No Expenses Spared

by Robert Winnett

  Lewis agreed, but as Winnett got up to leave the office the editor’s mobile phone rang. It was Gordon Brown calling. Lewis has never disclosed what was said in the conversation, but as Winnett shut the door behind him he could hear the beginning of what was clearly a rather heated discussion.

  ‘That’s me crossed off the Prime Minister’s Christmas card list, then,’ he said to himself.

  At The Stationery Office, workers were still carrying out the process of redaction which had begun the previous summer. Few of them knew that one or more of their number had decided to orchestrate a leak, but after their initial surprise at seeing the Telegraph’s expenses stories, the mood was one of quiet celebration.

  At a British Army base overseas, two of the soldiers who had been on the security team in the TSO redaction room almost a year before popped into the base’s internet room to catch up on the news back home. They had no idea about the furore back in Britain until they logged on to the Telegraph’s website.

  ‘Look at this!’ one of the two men said, beckoning over his comrade.

  ‘Bugger me,’ replied the second soldier. ‘How the bloody hell have they got hold of that?’

  On a professional level, the soldiers were disappointed that the data they had been hired to protect had leaked out. But on a personal level, both men felt a certain wry satisfaction at seeing the MPs held up to public scrutiny.

  ‘Well, the shit’s really going to hit the fan now,’ said the soldier sitting at the computer screen.

  As senior executives at TSO gathered on the Friday morning, they were far from relaxed at what they were reading in the Telegraph. An investigation into the leak of the information was immediately ordered.

  In the bunker, the reporters would spend most of that day blissfully unaware of the strain that the newspaper’s management was having to bear – which was just as well, as the reporters could ill afford any distractions as they embarked on another mammoth effort to produce just as many stories for the second day’s coverage.

  Each had a spring in their step after coming in to work with evidence of the scale of the story all around them. Not only was the expenses story dominating the television and radio news almost to the exclusion of everything else, but there were clearly more people than usual reading the Telegraph on trains and buses, and other newspapers had scrambled to get the story into their second editions.

  Among the audience, too, were the vast majority of the bunker team’s colleagues at the Telegraph, who had known nothing about the story until it started breaking on the television news the night before, and who were thrilled to discover that their newspaper was suddenly the talk of the nation. Jeff Randall, the Telegraph columnist and Sky News presenter, summed up the mood in an email to Winnett. ‘BRILLIANT,’ he wrote. ‘I mean seriously, outstandingly, effin’ brilliant. Love it.’

  Praise for the Telegraph’s story was not universal, however. The left-leaning Guardian ran a lengthy article accusing the Telegraph of resorting to ‘chequebook journalism’.

  Porter, Brogan and Pierce were almost omnipresent on the airwaves (Porter texted Lewis to say: ‘Story huge. Will have done six broadcasts by 8.30am’) while Harriet Harman remained Labour’s sole representative on early morning television. Instead of defending her colleagues, Harman attacked the expenses system itself and began talking of the need for reform and investigating those who had broken the rules.

  ‘I know people will be very angry and concerned about this, but I do want to reassure people that we have recognized there’s a problem and we’ve already taken action on this,’ she said on GMTV.

  She was then asked whether ministers had been caught ‘fiddling’ their expenses, and answered: ‘I think you’ve got to be quite careful about saying “fiddling”. I don’t think that because Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, shared a cleaner for his flat with his brother, that that is fiddling. I don’t think anyone’s suggesting that Gordon Brown was pocketing that £6,000, nor are they suggesting that his brother was pocketing that £6,000.’ Harman was clearly being dragged into territory she would rather have avoided at all costs.

  For the investigation team, the reaction was a huge relief. Although they had been confident the story was huge, they also realized that after more than a week in the bunker they had become detached from the outside world and hence lacked objectivity. The response to the story amounted to vindication for all those working on it.

