Gewanter added one more thing – a ‘small number’ of other newspapers had already been approached, he said.
This was starting to get messy, thought Winnett. The Sunday Express had already published one story based on the material on the disk. How much more did the paper know? And if other newspapers had been offered the information, why hadn’t they snapped it up? Was there something Gewanter wasn’t telling him? The only thing to do was keep the ball in the air, in the hope that his questions would be cleared up at the meeting which Prince had already arranged for Wednesday, where Winnett would meet John Wick, the man who actually had the information.
Winnett left the wine bar excited about the potential of the information, but with lingering doubts about the Telegraph’s chances of securing it. After saying goodbye to Gewanter, he made his way to the House of Commons for a prearranged lunch with Oliver Letwin, the Conservatives’ head of strategy. Here he discussed with Letwin how the Tories might sort out the public finances if they won the next general election, but really he couldn’t wait to get back to the office to update Evans and Gallagher. Both men impressed upon Winnett once again just how important a story this could become for the Telegraph. He assured them he was doing his best.
The time had come to tell the editor what was going on. Lewis was intrigued, but hugely sceptical.
‘It sounds very interesting,’ he said. ‘Keep me up to date.’ Privately, he thought the chances of the story turning out to be true were almost nil.
In the midst of all the intrigue, Winnett had some pressing domestic matters to attend to: he had arranged to move house that week, from Docklands to Shoreditch. Moving from one furnished flat to another could be done in a series of taxi journeys, and after moving half of his possessions from one address to another after work that Monday, he was ready for an early night.
It wasn’t to be. Having watched the ten o’clock news on TV, Winnett flicked over to BBC2 to watch its flagship current affairs programme, Newsnight, which often carried agenda-setting stories that would have to be followed up by political reporters the next day. To his utter horror, one of the main items it carried that night was a preview of an article which would appear in the next day’s Times, one of the Telegraph’s biggest rivals, revealing that a ‘businessman’ was offering newspapers a computer disk containing the details of MPs’ expenses. It said the asking price for the disk was £300,000.
Newsnight interviewed Sir Stuart Bell MP, a member of the House of Commons Commission, the body which oversaw the MPs’ expenses system. Bell, clearly on the warpath, said the leak was ‘a breach of trust’ and dropped heavy hints that a police investigation would follow.
‘It’s probably a breach of the Official Secrets Act,’ he said. ‘It may be a theft, but we will get to the bottom of it. We have a pretty good idea of not the person, but the source, and that is the subject of a House of Commons investigation.’
The BBC was soon running the story as its main item on its radio and television news bulletins, where it dominated the news agenda throughout the next day. Winnett groaned inwardly as he saw the story slipping away from him. One thing guaranteed to frighten off any whistleblower was a blaze of publicity, and it seemed that before Winnett had even had a chance to get down to business by meeting John Wick, the whole project had been strangled at birth.
The only positive thing about Sir Stuart Bell’s television appearance was that it appeared to confirm that the data on the disk were authentic. Had it been a hoax, Sir Stuart would not have been on television at all, because there would have been no story. But now every man and his dog knew of the existence of the disk, so even if Gewanter’s source was still prepared to go ahead with a deal, other newspapers were likely to start a bidding war which could spiral out of control.
Well, thought Winnett, we’ll just have to see how it all plays out. But he was already thinking about the nightmare scenario of seeing the contents of Gewanter’s disk splashed all over the pages of a rival paper.
The story which ran in The Times on the Tuesday added little to what Newsnight had revealed – but was accompanied by a surprising admission in an article by The Times’s political editor, Philip Webster. He disclosed, for the first time, that The Times had been ‘approached by a businessman who claimed that he was acting in the public interest by offering the details of the expenses claims of all MPs for the past four years. He then asked for £300,000 for his information. At that point we took the matter no further.’ Without explaining exactly why The Times had decided to turn down the offer, Webster said newspapers ‘have a duty to inform’ and ‘a duty to disclose’ but also ‘an absolute duty to protect the anonymity of our sources’ – the message being that the newspaper would not be handing over the name of the businessman to the Commons authorities.
Weeks later, when the Telegraph eventually published the MPs’ expenses stories, Peter Preston, a former editor of the Guardian, wrote in the Observer that Webster’s op-ed piece might be regarded by other journalists as ‘the most pious suicide note in history’. He wondered ‘how any hugely experienced correspondent could get his duty to inform in such a twist’.
In fact, The Times would not be the only newspaper which would have to answer awkward questions in the weeks to come about why it had turned down the disk. For the time being, though, the Times piece appeared to have scuppered any chance of the uncensored details of MPs’ expenses claims appearing – for, as Winnett had feared, Wick took fright when he saw the article.
Gewanter phoned Winnett on the Tuesday morning and told him the meeting planned for the next day would have to be postponed. ‘Everything’s a bit too hot at the moment,’ he said. It was clear that his client had been taken aback by the piece in The Times. Although the newspaper had not named either Wick or Gewanter, the very fact that it had revealed that the confidential approach had taken place had dramatically escalated the hunt for the source of the information. Winnett felt Gewanter could hardly be blamed if he wasn’t feeling too confident about placing his trust in newspapers right now.
