No Expenses Spared

by Robert Winnett

  Nor were the expenses claims of the party leader, David Cameron, or the Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, squeaky clean. Cameron, whose blue-blooded wife Samantha is the daughter of Sir Reginald Sheffield, a landowning baronet, had claimed around £20,000 per year to help pay the mortgage interest on his constituency home in Oxfordshire. He had also submitted a £680 repair bill which included the cost of removing wisteria from his chimney. Osborne, meanwhile, had claimed £400 for the cost of a ‘chauffeur’ to take him from Cheshire to London.

  As the reporters compiled formal letters to send out to the senior Tories, Evans and Winnett discussed which of the stories were potential front-page material. The Telegraph’s undertaking that all political parties would be treated equally meant that, ideally, Cameron should appear on the front page, in the same way that Brown had done three days earlier. But there was no escaping the fact that Cameron’s expenses claims were pretty straightforward compared to those put in by several of his frontbenchers. Boring, even. Cameron had gone public the previous year with the fact that his second-home claims related to mortgage payments (the total amounts for second-home claims were already in the public domain), so there was nothing earth-shattering about what the Telegraph had found in Cameron’s file. There was the wisteria bill, but hammering him over that would be stretching the point, Evans and Winnett both felt. So in the end it was decided that Cameron’s expenses would appear on page five of the paper – enraging Labour and eliciting ever louder accusations of party political bias.

  However, there was one senior Conservative whose claims particularly surprised Winnett – and would be at the centre of the first real threat of legal action since the investigation had started. Michael Gove, the shadow schools secretary and paid-up member of Cameron’s ‘Notting Hill set’ of trusted friends, had spent thousands of pounds kitting out two different houses after flipping his second-home designation.

  Gove, a former Times journalist who had become an MP in 2005, had helped overhaul and modernize the Conservative Party and was widely regarded as a man in line for one of the very top Cabinet jobs in the next Tory government. Of all the senior Tories who had made questionable claims, Gove had the most to lose, which made his behaviour all the more remarkable. Christopher Hope discovered that in the months after Gove was elected to Parliament he had spent thousands of pounds kitting out his house in west London before flipping his second-home designation to a semi-detached house in his Surrey constituency and claiming £13,000 in moving costs. Then, over a five-month period between December 2005 and April 2006, he had spent more than £7,000 on the Surrey house, which Gove and his wife Sarah Vine, a journalist at The Times, had bought in 2002.

  Much of the cash was spent at Oka, an upmarket designer store run by Lady Astor, David Cameron’s mother-in-law. Gove bought a £331 Chinon armchair from there, as well as a Manchu cabinet for £493 and a pair of elephant lamps for £134.50. He also claimed for a £750 Loire table – although the Commons authorities only allowed him to claim £600 – a birch Camargue chair worth £432 and a birdcage coffee table priced at £238.50. Other claims in the five-month period included Egyptian cotton sheets from the White Company, a £454 dishwasher, a £639 range cooker, a £702 fridge–freezer and a £19.99 Kenwood toaster. In February 2006 Gove even claimed for a £34.99 foam cot mattress from Toys ‘R’ Us – despite children’s equipment being among the few items excluded from claims under Commons rules.

  Appropriately enough, Gove’s wife wrote a regular column in The Times called ‘How Not To Spend It’, in which she had previously observed that ‘Like it or not, shopping is part of our cultural DNA: we can no more resist the urge to spend than we can the need to eat.’

  As Hope read out a list of the items Gove had claimed for, Winnett shook his head in disbelief. As a former journalist, Gove was surely savvy enough to realize that this information might one day become public and would embarrass him.

  ‘Are you absolutely sure about all this, Chris?’ Winnett asked over the top of his computer screen. ‘There’s no way someone else’s claims have got mixed up with his file? What on earth was he thinking?’

  There was only one way to find out.