  Over in Parliament, the reaction was rather different. James Kirkup, the only Telegraph reporter in Westminster while Porter conducted interviews and Winnett and Prince stayed in the bunker, found himself the focus of hostile reaction from MPs. Some simply pretended not to see him. Others looked daggers at him, and one minister made a V-sign. Another minister, however, was rather less condemnatory. ‘It’s bloody brilliant, your paper,’ he bellowed, slapping Kirkup on the back. ‘I never realized half the things we could claim until now. I’m going to order a bloody great telly for my flat!’

  Kirkup also had to deal with the frenetic questions from rival reporters, who all wanted to know the same things. How did you get the disk? How much more is there to come? What’s in tomorrow’s paper?

  Eventually, Kirkup closed the office door, after pinning on it a note which read:

  Telegraph Expenses Story: Answers to frequently asked questions.

  1 I’m not telling you.

  2 I’m not telling you.

  3 I’m not telling you.

  4 I’m not telling you.

  5 I’m not telling you.

  If MPs were suspicious of journalists, however, they were perhaps even more suspicious of each other. In Parliament’s tea rooms, usually the setting for lively gossip-swapping, members could barely bring themselves to speak in the days to come. The Labour MP Brian Iddon described how

  A dark cloud descended on the place … we wandered round in a state of shock and horror at what some of our colleagues had been doing. I couldn’t believe it myself. A sort of feeling of distrust came over the place, you couldn’t look people in the eye because you wondered what was coming next, whether they were going to be the subject of another story.

  Back at the Telegraph HQ, there was a unique challenge ahead. A typical newspaper exclusive involves one big revelation which can be spread over two or three days. If the story is important enough, it develops a life of its own as other newspapers and journalists find their own angles and chase up their own leads. This was entirely different: having printed what might on any other day be career-ending disclosures about the expenses claims of fourteen of the country’s most senior politicians (a unique achievement in itself), the Telegraph was moving on to a whole new set of MPs, with little time for reflection. Indeed, half the team of reporters had already begun preparing articles for Saturday’s newspaper on the previous day while the coverage of the Cabinet’s expenses was being put together.

  Phil Hope, a health minister, had spent more than £40,000 on furniture for a modest two-bedroomed flat in south London. How was this possible? Evans wanted a floor-plan of the flat to work out if that amount of furniture could even fit into the property. Barbara Follett, the tourism minister who is married to the multi-millionaire novelist Ken Follett, had claimed more than £25,000 for ‘private security patrols’ outside the couple’s London townhouse. She had told the parliamentary fees office that she did not feel safe in central London. How could a Labour tourism minister say such a thing while attempting to sell the country to potential visitors from abroad? Phil Woolas, the gaffe-prone immigration minister, had submitted receipts for tampons, women’s tights and even ‘ladies’ shoes’. Martin Beckford, writing the story, was looking forward to hearing his explanation of how such items were within rules which stipulated that only items for an MP’s ‘personal use’ were claimable. Vera Baird, the solicitor general, had even tried to claim for Christmas tree decorations.

  ‘This is getting totally out of control. Do these people have no shame?’ said Beckford as he prepared the letter
for Woolas.

  The Telegraph also had to deal quickly with a number of other senior MPs whose expenses claims had been seen by other newspapers: Michael Martin, the Speaker, and the former minister Keith Vaz. Michael Martin had rather grandly hired liveried chauffeurs to transport him around various locations in Glasgow, including a job centre. Vaz had unusual property arrangements. Despite representing a constituency in Leicester, where he had a constituency home, his ‘main’ home was a large detached property on the outskirts of London – and his ‘second’ home was a flat in Westminster. He regularly switched his second-home designation between two properties, enabling him to claim expenses towards both of them. During one financial year he bought twenty-two cushions, most of them silk, at taxpayers’ expense. Once again, letters were prepared and sent to the MPs and ministers in question.

  By lunchtime, however, debate was raging within the building about whether the investigation was following the right path. Lewis’s concerns about continuing to restrict the coverage to Labour had not gone away. He felt there was a need to include at least one Conservative MP in the following day’s paper to show readers that this was not a one-party scandal. The bunker team wanted to keep the most high-profile Tories under wraps for a headline-grabbing edition the following Monday; so Greg Barker, the shadow climate change minister, was chosen as a compromise candidate. Barker, who had previously attracted controversy after leaving his wife for a male interior designer, had moved between expensive homes in Chelsea, west London, claiming for extensive renovation work on the properties at taxpayers’ expense before making a handsome profit of more than £320,000 on the deal.

