No Expenses Spared

by Robert Winnett

  ‘I agreed with the fees office that a proportion of the maintenance and cleaning of my house, hence the housekeeper, should be claimed on the parliamentary allowance,’ he said.

  Did he claim for a moat?

  ‘That is not correct. In the interests of transparency I sent them a complete schedule of expenses incurred on the house. The letter was not a claims schedule.’

  But the publication of the documents on the Telegraph website showed that while Hogg may not have specified that he was claiming for the moat, he didn’t specify that he was not. By lunchtime, Hogg had changed his position and had accepted that he had ‘not positively excluded the items’.

  ‘You slippery so and so!’ Prince exclaimed as Hogg changed his statement.

  If Hogg thought the public would accept his clear-as-mud explanation for the moat claim, he was sorely mistaken. The public seized on the moat story as a form of shorthand for the entire expenses scandal, he received the full force of David Cameron’s ire, and the newly installed Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, was inspired to write a verse about it:

  What did we do with the trust of your vote?

  Hired a flunky to flush out the moat.

  In the corridor outside the bunker, Mark Skipworth was discussing the reaction to the story with Winnett and Rhidian Wynn Davies.

  ‘The funny thing is,’ said Skipworth, ‘if he’d just called it a drainage ditch instead of a moat, he would have got away with it.’

  The Tory grandees story provided helicopter firms up and down the country with a sudden rush of business as television crews flew over the spectacular mansions to film much-needed ‘visuals’. Hogg himself became, for a while at least, world-famous as his moat claim captured the imagination of journalists and satirists across the globe.

  In America, Jon Stewart, host of the top-rated Daily Show, mercilessly milked the Hogg story, calling it ‘the real Watergate’ and describing the expenses scandal as ‘Scamalot’. He was particularly tickled by Hogg’s name (‘neither I nor J. K. Rowling are making this name up!’) and painted a picture of England as a country where every householder has a medieval moat to keep out invaders.

  Some American viewers, however, were unclear exactly what was meant by a moat. In one interview with the cable news channel CNN, the Telegraph’s Andrew Pierce was asked by a news anchor: ‘What exactly is this moat?’

  Pierce replied: ‘Well, do you know who Robin Hood is? The chap who robbed from the rich to give to the poor, unlike our MPs. His arch-enemy was the Sheriff of Nottingham, and he lived in a castle with a drawbridge, which went over …’

  ‘Oh, that’s over the moat!’ replied the newsreader.

  Newspapers in Australia, Canada, Iran and South America delighted in picking over the bamboozling array of fripperies which MPs had spent public money on, while communist countries, including China, happily reported the excesses which come with democracy. The China Daily reported: ‘Disclosures that MPs have claimed everything from an adult movie to a chandelier on expenses have infuriated voters, eroding faith in the country’s ancient democratic institutions and causing Britain’s worst political crisis for years.’ And in Zimbabwe, the Herald newspaper suggested that politicians in the parliament controlled by the despotic Robert Mugabe should be given higher salaries in case they were tempted into corrupt activities like British MPs (yes, really).

  Writing in the New York Times, the novelist Garrison Keillor, who was on a visit to London, described the Telegraph’s story as ‘the best show in town’, while an editorial in the same newspaper noted that ‘The British public is not amused.’

  The man who was the least amused by the behaviour of the Tory grandees, however, was David Cameron. His MPs were about to find out what can happen when Cameron gets angry.

  Payback

  Tuesday, 12 May

  CHAPTER 15

  DAVID CAMERON’S FURY when he was told about the expenses claims of some of his wealthiest backbenchers had reached boiling point on Monday evening when Andy Coulson told him about Douglas Hogg’s moat. He spent more than two hours taking soundings from members of his Shadow Cabinet about how the party could limit the fallout from the grandees story, and by the time he saw the headlines on the television news that evening he knew that the following day would be one of the most testing yet of his leadership.

  Shortly after dawn on Tuesday, 12 May, television crews had started to gather outside the Camerons’ west London townhouse. After a family breakfast Cameron had spoken to his advisers, who agreed that the Conservative leader should reveal his anger to the waiting press. He was heading for what he would later describe as his ‘John Wayne moment’.

