No Expenses Spared

by Robert Winnett

  Rosa Prince got a taste of the reaction inside Downing Street when she phoned No. 10. She was told in no uncertain terms that the Telegraph would not be receiving much assistance ‘for a while’.

  ‘It’s nothing personal,’ insisted one adviser.

  Despite being in the thick of a growing media storm and possible police investigation, those in the bunker had to continue working to get out the following day’s paper.

  The Saturday edition of the Telegraph on 9 May was to carry eleven pages of new revelations over MPs’ expenses. At about 6 p.m. on Friday the MPs who were about to be exposed began to respond to the newspaper’s earlier enquiries. Ben Bradshaw, then a junior health minister, accused the Telegraph of homophobia for questioning whether it was appropriate that the taxpayer now covered the full mortgage interest on a property he owned with his civil partner (the couple had previously split the cost when Bradshaw was claiming for another house in Exeter). Follett, Vaz and virtually every other MP and minister contacted that day defended their behaviour on the basis that they had acted within the rules. Blaming the system was becoming the name of the game. Margaret Moran was one of the few MPs simply not to respond.

  One of the most bizarre responses came from Phil Woolas. The Labour MP for Oldham East and Saddleworth is not known for his tact, and had exasperated colleagues in the past with his bluntness and outspoken comments. He had once said that the population of the country could be capped, only to be quickly rebuked by the home secretary. Earlier that week he had been outmanoeuvred by Joanna Lumley when the Gurkha campaigner, having had a meeting with the immigration minister, said in front of television cameras that the minister had, in effect, agreed to all her demands. Woolas, standing beside her at the time, had looked more and more queasy as he watched the actress forcing him into a corner. Now, on the evening of Friday, 8 May, Woolas went to war with the Telegraph over whether the taxpayer had paid for tampons he had purchased.

  In a series of phone calls to Martin Beckford, he insisted that the reporter had got it wrong. ‘There are family items for which I did not claim,’ he said. ‘The amount of expenses claimed and received was less than the receipt submitted.’

  He then began to telephone bemused journalists from other newspapers to inform them he was about to be ‘incorrectly outed’ as an MP who had bought women’s clothing and tampons. The Telegraph had got it wrong, he told them.

  Beckford held his ground. He double-checked every receipt and compared them to Woolas’s claim forms. Beckford was able to prove that Woolas had claimed the full amount for the receipts which included tampons, meaning they had been paid for by the taxpayer.

  The irony was that the rules allowed MPs to claim up to £400 per month for groceries without producing receipts. Woolas had voluntarily provided the receipts – a decision which was now causing him acute embarrassment.

  They showed that in one weekly shop he spent £1.48 on panty liners, £1.19 on tampons, £2.99 on nappies and £15 on a ladies’ blouse. Another trip included claims for £5.96 on disposable bibs, £23 on women’s shoes, £1.99 for a child’s comic, £1.60 and £1.55 on more comics, £2.88 on baby wipes and £5 on a ladies’ jumper.

  Inexplicably, one bill from Tesco showed he had received a 10 per cent staff discount.

  Head of news Chris Evans was satisfied that despite the minister’s vociferous denials, Beckford had got it right. The headline for the article on page nine was written. It read: ‘Minister claimed for women’s clothing and panty liners’.

  Woolas was incensed. After the paper was published, he embarked on a series of television interviews outside his house in which he said the Telegraph’s claims were ‘absolutely disgusting’. He said: ‘It is untrue that I claimed these things. It misunderstands the system. The receipts are there, but I never asked for or got money for these items. To suggest otherwise is disgusting.’

  However, he later appeared to concede, when confronted with evidence, that the Telegraph had indeed been correct and that he may have made a mistake. ‘I am being hung out to dry for being honest,’ he said.

  By 9 p.m. that Friday, one of the most extraordinary days in the Telegraph’s history was coming to a close. The next day’s front-page headline read: ‘The ministers and the money’. Bradshaw, Hope, Follett and Woolas were all pictured.

