The effect of persistent local newspaper coverage of Hope’s expenses was typical of what was going on up and down the country. The Daily Telegraph would highlight an MP’s expenses; the story would then be picked up by local media who could then develop new angles – which the national newspapers did not have the time to do, because of the breakneck speed with which the Telegraph was printing more and more new revelations. The expenses story was also providing a boost to local newspaper sales, just as it was with the Telegraph’s. Radio phone-in hosts, meanwhile, gave up trying to think of alternative topics for their shows, because all the public wanted to talk about was MPs’ expenses.
While Hazel Blears and David Cameron had been arranging for taxpayers’ money to be refunded, the Telegraph’s investigations team still had to get on with the daily task of lifting the lid on the expenses claims of more MPs. And after five days of revelations about Labour, the Conservatives and Sinn Fein, it was high time the Liberal Democrats had their day in the heat.
The fact that the Lib Dems had not so far featured in the Telegraph’s coverage had resulted in a four-point increase in their opinion poll ratings. A rough calculation suggested that the articles during the previous five days had swayed the voting intentions of nearly two million people – more than the typical number of ‘swing voters’ targeted by the tens of millions of pounds spent during election campaigns.
The Lib Dems, of course, knew their turn was coming, and ever since the expenses scandal had first appeared in the Telegraph, Lena Pietsch, one of the most senior aides to the Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg, had been anxiously texting Rosa Prince on a daily basis asking when the party’s MPs would appear in the paper. Clegg and his team had spent the weekend on tenterhooks waiting for their claims to be exposed, and on Tuesday morning, when Prince texted Pietsch to say the time had come, it was almost a relief to some Lib Dem party workers, who cleared their schedules to deal with incoming emails from the Telegraph.
The Lib Dems prided themselves on the party’s carefully built reputation for personal accountability. For example, it had unilaterally decided years earlier that all seven of its MPs representing outer London constituencies would forgo their entitlement to the ACA, an admirable move which had not been replicated by the Tories or Labour. The Lib Dems also tended to be among the first to criticize any MP who was seen as being ‘on the make’, and were advocates of transparency and open government. Nick Clegg had championed the reform of MPs’ expenses and, after the first stories had appeared in the Telegraph, had been one of the most outspoken critics of the excesses of his colleagues, saying: ‘People will just simply despair that all politicians look either ridiculous at best or corrupt at worst.’ Clegg had, until now, been having a good war.
Yet it turned out that some of the most high-profile Lib Dem MPs had been quietly filling their boots from the generous ACA in similar ways to MPs from other parties.
Prince was surprised to discover that Clegg himself had claimed so much for his second home that he exceeded the annual limit of £23,083 by £100 in 2007/8. He submitted claims for food, gardening, furniture and decorating at his constituency home in Sheffield, and also put in phone bills which included calls to Colombia, Vietnam and Spain. When he had bought his second home he had claimed almost £10,000 for stamp duty and other legal costs associated with the purchase, then billed the taxpayer for new carpets, tiling, curtains, blinds and even work to ‘build small wall in rose garden’.
The honeymoon period the Liberal Democrats had been enjoying during the scandal so far was about to come to an abrupt end.
Clegg was in the process of announcing his party’s manifesto for the European elections when his staff picked up an email from Rosa Prince at 11.29 a.m. with a detailed series of questions about his expenses claims. Clegg was quick to respond, saying he would pay back the £80.20 he had spent on international calls, which ‘should never have been charged to the taxpayer’. He apologized, and gave a commitment that any profit he made when he sold the house in Sheffield would be given back to the taxpayer.
Other senior Lib Dems were also about to find themselves embroiled in the furore. Sir Menzies Campbell, a former leader of the party, had hired an interior designer – who also happened to be a family friend – to refurbish his central London flat, spending almost £10,000 on items including scatter cushions, a king-sized bed and a flat-screen television. He decided to pay back almost £1,500 for the cost of the designer.
Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrats’ home affairs spokesman and former party leadership candidate, had claimed £119 for a Corby trouser press, finished in mahogany, despite being a millionaire who owned a total of seven properties, having made a fortune during his previous career as a City economist. His meticulously typed office expenses also included claims for chocolate HobNobs (79p), tea bags (89p), a bus ticket (£3.20) and semi-skimmed milk (62p). To the amusement of the bunker team, the items which Huhne had not claimed for, but which appeared on the same receipts, showed that the sombre MP had a taste for cheese muffins, bacon flavour Wheat Crunchies and Ready Brek. He had even claimed £85.35 for the ‘mounting, framing and inscription of photo of Chris Huhne’ (it had been requested by the local council for use in the civic centre).
Huhne was not amused when he received an email from Gordon Rayner querying his expenses, and rang the reporter to point out that he had claimed less than 20 per cent of the allowable maximum. He did, however, decide to repay the cost of the trouser press, later admitting that buying it had been ‘a bit Alan Partridge’.