  Meanwhile Mark Skipworth, who was in charge of the Saturday edition of the paper, wanted to know which backbench MPs had committed the worst abuses. One name stood out from those who had been looked at so far – Margaret Moran, the Labour MP for Luton South.

  Moran, who was so obscure that the parliamentary reporters barely even recognized the name, had made a series of extraordinary claims which had been picked up by Holly Watt as she compiled the database of MPs’ second homes. A detailed analysis of these claims showed that she had flipped her second-home designation between three different addresses, in London, Luton and Southampton, spending more than £80,000 of public money in total on repairs, renovations and mortgage interest payments. Most extraordinary of all was the claim she had made for the property in Southampton, more than 100 miles away from her constituency. Within a month of designating the property as her second home, Moran had claimed more than £22,000 in taxpayer-funded expenses to treat dry rot at the house, which turned out to be jointly owned by her partner.

  Moran would, therefore, be the first backbench MP to feature in the investigation. Rosa Prince duly phoned her to ask for the appropriate email address to send her a letter about her expenses. Before she could get the words out, Moran started screaming at the top of her voice.

  ‘Wait! How can you have seen my expenses when I haven’t even seen them?’ she shrieked.

  Prince replied: ‘I have some questions which I need to put to you. What’s the best email address to get a confidential letter to you?’

  ‘No! I have some questions for you! How did you get my expenses?!’

  ‘If you just give me your email address, the letter will explain it.’

  Moran, who hung up before giving her full email address, was clearly gearing up for a fight, as the events of the next few days would prove.

  She wasn’t the only one preparing to take on the Telegraph. Shortly before 3 p.m., the Press Association wire service issued a news alert to all newspapers and broadcasters. It said simply: ‘The Commons authorities have asked the police to investigate the leaking of MPs’ expenses details, a spokesman for the House said today.’ The bunker team’s previous jokes about prison cells and handcuffs started to seem rather hollow as the prospect of a criminal investigation moved a step closer. Did this mean the bunker team were about to have their collars felt? Malcolm Jack, the Clerk of the House of Commons, had contacted Scotland Yard to say he believed there were ‘reasonable grounds to believe a criminal offence may have been committed’. The Yard said it was ‘considering the request’.

  Head of news Chris Evans was unconvinced. ‘There’s no way the police are going to want to get involved in this,’ he said. He was aware that Sir Paul Stephenson, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, had given the Telegraph an interview to mark his first 100 days in office, to be published the following day, in which he spoke of the need for the Met to concentrate on ‘serious crime’ and avoid being ‘dragged into party political games’.

  And there were further developments to come. Just over an hour after the Commons authorities contacted Scotland Yard, Sky News began reporting that ‘police sources’ had said that they were also considering investigating MPs who had made questionable expenses claims. One MP highlighted by the ‘police sources’ for possible investigation was Tony McNulty.

  As Evans had predicted, police involvement had suddenly become very political and the stakes were growing higher. Scotland Yard appeared to be warning the Commons that if they were put under pressure to investigate the leak they might also start probing MPs.

  Some MPs were deeply unhappy that the response of the Commons to the expenses scandal was to attack the Telegraph, and detected the hand of the Speaker, Michael Martin, behind the decision. Kate Hoey, the former sports minister, telephoned Telegraph political commentator Benedict Brogan to register her support for the newspaper’s exposé. In an unusual move, she agreed to be quoted criticizing the Commons’ decision to call in the police. She said: ‘It is a complete waste of public money. All this is doing is trying to cover up what should have been transparent from the beginning, which is what MPs do with taxpayers’ money. The public will not be impressed.’ Norman Baker, a Liberal Democrat who has campaigned for greater disclosure of MPs’ expenses, said, ‘Calling in the police is a distraction,’ while Shami Chakrabarti, the director of the civil rights organization Liberty, said she hoped there would be ‘no question of coming after a national newspaper for exposing such a matter of public interest’.

