No Expenses Spared

by Robert Winnett

  It all seemed slightly surreal. Ministers and secretaries of state who would often take all day to respond to reporters’ questions about even the most serious departmental matters were suddenly falling over themselves to provide excuses for why they had made expenses claims for a hanging basket, a yoghurt or a pizza.

  Lord Mandelson, that master of media manipulation, tried an entirely different tactic – claiming that because he was about to get on a plane, he could not possibly answer the Telegraph’s questions and so the newspaper would have to wait until the following day, at the very least, before publishing anything. It was a nice try, but the Telegraph refused to be browbeaten. Unsurprisingly, Lord Mandelson found that he did, in fact, have time to send a brief answer, as it turned out his time-consuming flight was only going as far as Scotland.

  The good news was that no matter how hard the ministers tried to wriggle off the hook in respect of minor details, none disputed that they had made the claims in the first place; nor was there the slightest hint of legal action. For the investigation team, it was full steam ahead.

  With the first edition deadline creeping ever closer, Winnett sat down at his computer and began to write the front-page story – the ‘splash’ – for day one of what would be branded as The Expenses Files. Involuntarily narrowing his eyes, red-rimmed with fatigue after staring at his computer screen for more than twelve hours each day for over a week, he searched for the words that would be, to quote the late publisher of the Washington Post Philip Graham, the first draft of history.

  The obvious way into the story was Gordon Brown, and so Winnett wrote his first paragraph – the intro – beginning: ‘Gordon Brown used taxpayers’ money to pay his brother more than £6,000 for cleaning services …’

  But it was now 7.15 p.m. and there had been an ominous silence from the Prime Minister. Did this mean he was considering legal action? Would his lawyers pounce at the last minute and seek an injunction? Rayner had tried, and failed, to contact Brown’s brother Andrew to get his version of why the Prime Minister had paid him for ‘cleaning services’.

  Winnett’s nerves were starting to fray around the edges, and he decided to text the man who was dealing with Brown’s expenses, Michael Dugher. Dugher, a straight-talking Yorkshireman, was one of those who had been present in the Chilean vineyard when the first hints of the looming scandal were discussed. Now, he wanted to know, how bad was the Telegraph’s coverage going to be for the Prime Minister? Not wanting to give too much away, Winnett told him it was scheduled to be the focus of the front-page story but that a lot hinged on Brown’s explanation for the bizarre arrangement. Dugher told him the answer would soon follow.

  At 7.28 p.m. an email arrived from the ‘Prime Minister’s political office’. Winnett guessed it had been written by Brown himself because it was typed out in large, bold letters, as all of his correspondence has to be because of his partial blindness, the result of a terrible rugby accident he suffered as a teenager. To Winnett’s immense relief, it contained no nasty surprises. The Prime Minister had paid the money to his brother because they shared a cleaner, Brown said. It was what the investigation team had suspected, though it still didn’t explain why Brown had not simply paid the cleaner directly, as he had done with other cleaners.

  The response also contained a classic piece of spin. Referring to a £153 plumber’s bill which Brown had claimed for – and been reimbursed for – twice, it said that ‘when this inadvertent error was discovered, the amount was immediately repaid’. What it failed to mention was that the error was only ‘discovered’ when it was pointed out by the Telegraph’s letter, and it had only been repaid that very afternoon, as Downing Street was later forced to admit.

  Like his ministers, Brown had denied any wrongdoing, but didn’t dispute any of the claims. As far as the investigation team was concerned, he was ‘bang to rights’; but William Lewis wanted to satisfy himself that the Telegraph was not going overboard in its examination of the Prime Minister’s expenses claims. Lewis believed that Brown, as Prime Minister, should be beyond reproach in the matter of his expenses and that the arrangement with his brother was, at the very least, questionable. Brown had also made much of his ‘moral compass’, and yet the previous summer he had not even bothered to vote on wide-ranging reforms to stamp out some of the worst abuses of the expenses system. Nevertheless, Lewis decided that, on balance, the story should concentrate on the breadth of the scandal rather than any one individual; and so, after a quick rewrite, the story revealed that ‘More than half the Cabinet are facing allegations over their use of parliamentary expenses after details of their claims were obtained by the Daily Telegraph.’

