Another complaint voiced by one of the soldiers was that none of the MPs had bothered ‘to show their faces at Wootton Bassett to see the bodies home’. Wootton Bassett in Wiltshire had become synonymous with the nation’s respect for Britain’s armed forces, as large crowds turned out to pay their respects whenever funeral processions passed through the town after bodies had been repatriated to the nearby RAF Lyneham.
‘They don’t even have the decency to send anyone down,’ said the serviceman. Where, he asked, was the Prime Minister when the coffins were being driven through the streets. And where, for that matter, was Tony Blair?
The soldiers were not alone in being unable to stomach the contrast between their own lives and the gilded existence of the public servants whose expenses they were processing. As the weeks went on, the soldiers, parliamentary staff, Stationery Office workers and agency staff became united in their disgust at the MPs’ behaviour.
As well as the more outrageous individual claims, the workers in the room were growing increasingly agitated about the amount of money that could seemingly be claimed without receipts. Many MPs were claiming £400 a month for food, but there were no receipts. Others had submitted bills for suspiciously round numbers.
One of the workers noted that the MPs ‘must never have to put their hands in their pockets’, surmising that they could simply bank their salary and live off their expenses. Another suggested that many of the MPs ‘should be charged with embezzlement’.
In mid-October, the first phase of the process came to an end as the redacted files were sent back to Parliament to be reviewed. The workers returned to their regular jobs, taking their opinions with them. Meanwhile the security team closed down the rooms and secured all the data and information held at TSO before they, too, were stood down.
However, within weeks the redaction operation was up and running again. Parliamentary officials had decided that even more material needed to be removed from the files, so at the beginning of December the redaction room sprang back into life.
Some of the soldiers who had been involved in the security team had now been redeployed overseas. There was less work to be done in the redacting room, with fewer staff employed on the project than before. What none of them knew at that point was that someone involved in the original project, strongly influenced by their dismay at the fact that soldiers were having to work in their leave periods to earn money to buy decent equipment, had made up their mind that the public should know what was going on. They had decided to orchestrate a leak of the MPs’ expenses files and had contacted a media consultant, giving them a sample of the material.
For weeks nothing at all happened, and as the mole waited in vain, they assumed that the deafening silence meant people in the outside world did not share the same level of anger and disgust as those who had worked on the redaction process.
As Christmas and the New Year came and went, work continued on redacting more MPs’ files. New files, which had been mislaid in Parliament, were coming to light all the time, and it was still a Herculean task checking and rechecking those which had already been altered.
Meanwhile, the mole was taking a keen interest in the debate raging in the media over the apparent foot-dragging by Parliament on the public release of the expenses data.
Then, on 8 February 2009, the first bombshell exploded. The Mail on Sunday published a story on the home secretary’s expenses. The newspaper revealed that Jacqui Smith had claimed more than £116,000 in parliamentary expenses over the years for her ‘second home’, having given this designation to her large family home in her constituency in Redditch, near Birmingham, where her husband and two young children were permanently based. Meanwhile, Smith told the Commons authorities that her ‘main’ home was a spare bedroom in her sister’s house in London where she lodged during parliamentary sessions.
Two weeks later, the Mail on Sunday followed up its report with a similar exposé on the employment minister Tony McNulty – whose ‘second’ home on the outskirts of London was lived in by his parents.
However, the mole was not pleased. The material which had been passed on to the media consultant was supposed to be a sample, not for use by any newspaper. They thought it was unfair for Smith and McNulty to be singled out and pilloried. This was a scandal which stretched across Parliament, embroiling politicians from all parties, and that was the message which the source of the leak wanted to get across.
The first attempt to release the information had been a bruising experience for the would-be whistleblower. But the mole’s resolve was strengthened by having accidentally hung Jacqui Smith out to dry. They needed a different strategy to ensure the information was released as they intended. A series of phone calls led them to the door of a former SAS officer who they felt certain would be the perfect man for the job. His name was John Wick.
The ‘Missing Disk’
Saturday, 28 March 2009
CHAPTER 4
IN HIS SHORT tenure as Prime Minister, Gordon Brown had acquired a reputation as a man who was more comfortable immersed in the complexities of public spending plans than in the role of international statesman. His predecessor, Tony Blair, had loved nothing better than touring the globe, attending glitzy state occasions and talking ‘big picture’ politics with the likes of George W. Bush. Blair had been a natural showman, but Brown was seen as a dour Scot who preferred his own company. Whereas Blair had a 1,000-watt smile that wowed audiences the world over, critics joked that Brown’s attempts at grinning to order were more akin to someone taking part in a gurning contest.
But the forthcoming G20 summit of world leaders, to be held in London at the start of April 2009, would give Brown his big chance to prove that he, too, had the charisma to be the cheerleader at a meeting of the most powerful people on the planet, including the recently elected US President Obama. Brown had led the world the previous year in devising a model for coping with Britain’s banking crisis which had been widely praised by other leaders, and he believed that the G20 summit, intended as a chance to thrash out a global solution to what had become a global financial crisis, could turn out to be his finest hour.
