No Expenses Spared

by Robert Winnett

  These individuals had been selected for three main reasons: they were in power; they had all made questionable claims; and they had been on a list of twenty MPs whose expenses had been seen by the Sun, meaning the Telegraph had to get them out of the way before the Sun had a chance to catch up. Other members of the Cabinet who did not appear on the list had, on the whole, made apparently ‘clean’ expenses claims.

  Before the Daily Telegraph could even contemplate writing stories about any of them, however, each one would have to be ‘fronted up’ – in other words, the allegations would have to be formally put to them to give them a chance to respond. These were no ordinary front-ups, however. On a normal story, a reporter might bang on someone’s door or ring them up to say they were going to appear in the next day’s paper after they had been caught breaking the law/misbehaving/committing adultery. Even in the case of MPs, a phone call would usually suffice.

  But the Daily Telegraph was about to accuse the Prime Minister and half the Cabinet of misusing public money. The stakes could hardly have been higher; so special measures were called for. Each reporter was told to prepare a formal letter, based on a template approved by Arthur Wynn Davies. It would begin by setting out the fact that the Telegraph was investigating MPs’ expenses, and then give an assurance that no address or any other details which could compromise security would be revealed; only then would the specific allegations be set out.

  So instead of writing stories, the reporters spent the morning writing letters, each of which contained some of the most damaging allegations put to a serving minister in recent times. But writing the letters also served as a useful exercise to concentrate the mind: as the reporters typed them out, they went back through the expenses documents, checking and re-checking their facts, making sure every figure was correct and nothing had been overlooked. Each member of the team was acutely aware that the Labour Party media machine – constructed by Tony Blair’s master of spin, Alastair Campbell – was geared up to look for even the tiniest factual inaccuracies in articles which criticized its MPs, then use that inaccuracy ruthlessly to undermine the entire basis of the story. Any mistake in any story in the following day’s coverage could therefore prove fatal to the entire investigation. Not only would Labour seize on such a mistake, but rival media organizations, stung by the fact that they had lost out on the story, might be only too willing to run ‘denial’ stories to put the Telegraph back in its box.

  Wynn Davies had stressed that now, more than ever, the Telegraph had a duty to stick to the age-old journalistic code of ‘fair, balanced and accurate’ reporting, meaning that any stories written about the MPs would have to include their responses. If the MPs challenged the accuracy of any of the allegations, executives and lawyers would have to decide whether to expunge them from the stories altogether. The lawyer had also insisted that he should read each letter before it was emailed to its recipient.

  As the reporters waited for him to approve the letters towards the end of the morning, Gordon Brown was celebrating some particularly good news. The Crown Prosecution Service announced that it would not be pressing charges against three former Labour Party treasurers following the so-called ‘donorgate’ scandal of 2007. The three men had brokered a total of £600,000 in donations to the Labour Party from a property developer called David Abrahams via a number of proxies; this had caused a furore at the time, but prosecutors said that after considering the evidence they had decided there had been no breach of electoral law. The Labour Party had responded by putting out a statement making it clear that it should be ‘beyond reproach’, adding that it had reformed its procedures to ensure ‘transparency and accountability’. To those watching from the bunker, it was a delicious irony.

  The donorgate affair had been the closest Brown had come to being tarnished by ‘sleaze’ during his premiership, and by now the Prime Minister was, no doubt, beginning to think that he might get through his entire stay in Downing Street without being dragged into any similar scandals. He was able to enjoy the moment for no more than a couple of hours before the email from Robert Winnett, setting out the fact that the Daily Telegraph was intending to run a story about the Prime Minister’s expenses claims, signalled that Brown and his government were about to be hit by a tidal wave of public fury.

  Having received Winnett’s email, Michael Ellam broke the news to the Prime Minister at 2 p.m. Brown was deeply troubled by what he was told. He was under no illusions about the potential damage the allegations could cause, and immediately cleared his diary for the rest of the day to deal with the unfolding crisis.

  Brown’s advisers were also upset that the Telegraph had hit them with what one described as ‘a bolt from the blue’. Brown had been at pains to cultivate a good working relationship with the newspaper during his time in office, and wanted to know why the Telegraph had not given him any warning before hitting him with the allegations. But that question would have to wait; calls were beginning to come in from almost every Whitehall department to say that other Cabinet members had received similar letters from the Daily Telegraph.

  ‘It was like being on the deck of a ship and seeing a torpedo coming which you knew you couldn’t stop,’ said one source close to the events inside No. 10. Within the space of an hour, Brown learned that Alistair Darling, Geoff Hoon and Hazel Blears had kitted out more than one house at taxpayers’ expense after ‘flipping’ their second-home designations, with possible issues over capital gains tax in relation to Hoon and Blears. Lord Mandelson had claimed thousands of pounds for repairs to his house after announcing his decision to step down as an MP; Jack Straw had overclaimed on his council tax; John Prescott had claimed for three mock Tudor beams to be fitted to the front of his house (the self-professed bulimic had also claimed the maximum £4,800 annual food allowance). The list went on and on.