  For the second night in succession, the investigation team decamped to the Harvard Bar in the Thistle Hotel next door to the office to unwind and see how their stories were being reported on the television news. Unfortunate hotel guests trying to enjoy a quiet drink had the misfortune of finding themselves surrounded by more than twenty journalists who commandeered the large flat-screen television in the corner of the bar and turned up the volume before flicking between channels to check the coverage on BBC and ITV.

  As Robinson on BBC1 and Bradby on ITV both once more led the news with the Telegraph’s latest revelations, the journalists sounded more like pub regulars watching a football match as they cheered and jeered every twist and turn of the coverage. Within minutes of the broadcast ending, Winnett received a text message from one of the country’s most senior police officers, congratulating him on the scoop.

  ‘No chance we’ll be investigated now,’ Winnett thought as he smiled to himself, making his way over to a corner of the bar where William Lewis, Mark Skipworth and Rhidian Wynn Davies were sharing a bottle of white wine. All three were concerned about the possibility that if the Telegraph kept up its relentless pursuit of MPs for too long, the public might decide they had had enough of the story and accuse the paper of overkill. Judging when this tipping point would come – and ending the investigation before the public had reached saturation point – would be vital to the long-term impact of the campaign.

  While his reporters revelled in being involved in the greatest scoop of their careers, Lewis’s mind had already raced ahead to the end-game. ‘What’s the plan, then?’ he asked the others.

  The challenge for the editor, having pressed the button on the investigation, would be judging when to bring it to a conclusion – ‘exiting stage left, with the applause still ringing in our ears’. In theory, the sheer volume of expenses data at the team’s disposal meant the investigation could roll on for months while remaining unequivocally in the public interest. But how long would the revelations remain interesting to the public? A week? Ten days? A fortnight?

  ‘We need an exit strategy,’ announced Lewis.

  The Tories Get their Turn

  Sunday, 10 May

  CHAPTER 12

  THE DECISION TO keep the investigation focused on the government for a second day in succession had provoked apoplectic fury among many Labour MPs, but the Telegraph had made it clear from the word go that every party would have its turn, and the investigation team had decided that focusing on the Tories on Monday, 11 May, at the start of a new working week, would give the story fresh impetus.

  In the meantime, the Sunday Telegraph would unveil what appeared to be the most serious abuse of the expenses system so far unearthed. Ian MacGregor, the Sunday Telegraph’s editor, had been kept abreast of the daily paper’s expenses investigation from the beginning so that the coverage could span seven days a week. He had quietly assembled his own team who would soon be scouring some of the files for their own stories under the guidance of Ben Leapman, one of the journalists behind the original freedom of information requests.

  The scandal uncovered by the Sunday Telegraph involved the second-home claims made by the five MPs representing Sinn Fein, the Irish nationalist party widely referred to as ‘the political wing of the IRA’. It was commonly known among journalists that the five Sinn Fein MPs, including former IRA members Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, claimed close to the maximum second-home allowance despite refusing to take up their seats in Westminster. In total, the five MPs had claimed almost £500,000 over the course of seven years. The data on the Firestorm disk took the story much further. Receipts submitted by the five MPs showed that, between them, they had rent
ed three London properties from the same family. Investigations by Sunday Telegraph reporters Andrew Alderson and David Barrett found that the properties had been rented at rates well above the market norm. Adams and McGuinness had jointly claimed expenses of £3,600 per month to rent a shared two-bedroomed flat in north London, where a local estate agent said a fair market rent would be £1,400. The three other MPs together claimed £5,400 per month for a property which the estate agent said was worth more like £1,800 per month. Neighbours living near the properties did not recognize the MPs from pictures shown to them.

  The Sunday Telegraph story prompted calls for a parliamentary inquiry into the Sinn Fein MPs’ claims, and further strengthened the Telegraph’s case that publication of the expenses claims had been overwhelmingly in the public interest. Without the addresses which were included on the disk (but which would have been censored when the documents were released to the public) there would have been no way of knowing about the shared properties.

  Despite being in the bar of the Thistle Hotel until the early hours of Saturday morning, Rayner, Winnett, Prince and Swaine had volunteered to work on Saturday to supply the Sunday Telegraph with stories on another eight MPs not covered in the material the Sunday paper had in its possession. They included the former Tory environment minister John Gummer, who had claimed for moles to be removed from his country estate; John Reid, the former home secretary and self-styled hard man of Labour, who had claimed for a pouffe and a glittery loo seat; and the junior minister Kitty Ussher, who had given her Victorian home a £20,000 makeover on expenses.

  Ussher had written a letter to the fees office, which had been spotted by Prince in the early days of the investigation, in which she asked whether she could claim for various items, including having her ceilings replastered. She wrote: ‘Most of the ceilings have Artex coverings. Three-dimensional swirls. It could be a matter of taste, but this counts as “dilapidations” in my book! Can the ACA pay for the ceilings to be plastered over and repainted?’ The fees office refused, but Ussher was one of the first MPs to discover that the money didn’t actually have to be paid out for public anger to erupt. The very fact that she had tried to claim for having the swirly Artex removed was enough to enrage her constituents.

  There was also a blast from the past in the form of Tony Blair, whose final expenses claims showed that he put in a bill for almost £7,000 of roof repairs just two days before he left Parliament in 2007. (Mr Blair’s expenses file was incomplete, however – parliamentary officials had shredded many of his claims forms in error more than a year earlier after they had been requested by journalists Heather Brooke, Ben Leapman and Jan Ungoed-Thomas.)

  While the investigation team was preparing stories for the Sunday Telegraph, William Lewis was spending Saturday at a garden party in Wiltshire where fellow guests including the novelist Robert Harris and newsreader Jon Sopel warmly congratulated him on his newspaper’s audacious scoop. The host of the garden party, however, found himself in a rather unenviable position. Just days before the Telegraph’s expenses story had broken, he had been approached by Gordon Brown, who wanted him to replace the outgoing Michael Ellam as his communications chief. Unbeknown to all but a handful of the guests who had gathered to celebrate his fiftieth birthday, the host was having to slap Lewis on the back for a job well done, knowing full well that if he accepted the offer from Brown, he would not only have to help clear up the wreckage caused by Lewis’s newspaper, but would also have the job of trying to protect Brown from any future attacks by Lewis or his staff.

  That would have been irony enough, but what made this confluence of events even more remarkable was that the party host and prospective prime ministerial spin doctor was none other than Simon Lewis, William’s elder brother. William was one of the few people who knew about the job offer from Brown, and the brothers exchanged knowing glances as the congratulations kept coming. Simon had recently left the telecommunications giant Vodafone, where he had been director of corporate affairs. To the Prime Minister’s credit, he didn’t hold Simon Lewis’s family connection against him; the job offer remained, and Lewis decided to accept, though he would not start work at No. 10 until the worst of the expenses scandal had blown over.

  By Sunday the entire bunker team was back in harness, in readiness for the assault on the Shadow Cabinet’s expenses claims which would appear in Monday’s paper. For Christopher Hope, working on Sunday had meant a particularly early start, as he had to get to London from his family home in Norfolk on a day when there was no regular train service. Like the majority of his colleagues, Hope had lived in London for most of his career, but his life had been turned upside down in 2007 when his family was involved in a horrendous accident. His wife, daughter and mother-in-law had been on their way to visit his wife’s sister, who had just had a baby, when they were hit by a bus which ran out of control in a terminus near their home. Hope’s mother-in-law was killed, his daughter Pollyanna, then aged two, lost a leg below the knee, and his wife Sarah also suffered terrible leg injuries. As they tried to rebuild their lives, the Hopes had decided to get away from London in favour of the tranquillity of rural Norfolk, leaving the Daily Telegraph’s Whitehall editor with a punishing commute.

