One other thing which immediately struck Winnett was the sheer volume of material. For just these four MPs, there were 6,933 pages of documents. A quick mental calculation gave an average of around 1,700 pages per MP, which would equate to a million pages for the 646 Members of Parliament. Winnett blew out his cheeks and began to wonder whether it would be humanly possible for a team of reporters to go through such a vast amount of data in the limited amount of time which would be available if the project went ahead.
We’ll just have to cross that bridge when we come to it, he thought to himself.
Apart from the obvious stories contained in the documents themselves, Winnett knew from the stories on Jacqui Smith and Tony McNulty that if there were bigger scandals behind the expenses claims it would require a fair amount of digging to find them, by checking the claims against public records. The trouble was that Winnett still had his day job to attend to, and with the 2009 budget statement to come the following day, it wasn’t exactly a quiet week in Parliament. It was time to ask for help, and Winnett knew just whom to call on.
With impeccable timing, Holly Watt, Winnett’s former comrade in arms at the Sunday Times, had joined the Daily Telegraph just two days earlier, on 20 April. The pair had worked together on the Derek Conway expenses story two years previously, earning a shortlisting for scoop of the year at the 2008 British Press Awards, and the extensive knowledge of the MPs’ expenses system that both reporters had gained from that investigation meant that Watt would be the ideal person to help Winnett by going through the files looking for clues that might reveal hidden scandals.
Watt, a Cambridge graduate, had originally set out to become a solicitor, but after spending a year studying for a postgraduate law degree, decided she had made a disastrous choice. Sensing that she might be better suited to journalism, she began sneaking into the office of the Sunday Times’s ‘Style’ section, using a friend’s pass to get through the formidable security at News International’s Wapping headquarters, and worked there for nothing to gain valuable work experience. Incredible as it may seem, no one ever bothered to ask what she was doing there or how she had got in.
Once her face had become familiar, Watt decided to chance her arm in the newsroom, where the forensic eye for detail she had picked up at law school, coupled with her naturally dogged character, made her a natural for working on investigations. Her Sunday Times career almost ended before it began, however, when a manager discovered she had been blagging her way in, rather than applying for work through official channels, and she was banned for more than a month before a deputation of reporters persuaded their superiors to bring her back and give her a contract.
Four years later, having been poached by the Daily Telegraph, and before she had even had time to go through any kind of induction training, she found herself immersed in the early stages of the biggest and most complex investigation in the newspaper’s history.
Watt suspected that James Purnell had almost certainly avoided paying capital gains tax when he sold his London flat. The Cabinet minister had billed the taxpayer for £395 worth of advice from an accountant which included ‘tax advice regarding sale of flat’. Watt’s checks of records held at the Land Registry showed that Purnell had bought the London flat in 2000, then sold it in 2004, after four years encompassing some of the steepest annual price rises of the property boom. She strongly suspected that Purnell’s ‘tax advice’ had enabled him to pay no capital gains tax on the sale. Even though what he had done was perfectly legal, it was clear that the public might not be so forgiving as the taxman.
Winnett reported the findings to Evans and gave him a quick test drive of the disk.
‘Wow,’ Evans said as he looked through Jacqui Smith’s itemized bills for her kitchen. ‘The detail on this is amazing. If they’re all like this the potential is going to be massive.’
Evans and Winnett were now as sure as they possibly could be that the data were genuine, and Evans urged his colleague to arrange another meeting with Wick as soon as he could.
They also gave editor William Lewis a progress report. Lewis was excited about the potential of the material, but he was careful to maintain a poker face as he listened intently. He didn’t want Winnett and Evans to get carried away before the authenticity of the disk had been definitively established, and felt it was important not to give the impression that he had already made up his mind. He still harboured fears that it could all turn out to be a hoax and couldn’t shake off the feeling that it all seemed too good to be true.
‘Why did other papers turn it down?’ he asked. There was no obvious answer. But Lewis knew that if there was a chance the material was genuine, the Telegraph had to have it.
‘Just get it in, let’s have a look at it,’ he said. After all, looking at something didn’t mean you had to publish it.
By now it was Thursday. Winnett had managed to stretch Wick’s original 24-hour deadline, saying they needed more time, but was anxious to wrap up an agreement by the end of the week. He called Gewanter, but what the PR man told him was enough to make his blood run cold.
‘We can’t see you until next week,’ said Gewanter. ‘The thing is, we’ve also been talking to the Sun, and we’ve given them until the end of Friday to decide whether they want to go ahead with a deal.’
It was the worst possible news. Just when Winnett had finally allowed himself to believe that he might be about to pull off the scoop of his career with a story of consuming public interest, he was being told that he was second in the queue behind a newspaper which was not only a stablemate of his old employer the Sunday Times, but could also draw on Rupert Murdoch’s vast financial resources if it chose to. Winnett felt his mouth starting to dry out as he tried desperately to think of a way to persuade Gewanter not to do a deal with the Sun. He repeated his previous assurances about the Telegraph covering the story in a thorough, responsible and impartial way, and questioned whether the Sun would be as committed to the idea of covering every single MP. Ultimately, though, there was nothing to do but wait.