  As Brown retreated to his private office in an anteroom off 10 Downing Street’s open-plan ‘war room’ where his chief advisers had their desks, Joe Irvin, his political director, was told to gather a small team together to comb through Brown’s own expenses in order to respond to the Telegraph’s questions and look out for any other potential problems buried in the receipts. With the former lobbyist running Downing Street’s response behind the scenes, Brown spent the entire afternoon in his office, with various advisers going in and out to brief him on the latest developments from government departments. As he sat at his extra-large computer screen, he began drafting his own response to the Telegraph’s questions, with input from Dugher, Ellam, Irvin, and his permanent secretary Jeremy Heywood. Sir Gus O’Donnell, the head of the civil service, was also following developments, liaising with a senior Cabinet Office official who was checking that ministers had not broken any government rules.

  Back at the Telegraph, the investigation team was not expecting a response from any of the ministers much before 5 p.m., the deadline which the letters had given for their replies. But Jack Straw was about to spend the afternoon speaking to inmates at Whitemoor prison in Cambridgeshire, a maximum security gaol which was home to the M25 ‘road rage’ killer Kenneth Noye and the rapist and murderer Michael Sams, among others. Straw, like every other visitor, would have to surrender his mobile phone when he entered the prison, and by the time he came out it would be early evening. An email he had received from Gordon Rayner made it clear that the Telegraph had chapter and verse on a council tax overclaim he had made on his constituency home in Blackburn, which he had eventually repaid to the parliamentary authorities. He had also overclaimed for his mortgage and had claimed for a new kitchen after writing to the parliamentary fees office saying that: ‘My daughter complains – correctly – that it is less well equipped than her student house in Manchester.’

  To his credit, Straw decided to deal with the matter promptly, and at 2.24 p.m., just thirty-four minutes after he had sent the allegations, Rayner had Straw’s response, sent by his special adviser, Mark Davies. Quoting ‘a spokesman for Jack Straw’, it said:

  Jack takes
this very seriously … Any costs claimed in relation to his home in his Blackburn constituency and time spent in Blackburn have been made entirely in accordance with the rules set by the Commons authorities. On the claims relating to mortgage interest payments an error arose because the amount of interest declined rapidly towards the end of the mortgage. This error was identified by the Commons authorities on information provided by Mr Straw and then repaid. It was also Mr Straw himself who spotted errors in the claims for council tax and alerted the authorities. He repaid the difference.

  The reporters had been so confident that the ministers would take hours to reply that they had all dispersed to the various sandwich bars in Victoria station to grab their lunches as soon as they had sent off the letters. Most had only got back to the bunker a matter of minutes before Straw’s email landed, and their desks were covered in sandwiches, soup cartons and crisp bags as Rayner alerted them to the crucial development.

  Straw’s response was incredibly straightforward – dull, even. But to the bunker team it was a thing of beauty. Straw might have denied any wrongdoing, but he had not contested the substance of any of the allegations. At a stroke, he had removed most of the possible obstacles which could have prevented publication of the expenses investigation. For a start, the documents were clearly genuine, as Straw confirmed he had overclaimed for council tax and mortgage payments. The Telegraph had not been hoaxed. Also, in his role as Lord Chancellor, Straw would be the minister who would oversee any government attempt to block publication, either through an injunction or by calling in the police. His letter contained no such threat. In the space of a few seconds, the mood in the bunker changed from nervous anticipation to relief and celebration.

  ‘Fantastic,’ said an emotionally drained Winnett.

  ‘Unbelievable,’ said Hope. ‘Looks like we’re on, then!’

  ‘Yep. Better start writing!’

  As the reporters digested the news, Arthur Wynn Davies rushed into the bunker looking more excited than anyone. ‘We’re in business!’ he announced, a smile as wide as the river Taff on his face. ‘There’s no way any of them can deny it now.’ With a slightly melodramatic flourish, Wynn Davies said he had been so nervous waiting for the first, make-or-break response that he could only compare the tension with the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, when he and the rest of the world waited to discover whether America and Russia would start a nuclear war.

  There would be more waiting to come, however. After Jack Straw had given the investigation team such a quick start, it would be more than two hours before the next minister replied. In the meantime, another vital member of the Telegraph’s staff would have to be briefed on the expenses story – the newspaper’s legendary cartoonist, Matt Pritchett.

  One of the highlights of the editor’s day at the Telegraph is his daily meeting with Matt, when the editor must choose between several drawings which the prolific satirist produces each day. William Lewis had already had his 2.45 p.m. meeting with Matt that day, at which he had chosen a cartoon about the national DNA database, featuring a man who was being told that by wearing socks with his sandals he had committed a sufficiently serious crime to have his DNA retained by police. At around 4 p.m., Tony Gallagher pulled Matt to one side and told him: ‘There’s another story that might be on the front page tomorrow. We’ve got details of MPs’ expenses, and they’ve been claiming for some pretty outrageous things. Could you put something together?’ With no more details to go on, Matt produced the first of what would become dozens of cartoons on MPs’ expenses. It showed an MP in his office telling his secretary: ‘Buy me a hair shirt and put it on expenses.’