Winnett phoned Evans to tell him the bad news, and the pair agreed that the only thing Winnett could do was to try to keep in touch with Gewanter in the coming weeks in the hope that he might change his mind.
Over the next fortnight, Gewanter sent a number of non-committal text messages, but as Easter approached Winnett left for a week-long holiday feeling that, barring a minor miracle, the scoop had slipped through his fingers.
The Deal
Tuesday, 21 April
CHAPTER 6
WINNETT RETURNED TO London from his Easter break on 19 April to find that the resignation of Damian McBride over the email smear scandal had become one of the biggest political stories of the year and a major problem for Gordon Brown. The budget was also looming that week, and the bounce in popularity that Brown had experienced after the G20 summit was by now a distant memory. But while every other lobby journalist was preoccupied with finding new angles on the McBride affair, Winnett’s mind was elsewhere. He had received a handful of text messages from Gewanter during his holiday. He remained pessimistic about the chances of any deal being resurrected, but when he got home there was another text message from Gewanter, this time asking Winnett to call him. Against the odds, it turned out that Wick was now prepared to meet.
Gewanter suggested getting together in Tempio’s wine bar, the same place he and Winnett had met up three weeks before, and on Tuesday, 21 April Winnett was finally introduced to Wick.
He was surprised by the man who was waiting for him when he arrived. People who approach newspapers to ‘blow the whistle’ are sometimes rather odd characters. They are often extremely nervous, at the end of their tethers and prone to behaving irrationally. It is not unusual for them to overstate wildly the importance of the information they hold – and their role in the organization or company they represent or work for.
Wick was different. Dressed in his trademark pin-stripe suit, aged in his fifties, his grey hair neatly
combed, Wick was the epitome of the traditional Telegraph reader. He had caught the train to London from Worthing on the south coast, along with thousands of other commuters. It soon became apparent that he was a supporter of the Conservative Party and had connections at the highest levels. Wick was the former treasurer of the United and Cecil Club, a long-established and rather grand dining club which raises money for the Tories. A member of the Shadow Cabinet is his daughter’s godfather.
He also had a distinguished military history. He walked into the wine bar with a slight limp, a reminder of the military service he had seen in the Special Air Service, the Army’s elite special forces regiment. Wick had been an officer in the SAS in the 1970s and had led one of the regiment’s anti-terrorism teams. Had it not been for his injury, Wick would have been a key figure in the Iranian Embassy siege in 1980, when the SAS famously stormed the building in west London and rescued nineteen hostages who were being held by terrorists. After he left the SAS, Wick became a mercenary, and ended up for a period commanding a Middle Eastern ruler’s special forces regiment. Much of his work continued to be funded by the British government at ‘arm’s length’. By the time he met Winnett, Wick was running a corporate risk management company which – along with other services – specialized in negotiating the release of hostages from some of the world’s most dangerous areas. A spate of hostage-taking incidents by Somalian pirates in the Gulf of Aden meant business was brisk at his office in the City of London.
In the days and weeks to come, Winnett would have plenty of reasons to be grateful that he was dealing with someone with Wick’s strength of character. It would stand Wick in good stead under the pressures that lay ahead.
Winnett and Wick began their meeting by discussing how David Cameron had overhauled the Conservative Party. They also discussed the Telegraph, which had itself been overhauled under Lewis’s tenure, to the point where it had been able to build up a successful website and regularly break major news stories for the first time in a decade or more.
Then it was time to address the matter in hand. Wick confirmed that he had obtained a disk containing uncensored details of every MP’s expenses claims. The disk had been compiled as part of the preparations for Parliament’s release of a censored version of the information later in the year. It had not been stolen, he explained:
‘I’ve spoken to lawyers and I am taking a risk but I believe it to be minimal,’ he told Winnett. ‘This disk is not stolen, it is simply a copy. I have thought long and hard about this and I firmly believe it is essential the public sees this information. But, if it comes to it, I have seen far worse than the inside of a police cell.’
His frankness and composure impressed Winnett.
Wick set out his terms for any deal with the Telegraph. First, despite being a Conservative supporter, he said he wanted the expenses claims of MPs from every party to be covered – this was a scandal encompassing the whole of Parliament. Second, he, along with various other people involved with the disk, would require protection against potential legal action. Finally, he had also advised the ultimate sources of the information that they might suffer financially as a result of the release of the information. Wick had therefore recommended that money be put aside for the sources in a safe location in case this occurred.
Winnett asked further questions about who would receive any money, mindful that the Telegraph did not want to be paying criminals. ‘These are decent, honourable people who need some insurance in case everything goes very wrong,’ Wick said. ‘They did not ask for money; they want the information in the public domain. But I have advised them it would be madness not to have any sort of insurance. They are taking a very large risk.’
