No Expenses Spared

by Robert Winnett

  As the prime ministerial party in Chile boarded the 747 to make the fourteen-hour flight home, Gordon Brown was informed of the Sunday Express’s story about Jacqui Smith’s expenses claims. He reacted by focusing his attention on the mechanics of how pornographic films can be ordered by satellite television, while one of his more worldly-wise aides explained in detail the process of putting in a pin number on a TV’s remote controller which enables the user to access X-rated movies. The more pressing issue of how the government might respond to other embarrassing details of ministers’ expenses claims being leaked, or how the whole issue might rebound on him, was not yet at the forefront of his mind.

  Further back in the aircraft, the reporters were turning their thoughts to how they could get their hands on the disk. That disk, Winnett thought as he looked out of the window across the tarmac, was the holy grail of political reporting.

  In keeping with a long-standing tradition on prime ministerial tours, a stewardess served glasses of champagne to the journalists on board while they waited for the pilot to start the engines. Savouring his drink, Winnett settled back into his seat and began contemplating how he might go about trying to find out who had the expenses disk. His conclusion wasn’t long in coming.

  ‘Buggered if I know.’

  The Cold Call

  Sunday, 29 March

  CHAPTER 5

  THE PRESS GALLERY of the Houses of Parliament is a workplace unlike any other. Crammed into a warren of back corridors surrounding the upper tier of the Commons chamber, the tiny offices which house scores of national and regional newspaper, television and radio reporters are a messy clash of oak panelling, bricked-up fireplaces, battered wooden desks and grimy computer screens.

  The stretch of corridor which houses, among others, the Daily Telegraph’s parliamentary office is known as the Burma Road (because of the relentless toil of its inhabitants), and is in a part of the Palace of Westminster which was used as the Commons librarian’s house in the days when the parliamentary press corps included a young Charles Dickens.

  It was in the Telegraph’s office, a room measuring 15 feet by 10 that is home to the newspaper’s six-strong political team and situated so close to Big Ben that it vibrates every time the great clock chimes, that Rosa Prince was working alone on the morning when the Sunday Express published its exclusive about Jacqui Smith’s expenses claim for pornography. One of the most instantly recognizable figures in the press gallery, her corkscrewing blonde hair unmistakable from a hundred yards away, Prince had spent most of her career at the Daily Mirror, first as a news reporter (she had covered the September 11 attacks during a month based in New York) and more recently as part of the tabloid’s political team, before joining the Telegraph at the end of 2007. Although some political reporters have a habit of working from their newspaper’s head office on a Sunday, rather than in a deserted Westminster, Prince preferred the familiarity of her desk overlooking Parliament Square. And it was there that she took a phone call that particular Sunday morning which would change not only her own life, but the lives of everyone who worked in the Houses of Parliament.

  On the line was a man with an undiluted New York accent, who asked for the Telegraph’s political editor, Andrew Porter.

  ‘He’s not here today. Can I help?’ asked Prince.

  ‘Well, I’ve got a computer disk which contains the details of every MP’s expenses claims going back four years. Would you be interested?’

  You bet your life I’m interested, thought Prince.

  ‘Yes, definitely,’ she instinctively replied. Prince had taken a call the night before from Winnett warning her about the imminent Sunday Express story on Jacqui Smith’s expenses and summarizing what McBride had told him about the possibility of a disk being in circulation. Having read the Sunday Express story, Prince was as sure as she could be that the caller was genuine.

  ‘My name is Henry Gewanter and I work for a PR company,’ the voice went on. ‘I’m acting on behalf of someone else, and one thing I have to make clear is that they are very keen that details of every MP’s expenses are published.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure that’s fine,’ said Prince, though in truth she wasn’t at all certain it would be, given the sheer scale of what that would involve. ‘I’m sure we can come to an arrangement.’

