The final member of the reporting team would be Martin Beckford, the newspaper’s social and religious affairs correspondent. He had repeatedly proved his ability to dig out front-page stories buried inside weighty official documents, making him a natural choice for the work to come. Beckford would have some of the most memorable exchanges with MPs.
Once the seven-strong reporting team had been decided upon, Evans and Matthew Bayley began telling those reporters who did not know about the disk that they would be required for an important, and urgent, training session the next day at 8 a.m. Bayley struggled to keep a straight face as the reporters tried to hide their annoyance at having to disrupt their plans – and come in early – for yet more training. He couldn’t wait to break the real news to them.
Christopher Hope was dashing for a 7 p.m. train home to Norfolk when he received an email on his BlackBerry asking him to call Bayley. As he boarded the carriage, he rang the news editor, who said: ‘Sorry for the short notice, but could you get in early tomorrow morning for a training session?’
‘How early?’
‘Eight o’clock.’
Bugger, thought Hope. It would mean getting up at five thirty to catch an early enough train to be back in London on time.
‘OK,’ he replied, cursing his luck. Bloody training sessions!
Jon Swaine, who had been working an early shift that day, was at the Barbican Theatre being thoroughly confused by a play which, he discovered when the performance began, was in French. He picked up the email message from Bayley during the interval, replied that he would be there, and thought no more of it.
Beckford, meanwhile, unwittingly almost talked his way out of being involved in the biggest story of his career.
‘What are you up to tomorrow?’ Evans asked him.
‘I’m going to Oxford University for a conference on the social impact of couples who have kids without getting married,’ Beckford replied. He had been looking forward to a pleasant day out of town and a leisurely lunch at St Hugh’s College.
‘Well, I’d like you to come into the office instead, for a training session on self-publishing. You’ll need to be here at eight. Can you do it?’
‘That’s going to be difficult, because it’ll mean getting up at five,’ said Beckford, exaggerating slightly. ‘Does it have to be that early?’
‘Well, yes. Can you make it?’
‘OK.’
As Evans walked off, Beckford turned to a colleague and moaned: ‘I’m going to miss out on a great story tomorrow because I’ve got to come in for a bloody training session at eight. I don’t see why it’s got to be so early. It’s ridiculous.’
Meanwhile, other arrangements had to be made to ensure the smooth running of the paper in the absence of so many reporters. In Parliament, Andrew Porter, the Telegraph’s political editor, and James Kirkup, its political correspondent, both already in on the secret, were asked to hold the fort and deflect any questions from other lobby correspondents as to the whereabouts of Winnett and Prince. Porter was also earmarked as one of the front men of the investigation, and would later represent the Telegraph in countless television and radio interviews while the rest of the team carried on digging behind closed doors.
Evans and Winnett also had to find a way of copying the disk so that each member of the team would have their own copy when the investigation began the following day.
‘Do you have any idea how to copy one of these things?’ Evans asked.
‘Er, no – do you?’
The pair trotted up to the second floor of the building, looking for the head of the IT department. He was on holiday, it turned out, so Evans asked for his deputy, Toby Wright.
‘I’m going to tell you something you mustn’t repeat to anyone in any circumstances,’ Evans told the mystified Wright. ‘Have you heard the story doing the rounds about a disk being offered to newspapers which contains all the details of MPs’ expenses?’
‘Oh yeah,’ he replied.
‘Well, this is it.’
Evans and Winnett, who had not yet loaded up the disk, feared that it might be encrypted or password-protected in some way. To their immense relief, when Wright connected it to his computer, they saw that a couple of mouse clicks was all it took to start delving into the MPs’ claims.
Evans then explained to a startled-looking Wright that the disk needed to be copied before first thing the next day.
‘But I’ve got to leave in five minutes to pick my kids up,’ said Wright.
Evans smiled. ‘You might have to make other arrangements.’
Wright agreed to stay late, making two copies of the disk before showing Winnett and Holly Watt how to make more copies, each of which took an hour to complete because of the sheer volume of material.