To prepare the ground and try to obtain a consensus, Brown had embarked on a whirlwind bridge-building tour taking in France, the US, Brazil and Chile, chartering a British Airways Boeing 747 to carry his entourage and a group of a dozen or so political journalists on the 16,000-mile round trip. Far from being the anticipated triumph, however, the tour was turning out to be little short of a disaster for Brown, whose mood had become blacker with each passing day. In New York Les Hinton, one of Rupert Murdoch’s most senior and long-serving executives, had introduced Brown to Wall Street bankers with a joke about how far his popularity had fallen since he became Prime Minister. Brown, needless to say, hadn’t seen the funny side. By the Wednesday of that week, Downing Street aides were furious that the main item on the BBC news had been a comment by the Czech prime minister warning that Brown’s plans for economic recovery were ‘the way to hell’. Then, in Brazil, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva had suggested that the financial crisis had been caused by ‘white people with blue eyes’, and in Strasbourg a right-wing MEP, Daniel Hannan, had become the surprise YouTube hit of the year after making a withering attack on Brown in a speech to the European Parliament.
So worried were Brown’s staff about having their heads bitten off by their fingernail-chewing boss that they tried to hide the British daily newspapers from him in a different cabin on the plane in the hope that it would prevent him finding out how badly he was being savaged back home. The press corps were joking that Brown could apply for asylum in Chile when he arrived there for the last stop of the tour.
Among those on the plane was Robert Winnett, who had joined the Daily Telegraph in September 2007, having been lured away from the Sunday Times, where he had worked for nine years, starting out as a personal finance reporter before moving on to news. Winnett was now aged thirty-two, though many of his colleagues assumed he wa
s older, partly because his slightly thinning brown hair added a few years to his appearance and partly because of an assumption that anyone who had been a fixture in national newspapers for more than ten years had to be at least in their mid-thirties by now.
During his career at the Sunday Times, Winnett had established a reputation as a superb ‘digger’, able to find front-page stories buried in the minutiae of chunky official documents and to join the dots between seemingly unconnected pieces of information to find a scandal hidden behind them. Whereas many political reporters relied on their talent for networking to pick up stories, the quietly spoken Winnett specialized in carrying out investigations behind closed doors, and had done so with considerable success.
Winnett was viewed as unclubbable, but by no means unsociable, and he jumped at the chance of joining some of his colleagues when the final day of the whistlestop tour, Saturday, 28 March, afforded a rare opportunity for a moment’s relaxation for those travelling with the workaholic Prime Minister. With a few hours to kill between Brown’s final meeting in Chile and the take-off slot at Santiago, a handful of journalists and No. 10 aides decided to take a detour to a local vineyard on the way to the airport.
The party included Damian McBride, the Prime Minister’s key strategic adviser. McBride, who had worked for Gordon Brown for six years, including a spell as his head of communications at the Treasury, was aged just thirty-four, but could have passed for forty-five owing to his girth and florid complexion, brought on by an accumulation of business lunches and after-work drinking sessions in the bars of Westminster. He loved nothing better than to hold court with the political journalists whom he counted as his friends, giving them delicious titbits about life in Downing Street, though without ever betraying his master.
Although he had no reason to suspect it at the time, McBride’s career in No. 10 was about to come to an ugly end. In another two weeks he would resign following the disclosure by the Daily Telegraph that he had used his Downing Street email account to exchange messages with the Labour blogger Derek Draper, in which they discussed using the internet to spread smears about the personal lives of prominent Conservative MPs. But for now, both he and the reporters on the trip were enjoying the rare chance in a hectic week to down tools, sample life’s finer pleasures and look forward to a well-earned day off when they returned home.
Under a cloudless sky, the party was given a brief tour of the grape vines, together with three elderly and rather more sedate American tourists, before heading inside for the all-important wine-tasting session. In truth, few of those present had the stomach for the delicacies on offer, having been up late the night before enjoying an after-hours drink in their hotel bar. Nor could anyone present profess to be a wine buff – particularly not McBride, who was more of an expert on the idiosyncrasies of various European lagers. So it was with a sense of relief that the reporters and political aides were eventually ushered on to a sweeping veranda where they could look forward to the main purpose of their visit – an enormous lunch.
As the party settled down around a large square table, jostling for places under the shade of a faded umbrella, McBride, like everyone else, ordered the staple South American dish of steak, before baffling his hosts by turning down their eager offers of vintage wine and insisting on drinking beer instead.
While waiting for lunch to arrive he fielded regular calls from the Prime Minister’s party, anxious that he and the others would miss the ‘convoy’ back to the airport and the flight back to Britain. Brushing off their concerns, McBride put his phone down on the table in front of him and told his companions that a story was about to break in the following day’s Sunday Express concerning the parliamentary expenses claims of Jacqui Smith, the home secretary.
The Sunday Express, once one of the biggest-selling newspapers in the English-speaking world, had been in decline for decades, becoming so under-resourced that few of those around the table could remember the last time it had broken a story of any great significance. So the fact that the Sunday Express had a major exclusive was as unexpected as it was intriguing, and as McBride began speaking, those around him instinctively leaned inwards in expectation.