  Winnett picked up his BlackBerry and looked up the number for Henry Macrory, the Conservative Party’s head of media. Macrory, now in his mid-fifties, was a Fleet Street legend who had covered Parliament for the Daily Express and the Daily Star and had been famous for taking his own food – usually pork pies – when travelling abroad to exotic locations with the Prime Minister. He had also been responsible for an agony column, written under the nom de plume of Uncle Percy, where on quiet days he would mischievously make up letters from ‘readers’ with names that sounded remarkably similar to those of his bosses. A typical example, from a ‘Dave Stevens’, asked: ‘A bird crapped on my car, what do I do?’ Uncle Percy replied: ‘Get a new bird, Dave.’ Lord (David) Stevens, the then boss of Express Newspapers, was distinctly unimpressed.

  Macrory, or Uncle Percy as he was universally known within the Westminster press corps, had made the switch to press relations almost a decade earlier, but loved nothing better than to be at the centre of a big political story. So when Winnett interrupted his holiday in his native Ireland, he was more than happy to take the call.

  ‘It’s the moment you’ve been waiting for,’ Winnett said.

  ‘Ah yes, I thought this might be coming,’ Macrory replied.

  ‘As you’ve probably guessed, tomorrow is Shadow Cabinet day. We’re going to be whacking out some letters to a lot of the frontbenchers with questions about their expenses.’

  ‘Right, I’m on my way to a computer. It looks like it’s going to be a busy day,’ Macrory said. ‘How bad – on a scale of one to ten – is this going to be?’

  Winnett replied: ‘It’s not looking good, but there’s nothing much we didn’t know on Cameron, Osborne or [William] Hague [the shadow foreign secretary].’

  Macrory said he already had permission from Cameron and the Shadow Cabinet to have the letters for each MP copied to him. Macrory’s questions to Winnett made it clear that the Tories – who knew as soon as the Telegraph had begun running its stories about MPs’ expenses that the spotlight would inevitably be turned on them – had done their homework on the claims made by the Shadow Cabinet.

  ‘With David [Cameron] it’s just that one repair bill, isn’t it?’ said Macrory.

  Winnett was slightly taken aback by such a direct question.

  ‘Er, yeah,’ he replied.

  ‘The Tories have already been through all the Shadow Cabinet’s expenses by the sound of it,’ Winnett told the reporters in the bunker team. ‘They seem pretty organized, so hopefully we’ll get some answers fairly quickly.’

  Unbeknown to the reporters, within minutes of the Telegraph’s expenses story breaking the previous Thursday evening, Andy Coulson, the former News of the World editor who was now the Conservatives’ head of strategy, had been on the phone to Cameron at home. Both men had agreed that the newspaper would be turning to them shortly and that they should start preparing their response. Oliver Dowden, recently installed as the party’s director of political operations after a period advising companies as a public relations consultant at Hill & Knowlton, was nominated as the man who would become the party’s expenses expert. During the course of the previous Friday, Dowden had been installed in a special office in the Norman Shaw South building in Parliament – adjacent to the offices of Cameron and Osborne. It was an early sign of how central the party’s response to the expenses crisis was to Cameron’s prime ministerial ambitions.

  From his new base, Dowden formed a team made up of several members of the press office and specialist researchers – later expanded to a total of fifteen – to comb through the expenses files of every Conservative MP. This was the Conservatives’ own bunker, whose inmates were also working from dawn until dusk in a bid to beat the Telegraph’s investigators. Cameron, whose office was only feet away, would regularly pop in to see how his
team were progressing.

  The Tories’ team began with the Shadow Cabinet and would later examine the claims made by MPs about whom the Telegraph had been asking questions. This approach would put Macrory and Coulson in a far stronger position to answer questions than their Labour counterparts – as was already clear by the time Winnett and Macrory had spoken little more than forty-eight hours later.

  By noon on Sunday the letters to the Tory frontbenchers had been sent, but it would be nearly six hours before the Conservative Party’s coordinated responses came back. It was a far from quiet day, however. In the television studios MPs went on the attack in the Sunday morning political shows – among them Margaret Moran. The Queen of the Flippers had taken to the airwaves to tell the BBC that she had been ‘misrepresented’ and the Telegraph’s story was ‘actionable’, without ever managing to specify what was inaccurate. She claimed she was justified in spending £22,500 of taxpayers’ money on the home in Southampton because she was ‘entitled to a family life’.