  The story would appear under the headline: ‘The truth about the Cabinet’s expenses’ with pictures of Gordon and Andrew Brown, and one of the cleaning receipts, to illustrate it. The headline was factual, but understated, in keeping with the tone of the entire coverage of the scandal. Lewis felt strongly that the facts spoke for themselves and did not need to be in any way hyped up.

  Now it was time to whet the British public’s appetite to ensure maximum impact – and maximum circulation – when the paper hit the streets the next day.

  Shortly after 8 p.m. Fiona Macdonald, the Telegraph’s formidable public relations executive, called the three main news broadcasters to tell them the newspaper had a major story which she felt sure they would want to cover in that evening’s ten o’clock news bulletins. If they came to the Telegraph HQ they would be briefed on the story, and would also be able to interview a senior member of staff on camera. The BBC’s political editor, Nick Robinson, knew that such calls were rare and immediately set off for Victoria. Tom Bradby, his opposite number at ITN, also dropped everything, but Sky News’s Jon Craig, standing in for political editor Adam Boulton, was less enthusiastic. ‘I hope it won’t take long,’ he said. ‘I’m very busy at the moment, so it had better be good.’ Macdonald assured him that he wouldn’t regret turning up.

  Waiting for them in a conference room were Macdonald, Andrew Porter and Benedict Brogan, the paper’s new chief political commentator, who had come over from the Daily Mail only two weeks earlier.

  ‘We’re launching a major investigation into MPs’ expenses,’ announced Brogan. ‘Tonight and in the coming days we’re going to be laying out exactly what MPs have been spending public money on.’

  The three broadcasters made notes but said nothing. Hmm, thought Brogan. They seem distinctly underwhelmed by this.

  ‘We’re going to tell you about the expenses claims made by Gordon Brown, Jack Straw and Paul Murphy,’ he went on; then Winnett was asked to join the briefing to fill in the broadcasters with specific details.

  They seemed to have their doubts about whether the story was quite as big as the Telegraph claimed. Nick Robinson was particularly interested to learn how the Telegraph had acquired the information and whether money had changed hands.

  ‘How much of this is stuff that we already know?’ asked one.

  ‘Is it that big a deal to pay money to your brother to pay a cleaner?’ asked another.

  Then came questions about the rumours they had heard.

  ‘Has someone claimed for a sauna?’

  ‘Found any shagging?’

  ‘You’ll have to wait and see,’ replied Winnett enigmatically, not wanting to give away the fact that the vast majority of the expenses claims hadn’t even been looked at.

  Brogan, Winnett and Porter emphasized that the story was about the overwhelming extent to which MPs had been playing the system. Slowly the broadcasters began to nod their heads, but it still seemed uncertain whether or not they were going to go for it. Then, as Robinson left the meeting, he took out his mobile phone and rang his news desk. ‘We’re going to have to change the running order,’ he told them. Bradby and Craig relayed similar messages to their editors.

  Winnett left Brogan to record on-camera interviews with the television crews, to be used later in the night, as he prepared to make one last phone
call of the day.

  John Wick had been told earlier in the week that, barring any last-minute hitches, the Telegraph was planning to publish on either Friday or Saturday. At 9.45 p.m., a quarter of an hour after the presses had started rolling, Winnett phoned Wick to tell him: ‘It’s definitely tomorrow. Watch the television news at ten o’clock, and keep your head down!’

  Wick replied: ‘Sounds great. Can’t wait to see it.’

  In the bunker, the team gathered around a computer screen to watch the TV news. The broadcasters’ reaction to the story would be critical. Although the investigation team knew they had uncovered a massive scandal, the impact of the story would be severely dented if the hugely influential TV political editors played down its significance. The Telegraph, after all, was by tradition a Conservative-leaning newspaper, and the expenses claims being highlighted were those of the Labour Cabinet. Would Robinson, Bradby and Craig try to portray the story as a politically motivated smear campaign?

