The investigation team knew that these extravagant claims by Tory grandees were likely to be far more damaging to the Conservative Party than the flipping and the furniture claims by Tory frontbenchers which had already been exposed. After all, the antics of Michael Gove, Chris Grayling and other members of the Shadow Cabinet had only served to prove that the Tories were just as capable as their Labour counterparts of playing the system. At a time when the Tories were way ahead of Labour in the polls, David Cameron could live with that.
But in his three and a half years at the head of his party, Cameron had worked tirelessly to change the public’s long-standing perception of the Conservatives as the party of the rich and privileged. Although his background was quintessentially ‘Old Tory’ – wealthy parents, Eton and Oxford education – Cameron had achieved remarkable success in persuading a significant percentage of the British people that the Conservatives had become an inclusive party which cared about all levels of society. By moving his party to the centre ground and disowning the far right, Cameron had mirrored the winning formula used by Tony Blair to bring ‘New Labour’ to power in 1997. Now that new image of the Tories as a party for the people was at risk of being destroyed overnight by the evidence the Telegraph’s investigation team had in front of them. The British public was about to be confronted with a parade of ‘toffs’ whose claims for domestic staff, Aga servicing and horse manure would make them seem as grand, arrogant and out of touch as it was possible to imagine.
The reporters had been staggered not only by what the grandees had been claiming for, but by the spellbinding wealth of so many Tory MPs.
‘I’d realized some of the Tories were rich, but I had no idea they were that rich,’ said Rayner as he looked through the expenses claims of yet another ‘Lord of the Manor’.
‘The paper’s going to be like an edition of Country Life,’ added Watt, as she stared at a picture of one of the many dream homes owned by Tory MPs.
‘This is going to be an absolute disaster for the Tories,’ Hope grimly observed. ‘Cameron’s going to be livid.’
One of the most startling examples involved Michael Ancram, also known as the Marquess of Lothian. Ancram owned three houses worth a combined total of around £8 million, none of which was mortgaged: a £1.5 million flat near Parliament, a £5 million mansion in the Scottish borders which had been in his family for three hundred years, and a large country house in Wiltshire. Despite his enormous wealth, Ancram had claimed close to the maximum second-home allowance in 2006/7 to pay for gardening and maintenance at his Wiltshire property, which included £98.58 for having his swimming-pool boiler repaired and a £1,117 gardening bill which included ‘cleaning up moss etc’. Ancram said he would repay the money for the swimming-pool maintenance, insisting it had been ‘a mistake’. He would later be critical of Cameron’s handling of the crisis and announce his resignation on health grounds at the next election.
Not that he was he alone in claiming for swimming-pool maintenance: James Arbuthnot, a senior backbencher, made claims relating to the swimming pool at his home, as well as recouping thousands of pounds to pay for gardeners and housekeepers. When challenged by the fees office over the necessity of his claims, he had replied: ‘My house is very expensive to run.’ And Stewart Jackson, a shadow communities minister, claimed £304 for work on the swimming pool of his second home in Cambridgeshire.
David Davis, the former Tory party leadership candidate who liked to remind people he grew up on a council estate, had claimed £5,700 for the cost of a new portico at his home in Yorkshire, as well as £2,000 for the cost of mowing and rolling two ‘paddocks’ and £400 for servicing his tractor mower. He was somewhat taken aback when he received the call from the Telegraph questioning his expenses, telling Christopher Hope: ‘I thought I was bombproof !’
Other claims were almost beyond ridicule. Sir Michael Spicer, the chairman of the 1922 Committee of backbench Conservative MPs, charged more than £5,000 during one nine-month period for gardening, which included an invoice for a hedge to be trimmed around his ‘helipad’. The taxpayer also stumped up £620 for the installation of a ‘chandelier’ at his Worcestershire home, where he made council tax claims for two separate houses within the grounds of his property.
David Heathcoat-Amory’s claims for 550 sacks of manure would also be published.
