It quickly became apparent that the MPs’ expenses would also feed the British public’s insatiable appetite for toilet humour. The fact that Gordon Brown had claimed back the cost of having his loo unblocked provoked bellows of laughter in the bunker’s classroom atmosphere (as well as speculation about who was the culprit), while the fact that the heavyweight former Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, had claimed for two loo seats in quick succession would provide a rich vein of Carry On-style gags for cartoonists and headline writers when it was revealed to the world. (After several weeks of deliberation, Prescott would eventually announce that he had not broken any loo seats, but had found that the first one didn’t fit his loo because he had bought an imperial size instead of metric.) However, even Prescott was overshadowed by Tory MP Peter Luff, who managed to claim for three toilet seats in four years.
There was also a pattern emerging of several different scams which many MPs used to play the system. Winnett and Rayner compiled a list of the most popular, so that reporters could jot down examples of each one as they came across them.
‘Loads of them seem to be flipping their second home designation between one place and another so they can do up more than one house,’ observed Hope.
Rayner jotted down the word ‘flipping’ at the top of the list, little knowing at the time that it would soon pass into the national lexicon as a virtual dictionary definition of MPs’ dodgy behaviour.
After a few minutes’ discussion, the list looked like this:
Flipping. MP nominates one property as second home, charges the taxpayer for refurbishment, then flips designation to another property so they can do up that one too.
Property ladder. MP renovates property at taxpayers’ expense, sells it for a profit, buys another property, does it up, sells it, etc.
Council tax. MP claims back full rate of council tax on second home, paid by taxpayer, then claims discounted rate on their other house by telling council this is really their second home.
March madness. Members who have not claimed the maximum permissible amount in a financial year go on last-minute spending spree in March to ‘use up’ the rest of the money available to them before April deadline.
Last-minute repairs. Splashing out thousands on renovations just before stepping down from Parliament so they can maximize profits when they sell a house they no longer need.
Capital gains tax avoidance. MP tells the taxman their second home is their ‘main’ home at the time they sell it, so they can avoid paying tax on the profit from the sale.
Claiming for ‘wrong’ address (‘doing a Jacqui Smith’). MP nominates their family home as their ‘second’ home, so taxpayer foots large bills there, while claiming a cheap bedsit, paid for by themselves, is their ‘main’ home.
Long-distance shoppers. MP buys large household goods, then has them delivered to main home, while telling fees office they have bought them for their second home.
Maxing out. MP claims £249 for anything they don’t have receipts for, meaning they don’t have to prove they ever spent the money, as no receipts needed for claims under £250.
Binge eaters. MP claims maximum £400 per month food allowance every month of the year – even when Parliament isn’t sitting.
‘Right, I’ll just print off a copy for everyone and then we can keep tally of who’s done which scam,’ said Rayner, as he sat down and typed up the list.
Five minutes later Rayner suddenly went pale. ‘Oh shit.’
‘What’s up?’
‘I’ve just pressed print, and it hasn’t sent it to the printer in here. It might have gone bloody anywhere!’
The team were not impressed. Secrecy was vital to the success of the investigation, and Rayner might have just gone and cocked the whole thing up with a single click of a computer mouse.
‘What’s the number of the printer it’s sent it to?’ said Hope. Rayner passed on the number, and Hope rang the Telegraph’s building services department to find out the location of the printer.
‘They say they don’t know where it is.’
‘Bollocks.’ Feeling physically sick, Rayner grabbed Jon Swaine and headed out into the Telegraph’s vast open-plan office to begin a frantic search of every printer they could find. It was almost certainly futile, but it was better than doing nothing.
After an agonizing two minutes, Rayner’s mobile rang. ‘We’ve tracked it down,’ said Hope.
‘Oh, thank God. Where?’
‘Rosa was logged into that computer so it’s gone to the printer in the parliamentary office. Katriona [the Telegraph’s parliamentary secretary] has got it and we’ve told her to destroy it.’
A red-faced Rayner returned to the bunker feeling he’d let the side down horribly.
‘Er, I’ll get the teas in, shall I?’ he sheepishly suggested.
Beckford, meanwhile, was thanking his lucky stars that Evans had persuaded him not to go to Oxford that day.
‘Thanks for twisting my arm yesterday,’ he told the news chief, out of earshot of the other reporters.
‘That’s OK,’ said Evans. ‘I’ve asked someone else to write up something on that conference, by the way.’ (It made six paragraphs in the next day’s paper, leaving Beckford even more grateful he hadn’t chosen to go to Oxford instead of joining the expenses team.)
By the end of day one, the bunker team had already got enough material to write explosive stories about several members of the Cabinet. But if they thought a week was a tight deadline for turning around the MPs’ expenses files, they were in for a shock when they came in the next morning.
Mark Skipworth, executive editor, strode purposefully into the bunker with an A4 notebook under his arm. He had been discussing the previous day’s discoveries with Lewis, Evans and Bayley, and now announced to the room: ‘I don’t want to alarm you, but it may be we decide to go with the Gordon Brown stuff for tomorrow’s paper.’