  As the bunker team speculated on the reasons for the delay in getting more replies from the Cabinet, Gordon Brown was holding a crisis meeting in his private office. Dugher had asked every Whitehall department to send him copies of the letters they had received from the Daily Telegraph and had laid out the letters, and the ministers’ intended responses, on a coffee table in the corner of the office. Brown wanted to know how bad it was, and was particularly concerned with judging how his own expenses claims stood up to scrutiny compared with those of other Cabinet members. Already Brown was displaying a strong instinct for self-preservation, sensing that the story could be seized upon by his rivals and used as a weapon to stab him in the back.

  Brown had no idea what his ministers had been claiming, and according to one who saw him that afternoon ‘looked really shocked’ when he found out. In particular, he was concerned about Blears, who had avoided paying £13,000 in capital gains tax when she ‘flipped’ her second home at around the time she sold it; Straw, whose council tax aberration was likely to become headline news because of his position as justice secretary; and Mandelson, who had been brought back into government in a huge gamble by Brown after having been twice forced to resign from ministerial posts in the past, once because of questions over his personal mortgage arrangements. But above all, Brown was preoccupied with his own claims and was angry that his personal integrity was being challenged.

  Over in Victoria, the vast majority of the Telegraph’s staff were still totally unaware of the historic scoop the newspaper had waiting in the wings. Even at the midday news conference, most of the executives planning that day’s newspaper had no idea of what was going on in the bunker. Instead, they planned a paper which was going to lead on the latest twist in the Gurkha residency row and include stories about why Chariots of Fire was Gordon Brown’s ‘most inspirational’ film and how Sikh police officers were calling for bullet-proof turbans. The exercise was not intended to be entirely redundant, though. William Lewis had decided to use a tried and tested Fleet Street trick to throw rivals off the scent by ‘spoofing’ the first edition of the newspaper. The plan was to print a limited run of around 25,000 copies containing nothing of the expenses story: these would be picked up by rival newspapers, which would assume that the Telegraph had no major stories worth following up.

  National newspapers print several different editions each night, enabling them to update the news as it develops during the evening, and one of the most important tasks of a night news editor is checking the stories which every other paper has in its first edition, then putting his reporters to work on their own version of the story so that by the time the final edition is printed it will contain ‘spoiler’ versions of other papers’ exclusives. But by spoofing the first edition editors deny rival publications the chance to catch up, because by the time they see the big story splashed all over the second edition, it’s too late to do anything about it.

  In this case, a spoof would also buy the newspaper time if the government was thinking of applying for an injunction: if ministers saw the spoof first edition, they would assume the Telegraph had held off from printing the stories referred to in the formal letters to ministers, and not bother going for an injunction.

  By 5 p.m., however, Lewis had received news of a worrying development. Word had reached him that the Sun – and possibly one other newspaper – had been alerted to the Telegraph’s expenses exclusive. Although he couldn’t prove it, Lewis suspected that Downing Street had tipped off ‘friendly’ Labour-supporting newspapers in the hope that they could spin the story to them in a more positive way and at the same time burst the Telegraph’s bubble. Politics, after all, is a dirty business.

  Lewis called Winnett into his office. ‘We’re going for first,’ he announced, informing him of the latest turn of events. Winnett was alarmed, but not entirely surprised. In the bunker, the reporters had repeatedly commented that it would take a minor miracle to keep the lid on the story for more than a week.

  Winnett had expected to have several hours to fine-tune the front-page story he had already started writing, but now he was going to have to get a shift on, particularly in view of the number of eyes which would need to see his and the other reporters’ stories before they were officially signed off by editors, production journalists and lawyers.

  By the time Winnett returned to the bunker,
responses from the various departments had started to flow in at a steady rate. Some ministers, like John Prescott, Alistair Darling and Hazel Blears, had sent only the briefest responses, variations on the ‘it was all within the rules’ theme. Others, however, went to extraordinary lengths to justify every detail of their claims. Margaret Beckett, who had claimed £1,480.84 for a new larder fridge, freezer, dishwasher, dryer and washing machine just a few days before the end of the financial year, phoned Gordon Rayner and spent more than ten minutes explaining why she had gone on the spending spree.

  ‘My tumble dryer started to have hiccups,’ she explained. ‘Our other white goods were showing signs of wear and tear and we tend to replace things in a batch because it’s the best use of our time. It’s part of the pattern of life that that sometimes goods go wrong and if so it’s a good thing to do it all at once.’ Claims she had made for hanging baskets and pot plants ‘should not have been claimed’, she conceded.

  The multi-millionaire Northern Ireland secretary, Shaun Woodward, had received more than £100,000 to help him pay the mortgage interest on a £1.35 million flat that was one of at least seven properties he owned. He did not dispute this, but an aide took issue with the fact that the Telegraph had also suggested in a letter to Woodward that he had made an expenses claim for a Muller Crunch Corner yoghurt (38p) and a pizza from Asda (£1.06). The pizza and yoghurt in question had been consumed by a member of his staff, the aide said, not the minister himself.