All of these claims, however, would come to be overshadowed by the antics of the former environment secretary Douglas Hogg, alias Viscount Hailsham. One of the items he claimed for at his Lincolnshire manor house came to define the whole expenses saga in many people’s eyes; yet it was a story which nearly, very nearly, was never told at all.
Rosa Prince had decided to examine Hogg’s expenses claims, knowing that, although he was a backbench MP who had rather faded into obscurity since his time as a Conservative frontbencher in the 1990s, his aristocratic background put him squarely into the category of Tory grandees. Hogg, the MP for Sleaford and North Hykeham, had submitted the maximum allowable expenses claims for his ‘second’ home, the historic Kettlethorpe Hall, parts of which dated back to the thirteenth century. Previous occupants of the mansion included a sister-in-law of Geoffrey Chaucer; Margaret Beaufort, grandmother of Henry VIII; and Joan Beaufort, grandmother of Richard III. It had also featured in the 1954 novel Katherine by Anya Seaton. Prince guessed that Hogg would own the property outright and that he, like Ancram and others, could only be seeking the maximum ACA if he was claiming for gardeners, cleaners and other staff. She was not disappointed.
Rather than handing in receipts for expenses he had incurred, like other MPs did, Hogg saw no need to waste time filling in itemized forms. Pointing out that his grand manor house cost him well in excess of the maximum second-home allowance, he simply wrote to the fees office suggesting they should just pay him the full amount in twelve equal monthly instalments.
To illustrate just how expensive it was to run his stately pile, Hogg sent the fees office a ten-page letter setting out all his household costs over the course of the year. It included the cost of employing a full-time gardener at £18,000 per year, a salary package of £14,000 for a ‘lady’ who looked after the house (as well as the cost of running her car), a separate bill of almost £1,000 to have the lawn mowed regularly, and £671.17 for a mole-catcher.
He also paid £4,488.48 for ‘machines and fuel’, including a new lawnmower; between £200 and £300 a month for ‘oil and coal’; £93.41 for tongs; £40 for piano tuning; £646.25 for ‘general repairs, stable etc.’; £31 to have bees removed; and around £200 a year for maintenance to his Aga. He asked the fees office to agree simply to pay him the maximum on the basis of the ‘accounts’ he had provided, saying his running costs were ‘greatly’ in excess of the annual expenses limit and: ‘It will certainly make my life a lot easier.’
He said he was not claiming for all of the sums involved, adding: ‘Whilst some items may be disputable as to whether they do or do not fall within the allowance, I would suggest that it is certain that allowable expenditure exceeds the allowance by a sizeable margin and consequently we need not spend too much time on debate.’
After an exchange with the fees office, Hogg reluctantly agreed to cover 35 per cent of the housekeeper’s salary from his own funds.
Hogg’s complicated financial arrangements seemed to have caused something of a headache for the fees office. While his claims were initially allowed by senior officials, later attempts to implement a tougher regime were opposed by the MP. Asked to provide receipts, he responded, saying that his agreement meant documentation was not necessary. In December 2003, he wrote:
I am writing this formal letter in the hope that we can resolve this matter by the end of next week. I have received the letter dated 4th September 2003 and the pro forma rejection of my October claim dated 20th November 2003 (which was more than a little surprising …) I hope that you will agree that the matter cannot be left outstanding for any longer. I would be surprised if any other Member has provided
fuller documentary evidence. These sums are significant and in the absence of some good and compelling reason I suggest that they should be paid without further delay.
Eighteen months later, when the system was queried again, he wrote:
Might I suggest that we continue with the present system. It is a system that was positively suggested by the Fees Office. It is to everybody’s convenience. I am happy to let you have the supporting documents but to do it in a monthly way as you suggest was positively declined by your colleagues and I was happy to welcome their suggestion.
Prince was stunned by what she was seeing. Hogg appeared to be trying to wear down the resistance of fees office workers who were reluctant to accept what appeared to be questionable claims.
‘This guy is unbelievable, is he having a laugh or what?’ Prince said to Winnett, as she began preparing a formal letter for Hogg.