  ‘I have to tell you that the material has been offered to other newspapers,’ said Gewanter, ‘but they were only interested in one political party. If you were to go ahead with publication, any coverage you give mustn’t be partial. We don’t want it to be based on any one political party. The source is very keen that it should cover every political party.’

  ‘OK,’ replied Prince. ‘We need to meet up.’

  Gewanter said he would call his contact, who would get in touch with Prince.

  Five minutes later, as Prince was still replaying the earlier call in her head, working out what else she needed to do, her phone rang again.

  ‘My name’s John Wick,’ said the voice on the line. ‘You were talking just now to my colleague Henry Gewanter.’

  This time the caller was English, well spoken, with a slight hint of a regional accent which Prince couldn’t quite place.

  ‘Yes, I was hoping we could meet up,’ said Prince. Wick said he did not want to meet at Westminster, in case other journalists were alerted to the fact that Prince was talking to him. Prince racked her brain for a venue where she could be sure she would not bump into any of her colleagues from rival media organizations, then finally suggested the Goring Hotel, a discreet but suitably well-appointed place – a favourite of Baroness Thatcher, indeed – tucked away in a side street near the Telegraph’s head office. Wick agreed to meet for lunch the following Wednesday.

  Fifteen miles from Westminster, the Prime Minister’s plane had just touched down at Heathrow at the end of its overnight flight from Chile. Within minutes of the engines winding down, the Prime Minister’s motorcade had pulled up alongside the jet, and moments later Brown and his entourage were on their way back to Downing Street.

  The reporters, meanwhile, decamped with their bags on their shoulders and walked the short distance across the tarmac to Heathrow’s Royal Suite, the VIP arrivals area which is one of the perks of travelling ‘Prime Minister class’. All of them had been given high-level security clearance before the trip, meaning they were spared the usual irritations of lengthy passport checks and customs, and they made a beeline for the taxis waiting outside.

  As Winnett sat in the back of a cab heading into London shortly before noon, his BlackBerry vibrated in his pocket to alert him to a new email. It was from Prince, who had decided to contact him following the conversation the previous evening.

  ‘Give me a bell when you get a sec,’ it said. ‘We’ve been offered something potentially quite interesting on expenses – hopefully can set up a meeting.’

  Prince had deliberately kept the information to a minimum in the email, acutely aware of the potential for any electronic message to end up in the wrong hands. Without stopping to wonder exactly what it was that the Telegraph had been offered, Winnett phoned her as the taxi took him east along the M4.

  ‘I’ve had this call from someone, and it sounds great,’ Prince told her colleague excitedly. ‘He says he’s got a computer disk with the details of all the MPs’ expenses on it. It looks like it’s the same source as where the Jacqui Smith story came from.’

  Winnett could hardly believe what he was hearing. Less than a day after he had first learned about the existence of the disk, hours after he had resigned himself to having little or no chance of acquiring it, it seemed to be about to fall into his lap. If only it was always this easy!

  ‘Sounds brilliant,’ said Winnett. ‘What’s the guy’s name?’

  ‘Oh, he’s an American with an odd name. Henry Geweder, or Gewader, I’ve got it written down …’

  ‘Not Henry Gewanter?’ Winnett instantly recognized the name as one of the financial PRs he had regularly dealt with in his previou
s incarnation as a personal finance reporter. Gewanter represented several large insurance companies and other personal finance firms, and in years gone by the pair of them had shared long lunches at some of London’s top restaurants. Winnett’s pulse quickened as he realized that not only had the Telegraph been contacted by someone with access to the disk, but that this person, by sheer fluke, also happened to be one of his old contacts, giving him a crucial advantage in building trust between his newspaper and the source.