Wick said that two tabloid newspapers – the Sun and the Sunday Express – were also interested in the data. However, he said that they wished only to write about certain high-profile politicians – mostly members of the Cabinet – and hence no deal had yet been struck with them.
Wick was highly persuasive, and any lingering doubts Winnett had about the authenticity of the material were fading quickly.
‘We’re definitely interested,’ he said, adding that he was certain the source’s concerns about how the data were presented could be met by the newspaper. But he warned Wick that if the financial elements of the deal were of primary importance, the Telegraph would be extremely unlikely to be willing to match the budgets of tabloid newspapers. Winnett told Wick that he and the sources needed to be realistic about what they required as the economy was deep in recession and newspapers were in deeper than most.
Wick said that he fully understood and that he would like the Telegraph to have the story if the right deal could be struck.
Then came a surprise: Wick put a leather attaché case on the table, rolled his thumbs over the combination locks, sprang the catches, and took out a CD in an envelope. This, he explained, contained a ‘sample’ of a handful of MPs’ expenses claims to enable Winnett to check the authenticity of the material. The MPs included Jacqui Smith; James Purnell, the work and pensions secretary; and George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor. He then told Winnett that the Telegraph had twenty-four hours to decide whether it wanted to do a deal.
‘I’ll come back to you,’ Winnett promised, though he felt such a tight deadline was optimistic, given the magnitude of what he was dealing with.
Back in the office, Winnett immediately loaded the disk on to his computer. He was struck by the astonishing level of detail contained in the files. Each MP’s expenses were broken down into four years: 2004/5, 2005/6, 2006/7 and 2007/8. For each year, there was one file for each MP’s claims under the ACA and one file for their office expenses, officially known as the incidental expenses provision (IEP). Because the data were stored in PDF files – in other words, electronic facsimiles of the original documents – Winnett had at his fingertips every single piece of paper submitted by each MP in their expenses claims, from the claim forms they had filled in by hand to individual bills and invoices, right down to itemized supermarket receipts for grocery shopping.
Every time an MP submitted an expenses claim, they were required to fill in a two-page form divided into ten categories: hotel stays; mortgage or rent; food; utilities; council tax or rates; telephone and communications; cleaning; service/maintenance; repairs/insurance/ security; and ‘other’. On the second page Members were required to state the address of the second home on which they were making claims, as well as signing and dating a declaration which stated: ‘I confirm that I incurred these costs wholly, exclusively and necessarily to enable me to stay overnight away from my only or main home for the purpose of performing my duties as a Member of Parliament.’ But even the most cursory glance through the documents showed that MPs had stretched to breaking point – and often beyond – the interpretation of what could be regarded as an expense ‘wholly, exclusively and necessarily’ incurred to enable them to carry out their duties. Spread out in front of Winnett was a bewildering array of different items which the MPs had been able to buy courtesy of the British taxpayer, usually submitted under the cover-all category of ‘other’.
Although some categories of expense claim were already common knowledge, such as mortgage interest, council tax, utility bills and food, the receipts included with the claims showed the full extent to which MPs were able to furnish their homes and subsidize their lifestyles on expenses. As well as Jacqui Smith’s infamous claim for pornographic films – which showed up on the very last page of her most recent year’s claims – and her claims for a new kitchen, complete with 88p plug, here were claims by James Purnell for items including cutlery (£88), mirrors (£220), a rug (£92.99) and a bouquet of flowers (£34.50). In Smith’s case, incidentally, the taxpayer had also footed the bill for someone in her house to watch Ocean’s 13 twice (at £3.75 per viewing) and Surf’s Up (£3.50).
Winnett was certain the public would be up in arms when they discovered the sort of fripperies their money was being spent on, but this was only one part of the st
ory. Also contained in the files were letters between MPs and the parliamentary office which scrutinized MPs’ expenses claims – the Department of Finance and Administration. Winnett thought it sounded like something out of the TV series Yes, Minister, but this turned out to be the official name of what was commonly known as the parliamentary fees office. These letters revealed that a degree of cooperation was taking place between the MPs and the authorities, with expenses claims continuing to be met even if there was no immediate evidence or proof of money actually having been spent. All of the letters had a thick pink cross over them, with the word ‘deleted’ printed across the middle in large red letters. It meant that the public was never intended to see this highly enlightening correspondence, making a mockery of the forthcoming release of the data under the Freedom of Information Act.
Winnett was also able to see which pieces of information on the claim forms and receipts were going to be censored. Grey tinted boxes covered any words or numbers which the parliamentary authorities intended to remove, subject to the approval of the MPs themselves, who would have the final say on what stayed in and what was taken out. Once the MPs gave the go-ahead, these grey boxes would be changed to impermeable black, shielding from prying public eyes anything which was, supposedly, entirely personal, such as bank account numbers, or would pose a security risk if made public. But Winnett suspected – rightly, as it turned out – that this censorship would also be used to cover up anything that might embarrass MPs. Crucially, the grey boxes covered the MPs’ addresses, which Winnett knew would be the key to unveiling a whole host of potential scams.
No Expenses Spared Page 7