McBride explained, to the growing amusement of his audience, that the Sunday Express had contacted the Home Office earlier that day to ask why the home secretary had put in an expenses claim for the cost of two pay-per-view adult movies which had appeared on a bill sent to her home in Redditch. Before anyone had the chance to ask whether the home secretary herself had watched the films, McBride explained that her husband, Richard Timney, had admitted that he had watched them while his wife had been away. Timney, who was employed by his wife as her parliamentary adviser, had filled in the expenses claims himself on Smith’s behalf, and it seemed that the home secretary had known nothing about it until her department got the call from the newspaper.
After speculating about just how bad a day Richard Timney was surely having, the reporters turned their attention to the other obvious question: how the hell had such a good story gone to the Sunday Express? And where had that sort of detail come from?
McBride indicated that leaked details of MPs’ expenses claims might have been obtained by someone during the process of censoring hundreds of thousands of receipts. It seemed likely that the information had been downloaded electronically by someone with access to the documents, which had all been scanned into a computer in readiness for the day when they would eventually be published online by Parliament. The information would be so easily portable in an electronic format that it was possible the details of all 646 MPs’ expenses had been copied, ready to be offered to newspapers.
As lunch finished, the assembled reporters reflected on the knowledge that if one newspaper could get hold of the expenses details of other MPs, or even of all MPs, it would have landed one of the biggest scoops in years.
For the papers that missed out, it would be nothing short of a disaster.
Of course, the Sunday Express’s story was not the first newspaper exposé to be based on leaked information from the database of MPs’ expenses. On 8 February the Mail on Sunday had published its exclusive story about Jacqui Smith’s housing arrangements, which had led to calls for her resignation. The home secretary had tried to justify the arrangement in which she had designated her sister’s spare bedroom as her ‘main’ home (while claiming expenses for her family home) by saying she could prove that she spent more nights at her sister’s house than she did in the family home, and that the parliamentary authorities had given their approval. Her argument might have worked in a court of law, but in the court of public opinion it was a non-starter. Put simply, how could a large detached house where Smith’s family lived possibly be Smith’s ‘second’ home when her only other home was a back bedroom in a relative’s house?
On 22 February the Mail on Sunday had produced its second scoop on MPs’ expenses, involving Tony McNulty, the employment minister. The paper’s political editor, Simon Walters, who had also penned the Jacqui Smith story, discovered that McNulty had nominated as his ‘second’ home a house in his Harrow constituency in north-west London which was his parents’ main home. McNulty’s main home was in Westminster, 3 miles from Parliament, where he lived with his wife, the government’s chief inspector of schools, Christine Gilbert. McNulty initially tried to justify claiming £60,000 of taxpayers’ money for his parents’ house by saying he sometimes used it when he was doing constituency work, and protested that his claims were ‘all within the rules’ – a defence which would become tediously familiar to the public in the months to come.
After he was pressed further by the Mail on Sunday, McNulty announced he would stop claiming the second-home allowance. Unlike Smith, he appeared to have understood how ridiculous his expenses claims would seem to the general public, comparing himself to Nazi war criminals who would typically say they were ‘only obeying orders’. He said: ‘It’s not against the rules – though I suppose you might say that is the Nuremberg defence.’
The Mail on Sunday’s stories about Smith and McNulty had alerted the public to potentially widespread abuse of the expenses system. Widespread disgust among voters at the way the two ministers appeared to have taken advantage of the taxpayer left other MPs in no doubt of the rough ride they, too, would be in for when Parliament eventually published expenses details later in the year.
But there was an important difference between the Mail on Sunday’s stories and the one which was about to appear in the Sunday Express. The Mail on Sunday had made no direct reference to documents contained in the ‘missing disk’; its stories were based on just one key piece of information contained in the files – the addresses which the MPs had nominated as their second homes. It was only when the Sunday Express approached Jacqui Smith about the porn films that it became clear that actual documents might be finding their way into journalists’ hands.
The story that was published the next day contained the sort of details which could only be obtained by viewing the original documents. The newspaper listed the date when the adult films had been viewed at the home secretary’s house, the name of the company – Virgin Media – and the exact amount each film had cost. The following week the same newspaper would publish yet more details of Smith’s expenses claims, including a bill for a new kitchen, which included a claim of 88p for a sink plug.
Although few at the Chilean vineyard knew it at the time, the Sunday Express had not been the first newspaper to be offered access to information on the computer disk. More than a week earlier, former SAS officer John Wick had approached The Times to ask if it would be interested in obtaining the disk, which he had in his possession. He was prepared to let the newspaper see a limited number of documents as a sample to prove its authenticity, he told them; but his offer was turned down flat without Times journalists seeing any of the information on the disk. Reporters had taken legal advice, and had been told that the newspaper should not get involved. It was a decision which would backfire on them badly in the weeks to come, but for now The Times’s involvement would remain a strictly guarded secret.
No Expenses Spared Page 5