In the meantime, Evans had to recruit two final members of the team.
Lewis had already decided that the expenses story would be perfect for the newspaper not only in print but also online; indeed, it was viewed at that stage as being more ideally suited to the website than the print version, as the receipts of every MP could be published online to enable members of the public to search for their local MP’s expenses. To this end Ian Douglas, the newspaper’s digital production editor, and Duncan Hooper, digital news editor, were attached to the investigation with the task of preparing the expenses claims for online publication in their entirety. They would begin by putting the expenses of every member of the Cabinet online on the day the first newspaper stories were published, with every MP’s expenses to be published ten days to two weeks after that.
Or at least, that was the plan …
The Bunker
Thursday, 30 April
CHAPTER 8
AS THE SLIGHTLY dishevelled-looking reporters filed into the cheerless, windowless surroundings of Training Room 4 at 8 a.m. the next day, some were already a bit suspicious. National newspaper journalists traditionally start work at 10 a.m., a throwback to the days before 24-hour news channels and the internet, and a much-coveted perk of the job. But as the room filled up, Evans and Bayley chatted normally with the reporters about the stories they had written for that day’s paper, ranging from Beckford’s coverage of the latest twist in the horrific Baby P child abuse story to Swaine’s piece about the furore caused when the winner of a Cornish pasty baking competition had turned out to be from Devon.
Not only did several of the reporters have no idea what they were going to be doing, they were also in the dark about who they would be doing it with, and as each new face entered the room they were met with a light-hearted cheer from their colleagues, like school playground footballers just picked to play on the same side.
Christopher Hope was last in, having had the longest journey to work after his punishingly early start in Norfolk. Evans asked him to close the room’s heavy glass door before sitting on a desk in the centre of the room as his team wheeled their office chairs into an untidy semicircle, notebooks at the ready.
‘Thank you all for coming in so early,’ he said, giving a toothy grin and self-consciously pushing his glasses up on his nose. ‘As I’m sure you’ve all guessed, you’re not here for a training session. You’ll all have read stories in recent weeks about a disk with the details of MPs’ expenses claims on it. Well, we’ve got it.’
‘I bloody knew it was going to be something like this!’ interjected Hope, simultaneously breaking the tension and signalling the instant switch from anticipation to excitement.
‘I’m sorry we had to keep you in the dark,’ continued Evans, ‘but there are only a handful of people outside this room who know about this, and it has to stay that way. As far as everyone else is concerned, we’re involved in a training session. I’m afraid you’ll have to lie to your colleagues, though I’m sure you can all manage that, but as long as we all stick to the same cover story we should be OK.’
Several of the reporters exchanged doubtful glances at the idea that other journalists on the paper would swallow the story that any kind of traini
ng session could require so many senior members of the staff at such short notice, but in the absence of any better ideas it would have to do.
Evans explained that the disk had been the source of the Jacqui Smith and Tony McNulty stories, but that no other paper had been given access to the entire database.
‘There are something like a million and a half documents which we’re going to have to look at,’ he went on, ‘and we have to decide by this time next week whether we’re going to run with this, so we’re going to have to work through the weekend and do a lot of late nights. But if we do decide to go with it, the potential is absolutely enormous.’
As he spoke, the reporters were all doing the mental arithmetic. One and a half million documents, ten people. One hundred and fifty thousand documents each. In a week. How on earth was that going to be even vaguely possible?
Anticipating the obvious questions, Evans said: ‘We’ll have to divide it up, find a system we can work to and get through as much of this as we can. There’s bound to be stuff we’ll miss, but don’t worry about that because from the limited amount of stuff Rob’s looked at so far, there are going to be plenty of brilliant stories in there.’
Each reporter was then handed their own copy of the disk containing the full expenses files. All the work was to be handled on standalone laptop computers so that none of the sensitive information was put on to the Telegraph’s main systems until absolutely necessary, to reduce the chance of any leak.