  She said: ‘My partner works in Southampton. He has done for twenty years. He, if I’m ever going to see my partner of thirty years, I can’t make him come to Luton all the time, I have to be able to have a proper family life sometimes, which I can’t do unless I have er, you know, I, I share the costs of the Southampton home with him.’

  It had clearly never occurred to her that her partner should pay for his own house if the couple chose jobs which meant they lived 100 miles apart, as anyone else would have to do.

  The interviewer asked her why the taxpayer should pay for the property. ‘Well I, you, you could argue that I use it to be able to sustain my work,’ she replied. ‘Any MP has to have a proper family life, they have to have support of their partner. How can an MP, I mean I defy anybody to try and do a proper job, it, it – much less an incredibly pressured job, in which you work all hours all, all over you know, in the constituency, in Westminster and incredible pressure all the time.

  ‘It is all within the claims policy and that’s why I’m angry about this because not only has it been very stressful for me and my family, it gives the incredibly misleading impression that somehow we’ve been dodgy, that we’ve been fraudulent or we’ve been corrupt. Nothing is further from the truth. As I say, there are – I’ve done everything by the rules. There are inaccuracies, some of which I think are probably actionable and I think that it’s deeply irresponsible and actually the invasion of privacy, not just my privacy but my partner’s privacy.’

  Her self-pitying interviews were greeted with disbelief by her constituents, many of whom bombarded internet message boards and some of whom branded her ‘insane’.

  Reporters are used to being criticized and threatened with legal action, but if there’s one thing guaranteed to raise their hackles it’s an unfounded accusation that they’ve got a story wrong. Moran was about to find herself at the centre of a daily battle with the bunker team, during which the previously obscure backbench MP became one of the most infamous women in Britain.

  Martin Beckford, who was tasked with finding a suitable follow-up story on Moran, discovered that her neighbouring MP Kelvin Hopkins, who represented Luton North for Labour, had made virtually no claims on his second-home allowance despite living in the very same street as Moran. Hopkins had chosen to commute into London every day, just like thousands of his constituents, rather than boarding the gravy train. In one year he had claimed just £296 in second-home allowances, covering a handful of hotel stays.

  When he was contacted by Beckford, Hopkins said he was ‘astonished’ at what had been going on, adding: ‘I frankly didn’t know that all those things were possible within the rules. I’ve never had a second home, so I didn’t know you could switch them.’

  As the week went on, Moran continued to take issue with the Telegraph’s coverage, and so Beckford continued to dig up more revelations about her extraordinary behaviour. It turned out that she had not three but four homes, the fourth one being a villa in Spain, where she had angered locals by cutting off access to a footpath by having a mound of earth dumped across it. She had even pinned a letter on her gate in Spain, using House of Commons notepaper, warning people away from her land. Moran denied misusing Commons notepaper by using it for personal correspondence, so the Telegraph sent its Spanish correspondent, Fiona Govan, to the village, where Govan found that one of the neighbours had kept a note written on Commons notepaper which he had found pinned to his motorbike, telling him to move it.

  Moran – who never contacted the Telegraph directly after the first call with Rosa Prince – finally agreed to repay the £22,500 dry rot money, but her constituents made it clear they would settle for nothing less than her resignation.

  Meanwhile, another department at the Daily Telegraph was becoming almost as busy as the bunker. On a typical day, the readers’ letters department might receive scores of emails and letters, but as the expenses investigation got into full swing Christopher Howse, the Telegraph columnist and letters editor, was deluged with between 1,800 and 3,000 pieces of correspondence a day – more than twice the previous record for any story in the newspaper’s history. Peter Green, of Somerset, summed up the mood when he wrote: ‘We are constantly told by MPs that if they were in mainline business they would be earning more. I don’t think so: they would be in gaol.’