The MP responded to her letter within forty-five minutes, saying his odd method of claiming had been ‘initially at the suggestion of the fees office’, which had been ‘kept fully informed of all the expenditure incurred on the property’.
With Hogg’s reply in hand, Prince began writing the story for the following day’s paper, referring back to the documents in his expenses file to quote verbatim from them. As she did so, her eyes opened wide and she emitted one of her trademark involuntary gasps as she noticed a line buried in one of the letters which she had missed when she had looked at it the first time.
‘Oh my God! Look at this,’ Prince shouted across the bunker. ‘He’s claimed for someone to clean his moat!’
‘What!!?’ chorused the rest of the bunker team. All eyes turned to Prince, and within moments several of the reporters had crowded round her desk to see what she had discovered.
Sure enough, there, towards the end of one of his lengthy letters to the fees office, among Hogg’s list of household expenditure was: ‘moat clearing, £2,115’.
As the bunker erupted in gales of laughter, Prince brought up a Google Earth aerial photograph of Hogg’s home. And there it was, snaking around three sides of the house to keep out the great unwashed: Douglas Hogg’s moat. All of a sudden, the expenses claims of other MPs seemed dull by comparison. Hogg had gifted the Telegraph’s investigation the sort of story which you simply couldn’t make up.
The beauty of the expenses story had been that it was a political scandal which everyone could instantly understand: readers didn’t need to get their heads around the complexities of obscure company directorships, government contracts or labyrinthine connections between MPs and big business – a child could grasp the fact that public representatives were spending public money on big houses, televisions and leather armchairs. With his claim for the moat, Hogg had been elevated to the position of standard-bearer for arrogant excess; a man who, perhaps more than any other, appeared to inhabit an entirely different world from the little people he and his colleagues claimed to represent.
The reference to Hogg’s moat was contained in a letter which was marked ‘deleted’ in the files, meaning it was not due to be published by Parliament. If Prince had not spotted the moat when she read the letter for a second time, it would have remained a secret to this day. The near-miss was a reminder to everyone on the investigation team of just how easy it would be to let a crucial detail slip through the net, given the breakneck speed at which the reporters were working.
As Prince sent off a second letter to Hogg asking him about the moat, Winnett was called into the editor’s office to run through the top stories for the next day’s edition. William Lewis was so taken aback by what Winnett had to tell him that he had to reach for his trusty polo mallet for extra emphasis.
‘This is the best yet,’ Lewis said. ‘This will cause a revolution. People will go absolutely mad about this,’ he added, waving the mallet in the direction of Parliament as he spoke. He had no idea how right he would turn out to be.
The grandees themselves also seemed to have sensed just how badly their claims would go down with the public, having already seen the fallout from other people’s less extravagant claims. Several appeared to be on the warpath.
Hogg himself had sent Prince a detailed rebuttal of most of the claims, written as though he were preparing a legal case. In rather clumsy terms, he insisted that he had not claimed for his moat, saying: ‘As explained in the schedule in whether claimed or not, I don’t have records to hand when responding to this but I don’t believe that the moat would have featured in the claim.’ He then telephoned the reporter repeatedly in an attempt to close down the moat story, before attempting to call the editor.
Sir Michael Spicer adopted a similar stance with Holly Watt, phoning her to protest about the questions the Telegraph intended to raise over his expenses claims, then sending an email attempting to justify his actions.
‘I have lived in my house for over thirty years,’ he said. ‘Recently it has needed more maintenance and decoration as wear and tear sets in. It is perfectly proper that I should claim this.’ He also claimed that he did not have a helipad, and that the description was ‘a family joke’. (Taxpayers failed to see the funny side when the claims were published.) The ‘chandelier’, meanwhile, was simply a light fitting with several bulbs, he said (despite the enormous cost of its installation).