  At around 8 a.m. Cameron marched purposefully out of his front door towards a car that was waiting to drive him to the Commons. When reporters asked him about the morning’s revelations in the Daily Telegraph, he let rip, with a thunderous look on his face.

  ‘I am angry about what has happened. It is out of order, some of this is an abuse of taxpayers’ money and I’m going to deal with it.’ Then he ducked into his chauffeur-driven silver Lexus, slammed the door and was driven away, one of the more tenacious reporters narrowly avoiding getting a microphone caught in the car door.

  As Cameron sat in the back of the car, he knew that the only way to protect the image of a caring Conservative Party he had taken such pains to construct was to be ruthless with those who threatened to destroy it. If that meant terminating the careers of long-serving Tory MPs, then so be it. Several of the MPs who had been guilty of the worst excesses – Hogg included – were, in any case, ‘bed-blockers’: ageing MPs whose best days were behind them but who refused to give up their safe seats for new blood that could bring freshness and vigour into the parliamentary party. The one consolation for Cameron was that he would have the chance to get rid of some dead wood.

  That morning, the MPs who had appeared in the paper received the one phone call they had been dreading more than that from the Telegraph: the call from their party leader. Cameron spoke to each of the worst offenders in turn to confront them with the details of what the Telegraph had reported and find out at first hand what, if any, explanations they had. On the whole, he was far from satisfied with their answers.

  At lunchtime, he summoned all Conservative backbench MPs to a meeting of the 1922 Committee in a private room in Parliament. Cameron felt that the growing public fury over the continuing expenses revelations was justified, and realized that he had to align himself with this mood – rather than taking a defensive attitude of the kind which had got Labour off on the wrong foot when they first responded to the Telegraph’s disclosures. He told his backbench MPs that he had decided to take a lead on the expenses scandal, and would be establishing a ‘Star Chamber’ committee that would analyse the claims made by every Tory MP over the previous four years. The name – coined by the press – was an apt analogy; it referred to a court which sat in Parliament in the fifteenth century to try men so powerful that their cases could not be left to the ordinary courts. The original Star Chamber, which took its name from the night sky design on the ceiling of the room in which it sat, held its sessions in secret, with no right of appeal. Cameron’s modern-day equivalent would run on similar lines: anyone who refused to cooperate with the inquiry would be expelled from the party, and the committee would decide whether MPs needed to repay money – and how much.

  There was more. The Conservatives would be introducing new rules over expenses claims made by the party’s MPs which were far tougher than those applied by the parliamentary authorities. There would be a ban on ‘flipping’ the second-home designation between properties; Tory MPs would be prohibited from claiming for furniture, household items and food – and they would have to pay capital gains tax on the sale of homes against which they made claims.

  Many MPs in the room did not like what they were hearing. They cast sideways glances at each other, looking for signs that others were feeling vaguely mutinous, but realized they had little choice bu
t to agree to what their leader was announcing. After all, anyone who dissented was liable to see their political career come to a premature end.

  Once Cameron had finished addressing the backbenchers, he walked the short distance to St Stephen’s Club, a private club for Conservatives in a nearby Westminster townhouse, where the media had been told to gather for a press conference.

  ‘I want to start by saying sorry,’ he said. ‘Sorry that it’s come to this. And sorry for the actions of some Conservative MPs. People are right to be angry that some MPs have taken public money to pay for things that few could afford. You’ve been let down. Politicians have done things that are unethical and wrong. I don’t care if they were within the rules – they were wrong.’

  The reporters watching on in the bunker were impressed.

  ‘He’s always good when he’s angry,’ Prince observed.

  ‘Bet Brown’s wishing he’d done this,’ added Rayner. Then came a surprise announcement which was greeted with roars of approval in the bunker.

  Cameron said virtually his entire Shadow Cabinet would be repaying money – including himself – for claims which had been disclosed by the Telegraph the previous day. To leave no room for ambiguity, he named each Tory frontbencher in turn and gave the amount they would be repaying, and why.