  Sales of the Telegraph had gone through the roof, outstripping even the wildest hopes of executives at the paper. For years there had been little evidence that major scoops could lead to a significant rise in newspaper sales – the advent of the internet meant that millions of potential readers simply went online to cherry-pick stories they were interested in seeing. The accepted wisdom was that promotions such as free DVDs were the only way to give sales a boost. Before the expenses stories started running in the Telegraph, executives believed the investigation might sell a few thousand extra copies each day, on top of the average Monday to Saturday daily sale of just under a million. But on the day the paper revealed the expenses claims of the Cabinet an extra 87,000 copies had been sold, one of the biggest daily increases in the newspaper’s history. By the end of the expenses investigation, an extra 1.26 million newspapers had been sold, with particularly large sales rises in Scotland and London – and a very localized rise in sales in the Welsh county where the tax office which deals with MPs’ expenses is situated.

  In the early days of the investigation, however, William Lewis couldn’t shake off the fear that somehow or other the operation would be closed down by the authorities, through a police investigation, an injunction or some other means. There was also the danger that the public, and in particular Telegraph readers, might decide after a few days that they had had enough of the story, or that the newspaper was being unduly harsh. These concerns meant that every day the subject of an ‘exit strategy’ came up in editorial meetings.

  ‘Do we call a truce next week to let them sort out the problem?’ Lewis asked his deputy, Tony Gallagher, shortly after the stories had started running. ‘We need to make sure that we think through what happens every step of the way,’ he went on. ‘We’ve had the shock and awe, now we need to win the battle for hearts and minds.’

  But no matter how many times Lewis raised the issue, neither he nor his executives could come up with an obvious answer. All they could do, they decided, was to monitor reactions to the story and be ready to react if public opinion started to turn.

  The public, however, couldn’t get enough of the story. As well as the readers who wrote and phoned to encourage the paper to keep going with the investigation, Lewis received emails from fellow editors and media executives urging him to press ahead. The exit strategy, it seemed, wouldn’t be needed after all.

  Shortly after five o’clock that first Sunday afternoon, the Conservative frontbenchers began responding to the questions which had been put to them earlier in the day. Most issued short statements – via the party’s press office – simply saying that they had acted within the rules. The notable exception was
Michael Gove.

  Gove was acutely aware that he could be damaged by allegations that he was a ‘flipper’ of his Commons allowance. In the febrile atmosphere which was building after three days of the expenses investigation, such a charge could mean political death. He firmly rejected any allegation of wrongdoing in his reply to the Telegraph, but that was just the opening shot in what would prove to be a desperate attempt to kill off the story. At 7.07 p.m. Christopher Hope received an email from Anthony Julius, the late Princess of Wales’s divorce lawyer and a consultant to solicitors Mishcon de Reya.

  The email stated that Julius was acting for Gove, who had ‘complete and compelling’ answers to each of the reporter’s questions. It warned Hope that any piece criticizing the shadow minister for breaching even the spirit of the rules would lead Gove to take ‘appropriate steps to defend his reputation’.

  This email significantly raised the stakes. Lewis called Hope into his office to discuss the Gove story, aware that it was one of the most damaging because of Gove’s closeness to Cameron.

  ‘We’re getting right into Cameron’s circle here,’ he said, before grilling Hope on the facts underpinning the story. Hope stuck to his guns. After consulting with Winnett and Evans, Lewis was confident that the shadow schools secretary had behaved in a questionable way and decided to push ahead with the story.

  It was starting to look as though the Telegraph might find itself in an even bigger fight with the Tories than with Labour – an ironic possibility, given the newspaper’s traditional if somewhat outdated reputation as the ‘Daily Torygraph’. But there was a welcome surprise to come before the night was out. More in hope than expectation, Winnett had asked Andy Coulson whether David Cameron would like to make a comment on the conduct of his senior team. To the reporter’s surprise, shortly after 8 p.m. a spokesman for Cameron telephoned to say that the leader would be providing a quote for inclusion in the newspaper’s main story the following day. Although it did not specifically address the allegations, it containedthe word ‘sorry’ and gave the first indication that Cameron – unlike Brown – was preparing to tackle the expenses scandal head-on. He said: