America, di
gging through MPs’ expenses receipts to see what they had been spending public money on.
‘That’s really interesting,’ said Wilson, who assured Brooke that Parliament would be publishing details of MPs’ expenses in October 2004. Brooke decided there was nothing to do but wait.
When October came, however, Parliament published nothing more than a summary of the total amount which each MP had claimed on their expenses, backdated to 2001 and broken down into travel, office costs and the ACA.
Brooke called again. ‘Is this it?’ she asked. She was told it was.
Undaunted, Brooke decided to submit a written request for details of MPs’ expenses as soon as the Freedom of Information Act came into force in January 2005. She decided to go for broke by putting in a request for the expenses claims of all 646 MPs.
It was no great surprise to Brooke when her request was refused by the House of Commons on the grounds that it would be too expensive to collate and publish such a huge volume of information. But her motto was ‘never take no for an answer’, and where less combative reporters might have given up, she saw this as merely the opening round in a battle with the Commons authorities which she was quite happy to fight for years, if need be. And so it was to prove.
Brooke tried several different angles of attack, including requests for travel expenses; for the names and salaries of MPs’ staff; and for the ACA claims of all MPs. In each case her requests were swatted away by the parliamentary authorities, who seemed to regard her as something of an irritation.
‘They pretty much laughed in my face, because it was just so unheard of that a common person would dare to ask for them,’ she later said.
Parliament’s release of summaries of how much each MP had claimed was not without interest for reporters, however. Armed with even this most basic information, journalists had been able to uncover what appeared to most right-minded people to be blatant abuses of the expenses system, many involving MPs whose constituencies were in Greater London, less than half an hour’s commute from Parliament, deciding to treat themselves to a second home in Westminster courtesy of the taxpayer.
No Expenses Spared Page 2