  ‘Alan Duncan will repay £5,000 for gardening bills,’ he said.

  ‘Yes!’ shouted Christopher Hope, as he received slaps on the back from his colleagues.

  ‘Michael Gove will repay £7,000 for furniture.’

  ‘Good stuff!’ interjected Hope, clenching his fist, recalling Gove’s futile threats of legal action.

  ‘Oliver Letwin will repay more than £2,000 for replacing a pipe under his tennis court.’

  Thumbs up from Rayner.

  Cameron himself said he would be repaying the £680 bill for repair work on his house, while Chris Grayling and others would stop claiming the additional costs allowance altogether.

  One by one, the reporters who had written stories questioning the expenses claims of Shadow Cabinet members – and whose stories had in many cases been publicly challenged by the MPs themselves – were being vindicated, on live television, by the probable future Prime Minister. For a reporter, there are few things more satisfying than seeing the subject of a potentially risky story holding their hands up and admitting to the allegations concerned. For a whole roomful of reporters to experience that buzz simultaneously, in such high-profile circumstances, was the high point of the investigation to date.

  As the team shook hands and exchanged congratulations on a job well done, Hope grabbed a red marker pen and began writing down on a whiteboard the amount each MP was paying back, next to the name of the reporter who had written that story. A handful of MPs, including Michael Ancram and Stewart Jackson, had already made clear their intention to pay money back (for swimming-pool maintenance, in both cases) and suddenly it was becoming clear that the rush to pay back money was going to be a whole new story in itself.

  Back in the press conference, parliamentary reporters were surprised by the directness of Cameron’s approach. Once he had finished listing the names of the MPs who were paying money back (right down to David Willetts’s light bulbs and Cheryl Gillan’s dog food) he took questions from the floor, and answered them head-on.

  The watching press pack began to think that, despite the atrocious behaviour of many of his fellow Conservative MPs, they might be witnessing the moment when Cameron showed that he was ready to become Prime Minister. Gordon Brown had dithered and dodged; Cameron was grasping the nettle with both hands. In short, he was showing ruthless, decisive leadership.

  The significance of Cameron’s performance was not lost on the prime ministerial advisers watching with growing alarm in Downing Street. In front of their eyes, Cameron was seizing the initiative on the expenses issue while Brown was still struggling to connect with the public. Earlier in the day, the Prime Minister had attempted to move the agenda on with a major speech about crime. But it had largely been ignored, and Downing Street aides now decided they had no choice but to follow Cameron’s lead and tackle the expenses scandal directly.

  Within minutes of Cameron’s press conference ending, deputy Labour leader Harriet Harman hit the airwaves to announce that a Commons committee was meeting to discuss new rules, immediately applicable, to stop the abuse of the expenses system. Aides to the Prime Minister briefed reporters by saying that these would include rules to limit the amount of mortgage interest that could be claimed. (Many Labour MPs were angry that their Conservative counterparts were apparently able to fund huge properties at taxpayers’ expense without criticism.)

  But the public wasn’t interested in ‘the system’, no matter how flawed it might be. British voters were angry with the MPs themselves. If they could have done, the public would have put their MPs in the stocks on the local village green and taken out their frustration by throwing rotten eggs at them. Cameron had come close to a modern-day equivalent by naming and shaming his own Shadow Cabinet on live television, and Brown realized that if he was going to keep up with the game, he needed to hang some of his own ministers out to dry. And he knew exactly who should be first.

  Hazel Blears, the communities secretary, had over the previous few months gone from being the Cabinet’s feisty ‘ginger chipmunk’ to something of a poison dwarf. Shortly before the Daily Telegraph’s expenses revelations began, Blears had mocked Brown in a newspaper article, making reference to his disastrous attempt to connect with young voters by announcing a botched plan to reform the expenses system on the internet video site YouTube. Brown’s attempts to smile and speak at the same time had resulted in the usual sinister facial contortions, and instead of getting his message across, the Prime Minister had once again left himself open to ridicule. Blears had poked fun at her leader’s inept performance by saying: ‘YouTube if you want to …’ – simultaneously committing the cardinal sin of making a nod to Margaret Thatcher’s famous ‘U-turn if you want to; the lady’s not for turning’ speech.