‘Tomorrow!’ several voices gasped in unison. Then came a chorus of protests by reporters who felt it was madness to rush into print with a story that was still at such an embryonic stage.
The instinct of every reporter is to get stories into the paper at the first possible opportunity, rather than run the risk of being scooped by another newspaper while the story is being held back. Everyone involved in the expenses story was jumpy about the fact that other newspapers had seen some of the data, knowing that any kind of leak could alert those other papers and give them the chance to run the story first. The ticking bombs which the team had uncovered about Brown and other Cabinet ministers only served to ratchet up the tension, as Wick had told Winnett that Brown was one of those whose expenses had been seen by the Sun. But the investigation team felt there was a huge risk of getting key elements of the story wrong if they didn’t have time to check the facts properly, and that the whole project could run out of control as a result.
After a nervous morning, the decision was taken by lunchtime on Friday that the Telegraph would hold its nerve and keep digging through the files. Cue relief all round.
As the team worked through the May bank holiday weekend, the Sunday Times devoted three pages to an investigation into Baroness Uddin’s second-home allowance claims. The Labour peer had allegedly bought a small flat in Maidstone and designated it as her ‘main’ home while claiming £100,000 for overnight stays in London, even though the newspaper claimed her actual main home was in the capital and she never visited the flat in Kent. The story dominated the television and radio news for the next two days, and provided a timely reminder of the public appetite for stories about parliamentary expenses.
‘Bloody hell,’ said Winnett as he scanned the Sunday Times at his desk in the bunker. ‘This is just one politician that hardly anyone’s ever heard of. We’ve got dozens of better-known people implicated. Wait until people find out what we’ve been up to!’
Other newspapers, anticipating the forthcoming ‘official’ release of MPs’ expenses, ran stories about what they would supposedly reveal.
One report said several MPs were ‘on suicide watch’ because they knew their expenses claims had been so heinous. Another said at least three MPs were bracing themselves for the release of hotel receipts which would show they had been having adulterous affairs. A Sunday paper reported that one MP had installed a sauna in his home and claimed it on expenses. And one senior member of the Shadow Cabinet, unaware that the Telegraph had obtained the disk, quietly told a Telegraph journalist that the main scandal was going to be MPs who lived together and submitted claims for the same property. This led to the bunker team being asked on a daily basis by Evans and Bayley whether they had winkled out the unnamed MPs at the centre of these salacious stories.
‘Found any of the shaggers yet?’
‘Have we worked out who’s on suicide watch?’
‘Has the sauna turned up?’
In the event, no evidence was found to suggest any of these stories were true.
By the time the investigation was a few days old, questions were starting to be asked about the absent reporters.
‘How long is this bloody training going to go on for?’ demanded one staff member, whose patience was wearing thin after almost a week of having to cover for colleagues.
In Parliament, lobby correspondents were starting to wonder where Winnett and Prince had suddenly disappeared to. James Kirkup, who knew the truth about the ‘training’ cover story, batted away an increasing number of questions.
‘Is Rosa around?
‘No, day off. Rob too.’
Then:
‘Rosa back yet?’
‘No. Still off.’
‘Still? Lazy so and so.’
‘Yeah. Tell me about it.’
And:
‘Haven’t seen Rob for ages. Where is he?’
‘Up at Victoria. Some training course. Blogging, I think.’
‘God, you lot are mad for the internet, aren’t you?’
At the outset of the investigation, fewer than ten Daily Telegraph staff outside the bunker team knew the truth about what was going on. One features executive emailed Rayner to ask if he could write a piece for the Saturday review section on ‘Gordon Brown’s worst week’, following a plot by some Labour MPs to defect to the Lib Dems and mounting speculation of a leadership challenge.
‘I think Brown’s week is about to get an awful lot worse,’ he said to the other reporters, as he emailed the executive to say he would be unavailable.
Another executive, wandering past the bunker on bank holiday Monday, was shocked to see the room full of activity.
‘God, they really shouldn’t make you come in for training on a bank holiday,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Surely it can’t be that important?’
‘Not much we can do about it,’ shrugged Watt, as others feigned disgruntlement.
Even a trip to the canteen for a cuppa became a hazardous task as members of the bunker team were confronted by increasingly suspicious colleagues.
‘So you’re doing this training then, are you? What’s really going on in there?’
‘Oh, wouldn’t want to bore you with the details. Can hardly stay awake.’
Meanwhile, Training Room 4 was becoming more of a cesspit than a bunker. The strict secrecy surrounding the investigation meant that cleaners were not allowed anywhere near the place, and as the days wore on the blue speckled carpet tiles started to disappear beneath the takeaway pizza boxes, paper coffee cups, chewing-gum wrappers and plastic bottles which had spilled out of the unemptied bins.
‘It’s starting to smell like my old student digs in here,’ observed Jon Swaine as the smell of leftover Chinese food, delivered to the office as the team worked into the night, lingered heavily one morning.