Winnett broke the news to Evans, Gallagher and Lewis, who took the latest twist in their stride. Gewanter had made it clear from the outset that the Telegraph was not the first newspaper he had approached, and the Sunday Express stories were proof of that. It was no great surprise that another paper was still in the game.
On the other side of London, senior executives at the Sun were involved in intense discussions over whether to publish the MPs’ expenses disk. As Winnett suspected, the Sun wanted to cherry-pick the expenses claims of the most high-profile MPs, and leave the vast majority untouched. Wick was holding firm: it had to be all or nothing.
By Friday night, no deal had been reached with the Sun – though Winnett didn’t know it at the time. He spent an anxious weekend covering the Conservative Party’s spring conference in Cheltenham, rubbing shoulders with reporters from rival newspapers, most of whom were blissfully unaware of what was going on behind their backs. On Sunday he had lunch with a friend from the Sun’s political team, privately wondering whether it would be he whose name would be all over the ‘scoop of the decade’ while Winnett was left to reflect on what might have been.
In fact, the Tory spring conference was the last political story Winnett would cover before MPs’ expenses took over the next four months of his life.
Before setting off for Cheltenham, Winnett had arranged with Gewanter that if the deal with the Sun had not been signed, they would meet at the Telegraph’s head office in Victoria at nine thirty on the following Monday morning, 27 April. As Winnett made his way to the office that morning, there was no guarantee that anyone was going to show up. There had been no word from Gewanter over the weekend, and he knew from previous experience that no news often means bad news. But at ten past nine, as he emerged from the revolving doors at the entrance to the office, Winnett discovered Gewanter already waiting for him in reception.
‘Hey, Robert,’ Gewanter said cheerily as he held out his hand. ‘John�
��s just on his way.’
Leaving Gewanter in the reception area to wait for Wick, Winnett hurried up the lengthy escalator which leads to the editorial department and found Evans at his desk. After making sure they both knew exactly what the Telegraph could and could not offer, they invited Wick and Gewanter upstairs and took them to an office normally used by the Sunday Telegraph, whose staff have Mondays off.
Gewanter explained that although he had not entirely closed the door on the Sun, he and Wick were ready to discuss a deal.
Evans stressed the unique position that the Telegraph was in as the only remaining daily broadsheet newspaper. Not only would the newspaper’s broadsheet format lend itself to coverage which might run into dozens of individual stories per day, but the Telegraph also had a huge internet operation which was tailor-made for publishing large amounts of data.
‘I can promise you the Sun will mess you around,’ he added. ‘They’ll say they’re interested but then they’ll come back to you and say they only want to do a few MPs. If you go with us, we’ll do all of them.’
Wick gave the impression that he would prefer to see the investigation in the Telegraph than in a tabloid, feeling that the gravitas of the Daily Telegraph would underscore the seriousness of the material concerned.
Later that morning, Evans and Winnett reported to Lewis with news of their meeting. The editor wanted to know if Wick had been able to reveal anything about what else was on the master disk, in terms of possible stories about other MPs.
‘He doesn’t know for sure,’ said Winnett. ‘No one knows, because no one’s looked through the whole disk, but we need to get the disk first and worry about that later.’
Lewis’s response was simple: ‘Go for it.’
By lunchtime on Tuesday, after details of the deal had been thrashed out with senior executives, including Gallagher, Winnett was ready to put the Telegraph’s proposed offer to Wick and Gewanter.
The paper would offer the pair £10,000, to cover their time and expenses, for an exclusive opportunity to study the full contents of the disk for ten days. If the Telegraph decided to push ahead with publication, it would pay a further £100,000, to be disbursed in three tranches.
‘I think we’ve got a deal,’ said Gewanter when the offer was put to him. Wick had been insistent all along that money was not the reason the information had been leaked by the ultimate source, and in the weeks to come he was as good as his word: he would later turn down sums of up to £500,000 from other newspapers desperate for the information.
Winnett sank into his chair, scarcely able to believe that after so many twists and turns the Telegraph was finally going to take delivery of the sacred disk.
With fine details still to be ironed out, Arthur Wynn Davies worked through the night on Tuesday drawing up a contract, including the necessary legal indemnity for Wick. A copy of the contract was emailed to Wick on Wednesday, 29 April.
At 5 p.m. that day Wick was back in the Telegraph office. After signing a contract guaranteeing the exclusivity of the material, Wick took a brown envelope out of his briefcase, opened the flap, tilted it on to the desk and … nothing.
After a slightly awkward pause, he shook the envelope, while Winnett helpfully suggested to Wick that he could simply put his hand inside and pull out the contents.
‘I’m not touching it,’ replied Wick, as he shook the envelope more vigorously.
Finally a small red disk drive, no bigger than a cigarette case, slipped out on to the desk. The hard work was about to begin.
The Plan
Wednesday, 29 April
CHAPTER 7
ALTHOUGH IT WAS towards the end of normal office hours by the time Wick handed over the prized disk, the clock was already ticking.