  But how on earth had Gewanter become involved in something like this? He wasn’t the sort who made his living by offering leaked documents or exclusive interviews around Fleet Street, as some better-known PR consultants did. In fact, reflected Winnett, Gewanter was about as far removed from the ultra-smooth image of the top PR man as it was possible to be. A former New York cab driver, Gewanter was a wild-eyed chain smoker, in appearance reminiscent of the sort of actors who played CIA agents in 1960s TV shows. In his spare time he collected comic books, fossils and Roman coins. As far as Winnett knew, he had no connections at all to the murky world of Westminster politics. No matter, thought Winnett, as he dug his battered blue contacts book out of his laptop bag and took off the elastic band which was the only thing holding it together. Buried in its dog-eared pages was Gewanter’s mobile number, and Winnett wasted no time in dialling it.

  ‘Hi, Henry, it’s Robert Winnett.’

  ‘Hey, Robert!’ The American seemed relieved to hear from a familiar voice.

  After a brief catch-up and the usual exchange of pleasantries, Winnett cut to the chase and said he had been told Gewanter had some information that the Telegraph might be interested in. The PR man confirmed he had been approached by someone who had obtained detailed information about MPs’ expenses claims which, he said, could amount to the ‘story of the century’. Winnett cautioned Gewanter against saying too much over the telephone and the pair agreed to meet the following day.

  As the taxi reached Winnett’s flat in Docklands, east London, the reporter’s mind was racing with the permutations of what the following day might bring. Would Gewanter be ringing other newspapers? Winnett had asked him not to, but there was no guarantee. Did Gewanter really have the sort of information he said he did? Winnett couldn’t shake off his doubts about the unlikeliness of Gewanter’s involvement.

  Even if Gewanter’s story checked out, would the Telegraph go for it? The possible stumbling blocks were obvious. If the disk was stolen, the newspaper might be reluctant to get involved. Even if it wasn’t, how could the paper check that the material was genuine before it committed to anything? Gewanter seemed certain of the authenticity of the information, but hoaxes had happened in the past, and they would no doubt happen again.

  No point worrying about all that now, Winnett thought as he unpacked the debris of his hectic week-long tour. It would have to wait until tomorrow. In the meantime, he rang his colleague Andrew Porter to fill him in on the details of his conversation with Gewanter.

  The headlines on Monday, 30 March were dominated by news of the home secretary’s expenses claim and speculation over whether she could survive in her job. Preparations for the G20 summit merited little attention by comparison. Matthew Bayley was at his desk at eight thirty that morning, contemplating how the newspaper could take the Jacqui Smith story forward, as well as planning how his team would cover the G20 summit later in the week, which was expected to attract potentially violent protests. When Robert Winnett rang in, intending to explain what he would be doing later in the morning, Bayley ambushed him before he had a chance to get his words out with a series of questions about the Jacqui Smith story.

  ‘Where the hell did the Jacqui Smith stuff come from?’ he demanded. ‘And how did it end up in the Sunday Express of all places?’

  Reporters become immune to the sort of interrogation which is the speciality of all news editors whenever their paper has missed a story. News editors know they will get a pasting from their superiors, and in an attempt to cover their backs before the inevitable rollocking happens, they will always do their utmost to find an explanation for why a rival paper has got a brilliant exclusive and theirs hasn’t.

  The most common excuse (which is very often true) is that the other paper has got its story from a ‘ring-in’ – a reader or tipster making an unsolicited call with details of a story which turns into the next day’s splash. Tabloid newspapers, in particular, thrive on such tip-offs, while the staff of other newspapers can only shrug their shoulders and accept that ‘you can’t do anything about a ring-in’.

  On this occasion, though, Winnett had the best possible news for Bayley. Not only did he know where the Express story had come from, he was in contact with the source, and he had already arranged a meeting for later that day.

  ‘Really?’ replied Bayley. ‘Fantastic! Are you sure it’s not a set-up?’

  Winnett said he knew the person he was meeting and was confident he was genuine. But Bayley remained slightly nervous.

  ‘Make sure they’re not recording the meeting, won’t you,’ he said. ‘You’d better give Chris a call when he gets off the phone.’