The team also had to protect the information on the disks as if their lives depended on it; if so much as a single document containing MPs’ personal details was seen by someone outside the building, not only would the Telegraph’s investigation become common knowledge, but Parliament would be able to turn the tables by accusing the Telegraph of compromising security. Instead of reporting the story, the Telegraph would become the story.
So a strict set of protocols were observed from the very beginning. Winnett put the master disk on its own in one safe (the location of which was not known even to the other reporters), where it remained untouched, while the working copies were kept in a second safe, where he returned them every night. In the bunker itself, any material which was printed out for reference had to be destroyed at the end of each evening in an old, dustbin-sized shredder which made the whole floor vibrate every time it thrummed into action. One reason for destroying the documents was the fear of a burglary, but it would also be vital to the credibility of the investigation, once it became public, to be able to demonstrate to the outside world that all genuinely sensitive personal data, such as addresses and bank details, were being handled under maximum security conditions. To ensure no electronic leaks of information, the team also imposed a ban on making any references to the investigation in emails. Even so, the fear that the outside world would discover what the Telegraph was up to hung in the air every minute of the day.
By now the team had settled into something of a routine, starting at 8 a.m. and working through until 10 p.m., with meals eaten at a desk while staring at the seemingly endless stream of expenses documents. Eyebags and spots became increasingly de rigueur; sunlight and fresh air were distant memories, and the third-hottest May on record was something the team could only read about in the papers. During one conversation about the amount of time MPs seemed to spend pursuing their hobbies, Beckford dryly noted: ‘My only hobby at the moment is sleeping.’ More than anyone else, Beckford had every right to feel exhausted. He had become a father for the first time on 2 April, less than a month before the investigation began, and would have been sleep-deprived even without the punishing hours demanded by Operation Firestorm.
One of the few moments of relaxation came on the evening of Wednesday, 6 May, when the team downed tools to watch the Chelsea v. Barcelona Champions’ League semi-final on a computer screen in the bunker. Winnett, a lifelong Chelsea fan, wished he hadn’t bothered, as a last-minute Barcelona equalizer knocked Chelsea out of the competition on away goals. ‘Hope it’s not an omen,’ he mumbled, looking crestfallen.
As John Wick’s ten-day deadline approached, Chris Evans decided the investigation needed all the resources he could throw at it, and the bunker team gained a new member in the shape of Nick Allen, one of the Telegraph’s most thorough and dependable news reporters. Allen, who had joined the Telegraph two years earlier from the US news agency Bloomberg, had previously been chief reporter at the Press Association, the UK’s national news agency, where he had covered military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as natural disasters and high-profile Old Bailey trials. He was at his desk in the Telegraph’s newsroom being briefed by a member of the news desk to write a story about swine flu when Evans approached. ‘This man has to go to the training room immediately,’ Evans interjected, in what seemed to Allen a strangely urgent way. Allen, who had just come back from a holiday, had heard about other reporters disappearing from the face of the earth after being selected to work on a ‘special project’ and feared he was in for a mind-numbing experience learning about new computer software.
‘Been sent to the training room?’ asked deputy news editor Neville Dean as Allen passed him.
‘Yes. Don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing,’ replied Allen.
‘Oh, it’s very, very good,’ whispered Dean, the only member of the eight-strong news desk other than Bayley who knew about the expenses project.
As Allen entered the bunker, he was greeted by silence and nervous glances.
‘What’s going on, then?’ he asked.
Hope was first to speak. Turning to Evans, he asked: ‘Can we tell him?’ Evans nodded, and Hope, who, like his colleagues, had been burdened by the urge to tell someone about the expenses story, blurted out in relief: ‘We’ve g
ot the disk! The disk with the MPs’ expenses. We’ve got it!’
Allen looked slightly stunned. Then his face broke into a huge smile. ‘Fantastic!’
Evans explained the need for watertight security, giving Allen a particularly thorny problem. His girlfriend was a reporter on another national newspaper, and he didn’t want to present her with divided loyalties by telling her about the expenses investigation. He decided straight away he would have to lie to her, leading to a series of uncomfortable phone calls.
‘Why are you at the office so late, what are you doing?’
‘Um, internet training, like I told you.’
‘At this time? You’re lying. Why are you lying? Are you in the pub?’
‘Er, got to go now, training’s starting again. Bye.’
One of Allen’s first tasks was to plough through the expenses claims of the Tory grandee David Heathcoat-Amory, who had submitted handwritten invoices from his gardener which included regular deliveries of horse manure. After more than two hours of combing through the bills, Allen came up with a grand total: the taxpayer had bought 550 sacks of horse manure at a total cost of £388.80.
‘So he’s literally dumped a load of shit on the taxpayer,’ Allen noted. It seemed like the perfect description for the way the MPs had behaved.
Even with the extra muscle which Allen provided, it was clear that the team would only be able to look at a fraction of the MPs’ expenses files by the time the ten-day deadline expired, because it was taking up to half a day to look through each MP’s claims. This meant that if the Telegraph did go ahead with publication, the reporters would have to divide into two teams, with one team writing stories for publication and the other team carrying on with the task of looking through more MPs.
No Expenses Spared Page 10