Training Room 4 was not exactly set up for the needs of a reporting team working on a complex investigation. The bland office, 30 feet square, had sets of tables arranged in five clusters in the configuration of a number five on a die. Although each table had its own computer, there were few phones, only one printer and no fax machine. The only other furniture in the room consisted of a small wardrobe, a four-drawer metal filing cabinet and a flipchart. It did, however, have one crucial advantage: with two walls made of frosted glass and two walls lined with white-painted metal, it offered the team total privacy. Tucked away in a corner of the office, it was out of sight of most people in the building: few people even walked past it. In the days to come, Training Room 4 would become known to all who worked in it as ‘the bunker’ – a somewhat obvious and inevitable nickname, but none the less appropriate given the bunker mentality which developed within it.
The investigation also quickly acquired a nickname. The portable hard drives on to which the files had been copied had the trade name Firestorm, a word which came up on screen every time the disks were loaded.
‘It’s Operation Firestorm then,’ Winnett said sardonically to no one in particular as he cranked up his computer. The name stuck, and although it wasn’t repeated outside the room, it subsequently took on a certain resonance, with several politicians and even the Information Commissioner later referring to the expenses scandal as a ‘firestorm’.
Before the disks were loaded, the team decided on a way of carving up the information between them. Winnett and Prince would start looking through the Cabinet’s expenses, Rayner and Hope would do the Shadow Cabinet, and Beckford, Swaine and Hooper were to start looking at the Liberal Democrats and then backbenchers, one starting at A, one starting at M and one working backwards from Z. As each MP’s file was examined, the reporter in question would tick off the name on a master list, adding their own initials, to keep track of who had done which MP.
Watt was given the task of compiling a spreadsheet of every address for which the MPs had claimed the second-home allowance, so that any anomalies, such as several MPs claiming for the same address, would show up. It was a thankless task, but Watt had the benefit of being the only reporter to glance through every MP’s expenses, meaning she was able to comb out the most promising stories and keep a list of which MPs should be prioritized.
Ian Douglas, meanwhile, concentrated on preparing the Cabinet’s expenses documents for publication online, working out a system of blacking out genuinely sensitive personal information, such as bank account numbers, while leaving in much of the other data which Parliament wanted to censor.
The atmosphere crackled with anticipation as the reporters got their first sight of what was on the disks, and within a matter of minutes the room was buzzing as members of the team began making discoveries. Despite knowing that they were looking for potential abuses of the expenses system, they still reacted with disbelief at what the MPs had been spending public money on, from the outlandish to the downright trivial.
‘This guy’s bought a plasma television,’ called out Swaine.
‘Alan Duncan’s claimed hundreds of pounds for having his ride-on lawnmower serviced,’ chuckled Hope.
‘Oliver Letwin’s put in a bill for a pipe to be replaced under his tennis court,’ said Rayner.
Each passing minute was punctuated by expressions of disbelief as reporters found ever more astonishing claims.
‘Oh my God …’
‘You’re not going to believe what this guy’s claimed for …’
‘I’ve got a better one than that …’
Within two hours the team had made its first major breakthrough, and it involved none other than the Prime Minister himself.
Rosa Prince had assumed that the job of going through the Cabinet’s expenses would be boring and fruitless. Surely ministers in such prominent public roles would be scrupulous in ensuring that every claim for even a penny was above board and beyond reproach, she thought.
Not a bit of it. As she scrolled through Gordon Brown’s expenses claims, the rest of the room heard an involuntary gasp as she noticed that the Prime Minister had paid thousands of pounds for cleaning services to a certain Andrew Brown. Prince knew that Brown had a brother called Andrew, who ran the communications department of the French energy firm EDF. Was the PM arranging for public money to be paid to his own brother? For cleaning his flat?
‘Looks like Gordon Brown’s paying a load of money to his brother,’ said Prince, looking across at Winnett.
‘What!?’
The rest of the team crowded around Prince’s computer to see the evidence for themselves. Could it be a coincidence? they asked each other. Brown was one of the five most common surnames in the country, after all. Maybe it was another Andrew Brown who just happened to have a cleaning company. Even if it was his brother, why would the Prime Minister be paying him for cleaning services? It all looked very odd.
Within a matter of minutes the team had established, by checking publicly available online electoral rolls and Companies House records, that the Andrew Brown whose name and address appeared on the receipts was indeed the Prime Minister’s brother. Clearly the Prime Minister had some explaining to do.
As Prince continued her search, Brown’s expenses claims threw up other potentially damaging material. The Prime Minister had originally designated as his second home a flat in London where he lived with his wife Sarah. But in September 2006, within a fortnight of discovering that Tony Blair would be stepping down as Prime Minister (and hence that he would be moving into Downing Street as his successor), Brown had switched the designation of his second home to his constituency in Scotland. The implication seemed clear: that Brown had changed his designated second home so that he could carry on claiming thousands of pounds from the taxpayer even after he moved into a grace and favour flat in Downing Street.
There was plenty more besides. Brown had submitted two claims for the same £153 plumber’s bill, and had been paid twice. At the very least, it amounted to a deeply embarrassing oversight for the then Chancellor of the Exchequer. The canny Scot had also had an Ikea kitchen installed at a cost of £9,000, spreading the payments over two financial years, which meant that he stayed within the limit for each year’s total claim. There had also been a dispute with the fees office over a £105 children’s window blind. Officials, on first seeing a receipt which said simply ‘Noah’s animals’, had apparently assumed it was for a toy, and rejected it. Sarah Brown had written to the fees office on paper headed �
�Gordon and Sarah Brown’ saying: ‘The Peter Jones receipt for window blinds for London accommodation needs to be reimbursed.’ The fees office promptly paid up.
The Prime Minister, a self-professed sports fan, had even put in £36 monthly claims for the cost of his Sky TV package. How would the public feel about stumping up for Gordon Brown to watch live football on telly? Would voters be happy when they found out they had bought a £265 vacuum cleaner for the then Chancellor, who was at the time paid £144,520 a year? Or that they had paid for Rentokil to get rid of mice at his Fife home, at a cost of £352? The list went on and on.
No one on the investigation team had expected to find many major stories in the Cabinet’s expenses, but it turned out that almost every member of the Cabinet appeared to have played the system in one way or another.
Prince looked through Chancellor Alistair Darling’s claims and found that he too had switched the designation of his second home between London and his Edinburgh constituency, enabling him to claim £2,500 in stamp duty and legal fees when he bought a flat in London, and more than £4,000 to furnish and carpet it. Winnett discovered that Hazel Blears, the communities secretary, had claimed for three different properties in the space of a year, and during one house move had stayed at a £211 per night hotel whose publicity material stated that ‘Heaven will be a let-down after this.’ Margaret Beckett, the housing and planning minister, tried to claim £600 for hanging baskets and pot plants, while David Miliband, the foreign secretary, had spent so much money on his house and garden in his South Shields constituency that his own gardener had queried whether all the work was really necessary.
By mid-afternoon on that first day it was clear that the Telegraph would have a wealth of stories on the Cabinet alone, never mind the other 620 or so MPs who might have been up to no good.
It had also become obvious that as well as being outraged by the apparent abuses which the team was uncovering, the public would also be fascinated by many of the smaller claims. The Conservative MP Cheryl Gillan, for example, had submitted a supermarket receipt which included £4.47 for two tins of Cesar luxury dog food and a packet of Iams Senior chicken dry meal. Much to the amusement of the bunker team, Phil Woolas, the immigration minister, had claimed back the cost of nappies (£2.99), tampons (£1.19), panty liners (£1.48) and a ladies’ blouse (£15). The expenses claims provided a fascinating window on MPs’ lives, and the reporters found there was an irresistible vicarious pleasure in picturing powerful ministers musing over which brand of chocolate biscuits to buy (Jaffa Cakes proved to be a favourite) or knowing what flavour crisps certain members of the Cabinet preferred.
No Expenses Spared Page 9