  The answer was emphatic. All three channels led their news bulletins on the expenses story, to a resounding cheer from the bunker team, who at last felt that they could relax, if only until the next day. The BBC devoted almost ten minutes of the programme to the story, and Nick Robinson’s verdict was unequivocal. It was, he said, a ‘disaster’ for the government.

  Robinson’s report was greeted with dismay in Downing Street. Gordon Brown’s advisers had gathered in the ‘war room’ to watch the coverage, hoping the story would be dismissed as a storm in a teacup. Instead, it was being presented by all three broadcasters as a calamity for the government.

  Their best hope now lay with Harriet Harman, the Deputy Prime Minister and Leader of the House, who had been chosen to lead the government’s fightback. During a high-level conference call involving Ellam, Dugher, Irvin, deputy chief of staff Gavin Kelly, director of political strategy David Muir and policy adviser Justin Forsyth, it had been decided that Harman, who as an inner London MP did not qualify for the second homes allowance and was therefore largely untainted by the scandal, should go in to bat.

  Harman ran through the different facets of the story at home before driving herself to Millbank Studios, a short walk from Parliament, where each of the major broadcasters had its own studio facilities. She was met there by Nicola Burdett, Brown’s broadcasting adviser, who gave her a final pep talk.

  First up would be Newsnight, where Harman had hoped to be able to manage some significant damage limitation. Instead she was confronted by an incredulous Gavin Esler, one of the flagship show’s main anchors, who repeatedly harangued her about the Telegraph’s expenses revelations. Harman fought a losing battle as she tried to insist that the claims of her colleagues were ‘all within the rules’.

  ‘But one of your colleagues claimed 5p for a carrier bag,’ said Esler, with a look of genuine disgust on his face. ‘It just looks cheap. Don’t you accept that?’

  Harman quickly found she had been given the job of defending the indefensible, and with the Telegraph’s Benedict Brogan as Newsnight’s studio guest, Esler had the advantage of knowing more about what was in the next day’s paper than Harman did.

  Brogan and Porter, together with the Telegraph’s highly experienced assistant editor Andrew Pierce, would be the public faces of the expenses investigation over the coming weeks, meeting an almost endless number of requests for interviews from dawn to dusk. Over the coming days, the three of them would give a total of 146 interviews to television and radio stations as far afield as New Zealand, Lithuania, Norway, Russia, France, Dubai, the US and South Africa, as well as to every major broadcaster in the UK. As well as leaving the bunker team free to get on with the job in hand, they would play a vital role in making sure the story received the maximum possible airtime, and defending the Telegraph against the many accusations that rivals and MPs would throw at it.

  Porter, Brogan and Pierce, along with everyone else at the Telegraph, were about to find out just how much pressure the newspaper would have to withstand if it was to carry on with the expenses investigation.

  Backlash

  Friday, 8 May

  CHAPTER 11

  AS BROADCASTERS CLEARED their schedules to report every aspect of the Daily Telegraph’s expenses revelations when the paper hit the streets on Friday morning, Gordon Brown’s closest advisers were bracing themselves for one of the most challenging days of their professional lives.

  The Prime Minister had erupted in fury after seeing the Telegraph’s front-page disclosure about his cleaning arrangements, and was said to have stayed up much of the night agonizing over the article and reading every word of the coverage on the Telegraph’s website. His mood got even worse when he tuned in to Radio Four’s Today programme at 6 a.m. to find that one of the BBC’s most respected daily news shows was following the Telegraph’s lead by questioning the validity of his expenses claims. Brown was beside himself over the fact that the BBC was not holding the Telegraph’s story at arm’s length, and spoke to Michael Dugher before dawn to express his outrage that the BBC thought the story about the payments to his brother to be a major news story.

  Brown had a copy of the cleaning contract, showing that the money had gone to the cleaner, and he wanted to release it straight away to shut the story down. Dugher arranged for a copy of the contract to be sent electronically to the BBC; it arrived at 6.35 a.m., but it wasn’t enough to stop the BBC and every other news organization giving the expenses story wall-to-wall coverage for the rest of the day.