One of the conditions of the deal that Wick had insisted upon was that the Telegraph had just ten days to analyse the data and begin publishing it. If the newspaper did not go ahead with publication by the tenth day, the deal would lapse and Wick would have the right to approach other media organizations.
Evans and Winnett knew that the scale of the task ahead was nothing short of Herculean. The million or so pages of documents contained on the disk had to be read individually (they could not be automatically searched by any computer program because much of the information was handwritten) and there was, of course, no guide book to point out where the stories could be found.
While the public would no doubt want to know what the most high-profile politicians had been up to, it was just as likely that the biggest scandals might involve anonymous backbench MPs. So every single document would have to be read, analysed, checked against public records (such as Land Registry property deeds or electoral rolls) and cross-referenced with other MPs to check whether, for example, several MPs were illegally claiming rent for the same address.
In normal circumstances, a newspaper that wanted to investigate possible expenses fraud by an MP might expect a reporter to take several weeks to gather the necessary evidence. The Telegraph faced the prospect of carrying out more than sixty such investigations each day if it was going to check every MP’s expenses file before the publication date.
And the problems didn’t end there. There remained a very real threat that the Telegraph’s offices could be raided by the police, and the disk seized, if the parliamentary authorities got wind of what was going on. Despite Arthur Wynn Davies’s confidence that the newspaper had not broken any laws, and that the disk did not constitute stolen property, it was an argument that might have to be settled in a court of law if Parliament chose to dispute it, with the disk as Exhibit A.
To make matters even more complicated, two other newspapers – the Sunday Express and the Sun – had also seen part of the database. If word leaked out that the Telegraph had secured the rights to the disk, it was a near-certainty that one or both of the newspapers would print ‘spoiler’ stories about MPs whose files they had looked at, beating the Telegraph to the punch.
Two things were clear: the Daily Telegraph would have to put together a team of reporters capable of pulling off what might be the most ambitious newspaper investigation in history; and they would have to work in total secrecy to ensure no other newspapers – or the police – knew what was going on.
A newspaper office is never the best place to try to keep a secret, given that its staff spend their entire working lives ferreting out gossip, and journalism is such an incestuous industry that even the most closely guarded secrets become common knowledge across London in a matter of minutes if more than a handful of people know what’s going on. So Evans and Winnett, sitting down that evening to discuss how to prevent news of the investigation leaking from the building, decided on a brilliantly simple strategy: they would lie through their teeth. Apart from the handful of people directly involved in the investigation, everyone else who had cause to ask what the team was up to would be sold a cover story. As long as everyone on the team stuck to the script, it just might work.
Clearly the investigation team would need to work in a separate room, away from prying eyes, and after a couple of quick phone calls Evans secured the use of a room in a back corridor which was normally used for staff training. It was called, appropriately enough, Training Room 4.
‘If we’re going to be using a training room we might as well tell everyone we’re involved in a training exercise,’ Evans suggested. Winnett agreed, though both realized luck would play a big part in keeping such a huge project under wraps.
The idea that several reporters might suddenly be pulled away from their normal duties to take part in a training exercise was by no means implausible. The Telegraph was introducing a series of radical changes to the way reporters were required to work, not least a move towards self-publishing on the internet, meaning a reporter would write a story and publish it online with little input from anyone else. Reporters were in the process of being shown how to do this, and so any awkward questions about why a team of reporters had been asked to drop everything for a training exercis
e could be fobbed off with excuses about ‘orders from on high’.
The next job was to choose a team of reporters who could get the job done.
Holly Watt was an obvious choice, having already begun looking at the sample disk. She was acutely aware that the Telegraph could be sitting on Britain’s equivalent of Watergate, having recently spent a four-month sabbatical working at the Washington Post, the newspaper that carried out the political investigation against which all others are measured.
Winnett felt the team needed another parliamentary reporter to help steer the investigation through the political minefield ahead, and Rosa Prince, who had taken the crucial first phone call from Gewanter and who could be relied upon to pursue a story with ruthless vigour, was next on the team sheet.
Christopher Hope, the Whitehall editor, would also be brought on board. A veteran of political sleaze stories, he had recently helped expose the existence of the emails that led to the resignation of Damian McBride. Having worked on the Telegraph for six years, Hope was also the longest-serving Telegraph reporter on the team. In the long days which lay ahead, it would be his boyish enthusiasm that would often help keep spirits up as energy levels flagged.
Gordon Rayner, the Daily Telegraph’s chief reporter, had already been told about the newspaper’s pursuit of the disk by Evans, who was keen to make sure he was not about to take any annual leave. A veteran of the Sun and the Daily Mail, Rayner had often been called upon to organize teams of reporters covering different elements of major news stories, and would be ideally suited to helping oversee the expenses investigation in what would be a high-pressure environment. At thirty-eight, he was the oldest of the reporters chosen to work on the story.
The youngest would be Jon Swaine, a 24-year-old former Telegraph graduate trainee regarded as a rising star at the paper because of his thoroughness and professionalism. This was his opportunity to prove that he could cut it at the highest level of journalism – an opportunity he would grab with both hands in the weeks to come.
No Expenses Spared Page 8