  One man who was becoming increasingly worried about police involvement was whistleblower John Wick. That morning he had caught a train to work from his home in Worthing to London, reading the Telegraph and The Times on the journey. As he did so, he became increasingly convinced that he would be arrested as he passed through the ticket barriers in London. Although his fears proved unfounded, he was alarmed when he heard during the afternoon that Parliament had contacted the police.

  Wick decided not to leave anything to chance. Drawing on his SAS training, he called his partner, Tania, and asked her to make her way to Victoria station with a bag of his clothes and other essentials. Wick explained that she was not to acknowledge him in any way when she saw him at the station, in case either of them was being watched, and that he would draw her into a crowd where she should surreptitiously hand over the bag. Tania followed his instructions to the letter and Wick hired a car before driving to Dorset, where he lay low for forty-eight hours. He would later catch a flight from Gatwick Airport to Spain to maintain a safe distance from the unfolding events. (He realized just how big the story had become when he noticed a thriving black market in copies of the Sunday Telegraph at the airport newsagent, where people were paying ‘touts’ more than the cover price for the newspaper after the shops had run out!)

  While the debate about police involvement in the story began to rage, in Downing Street attention was still focused on extracting an apology for the Prime Minister from the Daily Telegraph. At 5.34 p.m. John Woodcock, another of the Prime Minister’s main advisers, emailed senior Telegraph executives with a ‘proposed clarification’ for the following day’s newspaper. The email said:

  The PM would like you to agree to print the following statement:

  CLARIFICATION

  THE DAILY TELEGRAPH WISHES TO MAKE IT CLEAR THAT THE £6,000 CLAIMED OVER TWO YEARS BY
MR BROWN FOR A CLEANER WAS FOR PAYMENTS MADE TO A PROFESSIONAL CLEANER WHO MAINTAINED HIS FLAT. A FULL CONTRACT SHOWING THIS HAS BEEN SEEN BY THE DAILY TELEGRAPH.

  THE DAILY TELEGRAPH WAS WRONG TO STATE THAT MR BROWN ‘USED HIS PARLIAMENTARY ALLOWANCES TO BOOST HIS EXPENSES CLAIMS BY SWITCHING HIS DESIGNATED SECOND HOME SHORTLY BEFORE HE MOVED INTO DOWNING STREET’.

  THE DAILY TELEGRAPH IS ALSO WRONG TO HAVE CLAIMED THAT MR BROWN ‘APPEARS TO HAVE PAID FOR LITTLE OF HIS OWN LIVING COSTS SINCE MOVING INTO NUMBER 10’.

  Referring to an article which reprised the fact that Mr Brown had bought his private London flat from the collapsed empire of Robert Maxwell, the late newspaper tycoon, it added:

  ANY SUGGESTION THAT HIS FLAT WAS PURCHASED OTHER THAN ON THE OPEN MARKET AFTER BEING WIDELY ADVERTISED IS COMPLETELY UNTRUE.

  The Daily Telegraph declined to print the clarification but did reflect part of the Prime Minister’s response in another article. The newspaper also made it clear that it intended to press on with the publication of revelations about a whole new set of government ministers in the following day’s edition. Downing Street aides, predictably enough, were furious. Instead of being able to shift the angle of the story in the other newspapers to one which questioned the Telegraph’s motives and the accuracy of its reports, Downing Street found itself having to cope with an avalanche of new allegations, without time to pause for breath. By the following day, no one would be interested in the Prime Minister’s rebuttals of the Telegraph’s stories, because they would be immersed in this brand new series of disclosures about what other MPs had been up to. Brown became convinced he was the victim of a ‘political plot’ and that the story had been leaked by a Conservative supporter who was only interested in damaging the Labour Party. (In the coming weeks, the Prime Minister’s office would conduct private polling which found that Labour ministers were disproportionately ‘hit’ by expenses revelations compared to their Conservative counterparts.)