  In Downing Street, the man who had been at the centre of the world only a month earlier, at the G20 summit, had been reduced to fretting about cleaning contracts, plumber’s bills and Ikea kitchens. Instead of trying to solve the global financial crisis, he found his integrity threatened by a crisis over his personal finances.

  Brown’s anger was stoked up even further shortly after dawn that Friday, when he learned that a reporter from the London Evening Standard newspaper had entered the private staircase of Andrew Brown’s block of flats and videoed an exchange between himself and the Prime Minister’s brother – which consisted of him shouting questions at Andrew Brown through the front door over the cleaning arrangement. It was an unedifying moment for the Brown family, who have jealously guarded their privacy throughout the Prime Minister’s political career.

  So by the time Brown’s key strategists dialled into Downing Street for a conference call, the Prime Minister was positively incandescent over what he saw as an unjustified attack on his personal integrity. His advisers couldn’t help thinking that, even for a man who was famous for his rages, this was possibly the blackest mood they had even known him to sink into. ‘He was absolutely livid,’ one adviser later said.

  Michael Ellam, senior Brown aide Sue Nye and James Bowler, Brown’s private secretary, were among those involved in discussions that morning. Item one on the agenda was how Downing Street could hit back at the Telegraph. Brown’s advisers all agreed that the Telegraph had treated the Prime Minister unfairly and they decided to release a copy of the cleaning contract to all media organizations in an attempt to prove that he had done nothing wrong. Dugher, meanwhile, was given the task of extracting an apology from the Telegraph for its coverage. According to those who spoke to the Prime Minister that morning, his focus was on clearing his own name and that of his brother. There was little discussion about the wider political scandal which was starting to run out of control as broadcasters and websites greedily gobbled up every detail of the Telegraph’s expenses stories.

  Although Brown had cleared his diary on Thursday afternoon to deal with the crisis, he would not cancel a long-standing engagement on Friday to attend a memorial service in Bradford for the murdered policewoman Sharon Beshenivsky. Onlookers were shocked at his appearance as he boarded the train to Bradford. His eyes were red-rimmed with exhaustion and had dark shadows under them, clear signs of the sleepless night he had chosen to endure. Instead of catching up on some sleep during the journey, however, the Prime Minister sat at
a table with a copy of the Daily Telegraph, scribbling copious notes across the pages where he thought the government could hit back, and underlining what he perceived to be mistakes.

  Brown’s narrow-minded reaction to the story troubled some of his ministers and many backbench MPs, who felt he was failing to get a grip on the situation and to show leadership. They would be proved right in the coming days, when David Cameron’s swift and ruthless response to the behaviour of his own MPs saw his popularity rise with the public, even though the Tories had behaved just as badly as their Labour counterparts.

  Nevertheless, both Downing Street and the parliamentary authorities would exert immense pressure on the Daily Telegraph that Friday in the hope that the newspaper would lose its nerve. Winnett got his first sense of how the day might unfold when he was called into the editor’s office shortly before 9 a.m. William Lewis wanted to discuss the following day’s coverage, and Winnett went through a list of other senior government ministers who had made questionable expenses claims and whose stories, he had agreed with Chris Evans and Matthew Bayley, should appear on day two. Lewis, however, was acutely aware of the need for the Telegraph to avoid accusations of party political bias in its coverage, in order to maintain the maximum credibility for the investigation. Several Labour ministers had been in contact with senior reporters and executives at the Telegraph to suggest it would be unfair to focus solely on Labour.

  ‘Presumably you’re doing the Tories tomorrow, then?’ was the general tenor of their calls. ‘Do you realize the sort of things they’ve been up to?’

  So now Lewis asked: ‘Should we go for some Tories tomorrow?’

  Winnett strongly believed the paper should stick to the original plan of focusing on Labour for the first two days. As the party in government, Labour had had the opportunity to change the system and yet they had squandered, and probably even blocked, previous chances of reform. Also, the Telegraph had at least two days of coverage on the Conservatives planned for the following week. That morning’s lead story had clearly stated that the newspaper would be covering politicians from all parties in the coming days and there was no need, Winnett argued, to be bounced into covering the Tories early just because Labour were making a lot of noise.