  Chris Evans was the Daily Telegraph’s head of news, whose job involved overseeing the day-to-day news operation but also planning longer-term investigations. Evans, one of several executives who, like Bayley, had joined the Telegraph from the Daily Mail during a round of changes at the top of the organization, had had a lot of experience of handling major deals for big stories, particularly during his time as news editor of the Mail. When Winnett repeated what he had told Bayley, Evans knew that if they played their cards right, and if the offer from Gewanter was genuine, it could turn out to be a defining moment for the Telegraph. But, like Winnett and Bayley, Evans had a worm of doubt going through his mind. It all sounded too good to be true. He had enough experience to know that for every world-beating scoop a newspaper pulls off, it will be offered countless other stories which seem just as good but ultimately turn to dust.

  Evans told Winnett to give it his best shot, and to keep him up to date with developments. Meanwhile he informed Tony Gallagher, the paper’s deputy editor, who also said Winnett should pull out all the stops to get the story. Gallagher, anxious to satisfy himself that there would be no legal obstacle to the newspaper’s going ahead with a potential deal, went straight down to Arthur Wynn Davies’s tiny glass-walled office at the far end of the newsroom, knocked on the open door and asked the lawyer if, in theory, there would be any legal reason why the newspaper should not take possession of a computer disk containing information about MPs’ expenses claims. Could the newspaper be prosecuted for handling stolen goods, for inciting theft, or for a breach of confidence or privacy?

  Wynn Davies said he would have to consider the matter. Later he came back with his answer: if the disk itself was the property of the person who was offering it to the newspaper, then no theft had taken place. It would not constitute a breach of the law because there was no such offence as ‘stealing’ information – certainly not information that was going to be published anyway at some point. Any attempt to prosecute a newspaper for disclosing misuse of public money would also be doomed to fail, as there was an overwhelming public interest defence which would be likely to sway most juries.

  The main point the lawyer was keen to establish was that the Telegraph had not asked anyone to remove the information or ‘procure’ the disk. It had not. Wynn Davies also pointed out that the Information Commissioner had already ordered that the data be released, putting the newspaper in a strong position to justify its publication.

  So far, so good, thought Gallagher.

  At eleven thirty sharp, Winnett stood in the early spring sunshine outside an office on the Embankment and phoned Gewanter on his mobile. Moments later, the American appeared in the street with a friendly smile on his face. It was the first time in more than five years that the two men had seen each other, but it seemed like much less time had elapsed. Gewanter, a slim, slightly hunched figure with wire-ri
mmed glasses which sat halfway up the bridge of his nose, vividly recalled their last meeting – a rather splendid lunch at the Oxo tower on the other side of the river – as he felt in his pockets for his cigarettes and lighter. Then he took the lead as the two men walked around the corner to Tempio’s restaurant in Temple Avenue, a stone’s throw from what had once been the Daily Telegraph’s head office in Fleet Street. Down in the basement wine bar, Gewanter selected a table in a narrow open-air well between the restaurant and the pavement so he could carry on smoking. There, over a glass of white wine, he repeated his disclosure that his client, John Wick, had obtained details of every MP’s expenses claims.

  ‘This stuff is absolutely mind-blowing,’ said Gewanter. ‘The Jacqui Smith story is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s extraordinary material. There are so many different angles to it – this will be the biggest story you ever work on.’

  ‘Sounds great,’ said Winnett, though inwardly he remained sceptical. Every reporter who has ever worked on a national newspaper has had at least one similar conversation at some point in their career with someone who claims to have ‘the story of a lifetime’. But although Winnett wasn’t yet in a position to know it, this would be the one time it turned out to be true.

  There was, of course, a catch, and Winnett already knew what it was going to be. The source of the information, Gewanter explained, would need to be compensated for the risky position they had put themselves in. Winnett knew that the Telegraph was not in the habit of paying for stories, but he emphasized how keen the newspaper would be to do the story and stressed that it would certainly be happy to give due prominence to all of the political parties, as Gewanter had mentioned in his earlier phone calls.