  Blears was fast becoming the Prime Minister’s biggest Cabinet opponent, and she had also been guilty of gross hypocrisy in Brown’s eyes when it came to her expenses. The Daily Telegraph had disclosed that Blears had flipped the designation of her second home between three different addresses in the space of a year. She had avoided paying capital gains tax by telling HM Revenue & Customs that the London flat she was selling was her ‘principal residence’ while telling the parliamentary authorities it was her ‘second home’. Although she had not broken any tax laws or parliamentary rules by doing so, such behaviour was regarded as morally wrong by many members of the public, as well as many Labour MPs. Roy Hattersley, the former deputy leader of the Labour Party, summed up the feeling of many long-serving members of the party by saying: ‘It’s inconsistent to be a member of the Labour Cabinet if you consciously try to avoid paying taxes.’

  Brown decided that Blears should pay capital gains tax retrospectively on the profit of around £45,000 she made when she sold her taxpayer-funded second homes. The BBC’s Nick Robinson and Jon Craig of Sky News were called into Blears’s Whitehall office, where she apologized for her behaviour and provided one of the defining images of the expenses scandal by holding up a cheque she had written out to HM Revenue & Customs for £13,332 in lieu of the capital gains tax she would have paid, had she been legally obliged to. In one of the interviews, tears welled up in the Cabinet minister’s eyes.

  In the bunker, it all seemed too dramatic to be true. First, virtually the entire Shadow Cabinet had been ordered to pay back the money the Telegraph had highlighted; now a Cabinet minister was holding up a personal cheque, made out to the taxman, for more than some people earn in a year. Things like that just don’t happen in the real world.

  ‘This has got to go on the wall of glory,’ said Christopher Hope, as he asked assistant picture editor Veronica Hale to print off a blown-up image of Blears with the cheque.

  Editor William L
ewis decided that the repayments, rather than the new expenses revelations the team was working on, had now become the story, and the next day’s newspaper would lead with the headline ‘Payback time’. It turned out, in fact, that the great payback had only just begun.

  The following day would see the biggest single repayment by any of the MPs, when the care services minister Phil Hope unexpectedly announced he would be repaying £41,709 for furniture, fittings and other items he had claimed for his second home, a flat in south London. The Daily Telegraph had featured Hope’s expenses the previous Saturday, along with those of other ministers, and had questioned whether it was physically possible for him to have squeezed all the furniture he had bought on expenses into his 511-square-foot flat. Almost a week on, the Telegraph had covered the expenses claims of dozens more MPs, and Hope was a distant memory. But the MP’s local newspaper in Corby had picked up the story, generating a huge response from its readers. The Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph published six pages of readers’ letters on the subject, which were overwhelmingly critical of the MP.

  Jeremy Clifford, the newspaper’s editor, said: ‘It has made people realize that their MP leads a completely different life to them when he is in London.’ On the council estates where many houses stand empty in the former steel town, Hope’s constituents did not hold back. Aran Stephen, an unemployed 26-year-old who lived with his mother, told the Daily Telegraph: ‘I haven’t got a home but [houses on the estate] have been empty for 10 years. What has Phil Hope done for me except spend money on posh furniture?’ John McShefferty, an unemployed former steel worker, said: ‘It’s disgusting. And to think he’s Labour. Paying it back is like saying he broke my window, but if he fixes it, is that OK? No, it’s not OK.’

  Hope, who had a slim parliamentary majority of 1,517, realized that the only chance he had of retaining his seat was to pay back the money highlighted by the Telegraph, though the Telegraph had accused him of spending only £37,000 on furniture, not the £41,709 he repaid. He had to remortgage his house to find the money. Although it was politically expedient for Hope to come up with the cash, he appeared to have been genuinely stung by the criticism when he appeared on television to announce his repayment. Tears welled up in his eyes as the shell-shocked MP said: ‘The anger of my constituents and the damage done to the perceptions of my integrity concerning the money I have received … has been a massive blow to me.’ The tears may have been more in self-pity than remorse, but they were genuine none the less.