Sir Michael was to be disappointed if he thought he had persuaded the paper to drop the story about him or leave out the details about the helipad and the chandelier. Later in the evening, he dashed out to Victoria station to get an early edition of the next day’s Daily Telegraph. As he got into a cab, the driver, who had already seen the paper, remarked: ‘You’re that Michael Spicer, aren’t you?’ before barracking him about his expenses claims.
As the bunker team brought up the television news on their computer screens, the latest revelations in the MPs’ expenses saga were brewing up to dominate the headlines for a fifth day running. ITN’s political editor, Tom Bradby, had caught wind of the Tory grandees story by the time he appeared at 6.30 p.m., though he was unaware of the precise details. ‘One may even have claimed for a butler,’ said the breathless Bradby.
Within moments of the broadcast ending, Winnett’s phone rang. On the line was Andy Coulson, the Conservative Party’s head of strategy. Coulson had been hired by the Conservatives in controversial circumstances after resigning as editor of the News of the World. One of his reporters had been gaoled for paying a private investigator to illegally access voice messages on mobile phones belonging to members of the royal household, and Coulson, although he said he had been unaware of what was going on, accepted that, as editor, he bore responsibility for what his reporters were doing. Although David Cameron was criticized by his opponents at the time he hired Coulson, the former editor had repaid his confidence by helping to transform the party’s image, just as another former red-top newspaper journalist, Alastair Campbell, had done for Tony Blair. Coulson had been involved in going over the expenses claims of members of the Shadow Cabinet who were expected to feature in the Telegraph, but he and other members of Cameron’s media team had not had the chance to bone up on what people like Ancram and Hogg had been up to.
Coulson sounded worried. ‘Did you see the ITV news?’ he asked Winnett.
‘Yep,’ replied the reporter.
‘This butler stuff isn’t true, is it? If not, I’d really appreciate it if you could close it down as a rumour.’
‘No, it’s not true,’ Winnett replied. ‘But it’s not that far off the truth. There are housekeepers and so on and they are in the right area.’
‘OK, I see,’ said Coulson. ‘I’d really appreciate it if you could give me a heads-up on the very worst of it tomorrow. I will only tell David [Cameron].’
‘Erm, OK,’ Winnett said. ‘As long as this is strictly not for repetition, the worst thing is someone claimed for a moat to be cleaned.’
There was a pause at the other end of the line. ‘F*** me. A moat?’ Coulson finally spluttered.
He quickly ended the call a
nd picked up the phone to David Cameron to warn him that all the work they had done to dispel the image of the Tories as ‘toffs’ was at risk of unravelling.
Hogg, meanwhile, was fighting for his reputation – and his career. When Rosa Prince booted up her computer early the next morning, one of the first emails she received was from Hogg, evidently written in a rush, judging by the poor spelling and grammar.
‘I enclose the comments that I make as to you [sic] article,’ the email began. ‘You will see that I did not claim for either the moat (about which we spoke last night) or for the piano tuner.’
He continued:
The stable lights [referred to in one of Hogg’s letters to the fees office] are in facts the security lights in the back yard which were advised by the police and the installed by the home office; after 10 years or so they needed to be replaced; I was one of those on the IRA list and for about 6 weeks or so after the murder of [Conservative MP] Ian Gow I had a squad of police in the house. You might care to correct the article
Yours, Douglas Hogg.
Hogg had also begun phoning the editor’s office to demand a correction, insisting he had not claimed for the moat. Instead, William Lewis agreed that Hogg’s letter to the fees office which included the reference to the moat should be published online so the public could decide for themselves.
To the horror of Conservative Central Office, Hogg then conducted a bizarre four-and-a-half-minute interview with Channel 4 News, who had waited outside his London flat for him to emerge in the morning.
Wearing a dark green shooting cap, a blue raincoat and a rucksack, Hogg walked briskly towards Parliament, denouncing the Daily Telegraph’s story as he went, but never breaking his stride as the television cameraman struggled to keep up. Tory spin doctors watched through their fingers as Hogg broke three of the golden rules of television interviews: don’t walk and talk, don’t wear a hat and don’t defend the indefensible.
No Expenses Spared Page 18