  Hope had earned immense respect from his colleagues for the dignity and quiet determination with which he went about getting on with his life, regularly bringing in superb exclusives for the newspaper while coping with the ever-present consequences of the accident. The expenses story had come along at a particularly difficult time, as Hope had just gone through the painful process of reliving the accident and its aftermath for a lengthy article in the Telegraph magazine. On the day when the Telegraph published its first revelations about MPs’ expenses, Hope, in between writing letters to government ministers, had left the office to record an interview about the accident with BBC Radio Five Live, and he had also been asked to write an article for the Daily Mail, which he did in what little spare time he had. His articles and interview, which were aimed at raising awareness of the Limbless Association, drew a huge response from the public, and Hope’s days in the bunker always began with opening letters and cheques from well-wishers, who sent in nearly £70,000 for the charity.

  Leaving his wife and three children to work on a Sunday was always a wrench, and on this particular day he had to leave home at dawn to get to the office for 8 a.m. The only way he had of getting to London without taking the train was to borrow his wife’s bright pink Nissan Micra convertible, and as he started the engine his mind wasn’t entirely on the task in hand. Hope put the car in reverse, pressed the accelerator – and drove straight into a lamp-post.

  ‘Sod it,’ he thought, as he checked there wasn’t any visible damage to the lamp-post. ‘Not the best start to the day.’

  Hope had spent much of his time in the previous week looking through the expenses of the Shadow Cabinet. The investigation team had expected the expenses of the Tory front bench to be among the cleanest of all: after all, not only were they at the head of a party preparing for government, they were also, traditionally, better off than their Labour counterparts and so would surely have less need to claim money back from the taxpayer. This was an assumption which turned out to be spectacularly wide of the mark, and Hope, together with other members of the team, had made some startling discoveries.

  Chris Grayling, the shadow home secretary, who had built his reputation as the Conservatives’ ‘attack dog’ when it came to the propriety of Labour MPs’ conduct, had made a series of questionable claims. Grayling’s constituency was in Epsom, just 17 miles from the House of Commons, yet he had claimed expenses for a second home in central London. He also owned two other properties within the M25 which he rented out to supplement his income.

  Alan Duncan, the Shadow Leader of the House of Commons, was a millionaire, having worked as an oil trader before entering politics. Surely he didn’t need to claim expenses for his second home? Wrong again. Hope discovered that Duncan had spent almost £5,000 of taxpayers�
�� money on gardening, including £598 for the cost of having his ride-on lawnmower serviced. Hope branded him ‘the constant gardener’ as he found invoice after invoice relating to work on Duncan’s second home in Rutland. At one point – highlighted in the files – the parliamentary fees office had even warned Duncan that his claims might appear excessive. The discoveries were particularly embarrassing as Duncan was the Conservative charged with leading the party’s drive to clean up the expenses system. He had also made a recent appearance on the BBC’s satirical current affairs quiz show Have I Got News for You, when he had joked about the generosity of expenses available to MPs. Asked by team captain Ian Hislop if he claimed expenses on his second home, despite his personal wealth, Duncan had smugly replied: ‘It’s a fabulous system, isn’t it. It’s a great system.’

  Hislop asked: ‘You don’t feel that’s a bit dodgy?’

  ‘No.’

  The clip would come back to haunt him when it was replayed endlessly on television and posted on YouTube after his gardening claims came to light.

  Other members of the Shadow Cabinet had made claims that were simply embarrassing. The shadow universities secretary David ‘two brains’ Willetts had claimed £132 for a workman to change the light bulbs at his London house. The chairman of the Conservative Research Department, Oliver Letwin, claimed more than £2,000 for a plumber to replace a leaking water pipe under his tennis court. Cheryl Gillan, the shadow Welsh secretary, even claimed £4.47 for dog food for her Lhasa apso bitch, Curby.