There was further comedy value in the claims made by the colourful Lib Dem housing spokesman and ‘human anagram’, Lembit Opik, a man better known for his ability to woo (and then usually break up with) famous and beautiful women such as the television weather presenter Siân Lloyd, an underwear model called Katie Green and, most improbably of all, the Cheeky Girls singer Gabriela Irimia. Holly Watt had discovered what appeared to be a hidden gem in Opik’s expenses during her trawl for MPs’ addresses. He had claimed for a ‘triple mirror’, and the reporters immediately started to wonder what the amorous MP would do with such an item. Was it for his bedroom? Would it be going on the ceiling? The truth, for once, turned out to be rather disappointing. Jon Swaine discovered that the triple mirror, bought at Argos, was nothing more than a folding, free-standing mirror to be placed on a dressing-table.
Swaine also discovered that the hapless Opik had managed to mistime the purchase of a £2,499 plasma television in such a way that he had to pay for it himself. Opik had bought the TV in 2005, after the dissolution of Parliament for the general election. As soon as Parliament has been dissolved MPs technically lose their jobs until they are re-elected; as they are not strictly speaking MPs, they can’t claim any expenses, and so the fees office refused to pay him anything for his new television.
None of these claims by well-known party figures, however, were considered sufficiently scandalous to make front-page stories, and head of news Chris Evans wanted to know what else had been uncovered on the Lib Dems.
Over the previous few days, Martin Beckford had been intrigued by the expenses claims made by Andrew George, a little-known Liberal Democrat who represented St Ives in Cornwall. His files showed that he had bought a flat in Rotherhithe, south London, as his second home, but one page of a Post Office home insurance invoice showed that the person covered was a ‘Miss M. George’. Beckford soon discovered that George had a daughter called Morvah, who had started university in London just months after he bought the flat. The reporter suspected she was using the taxpayer-funded property as her student digs.
John Bingham, who had recently joined the Telegraph from the Press Association, where he had distinguished himself by conducting a series of interviews with Prince Harry in Afghanistan, was sent to the flat. He discovered from neighbours that Morvah was regularly seen at the flat with her boyfriend, suggesting that the MP’s ‘second’ home was in fact his daughter’s main home. When George was contacted by the Telegr
aph, he admitted that his daughter, a part-time professional model who had also worked as a parliamentary intern for her father, used the flat as a ‘bolt hole’ and stored some of her possessions there. He later admitted she had lived there exclusively for several months.
Andrew George and his daughter’s living arrangements took a prominent place on the Telegraph’s front page the next day, below the main story about MPs paying back money. George was outraged, and appeared on Channel 4 News to deny the Telegraph’s story, calling John Bingham a ‘snooper’.
Beckford also found himself under attack from a rather more unlikely source – the Bishop of Croydon. In the course of his ‘day job’ as social and religious affairs correspondent, Beckford followed the musings of several bishops and vicars via their internet blogs or Twitter accounts. Some Anglicans criticized politicians’ greed and abuse of public funds, among them the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, who attacked MPs from his unorthodox ‘pulpit’ in his News of the World column. The liberal and media-savvy Bishop of Croydon, the Rt Revd Nick Baines, however, concluded that the real scandal was the hypocrisy of journalists. ‘I can’t help feeling that, despite the awfulness of exploitative MPs, the awfulness of the media coverage is also nauseating,’ he wrote in his blog.
The normally quiet and unassuming Beckford had already shown an entirely different side to his character when he had become embroiled in a heated, no-holds-barred row with Phil Woolas over his claims for tampons and other women’s items, and the red mist descended once again when he read the bishop’s haughty comments. ‘Your blog is more outrageous than anything our MPs have claimed. If only the public could vote out bad bishops,’ Beckford wrote on his Twitter page.
The prelate shot back: ‘What constitutes a bad bishop? Questioning the media?’
Beckford pointed out that public money was being repaid as a direct result of the investigation and asked: ‘Do you really think that is hypocritical and nauseating?’
Bishop Baines responded that the issue was about the ‘wider cost’ of the ‘corrosive nature’ of the reporting.
‘The reporting is corrosive b/c of what the MPs have done!’ Beckford angrily tweeted. ‘Would you really rather have a tame press and untouchable politicians?’
The bishop agreed that ‘good journalism is vital for democracy’ but added: ‘It does not give licence for anything.’ He claimed ‘all [MPs] are damned’ as a result of the Telegraph’s revelations, though he later conceded that his tone had been ‘harsh’ in his earlier postings.
As the Telegraph’s investigation continued, the internet was playing an increasing role in building up the public’s expectations each day for the following day’s paper. The reporters would first write a ‘taster’ story, with no names in it, announcing that the following day’s paper would contain details of prominent Tories, government ministers or whatever the top story was going to be. Within seconds of the story appearing on the paper’s website at around eight o’clock each evening, it would be picked up by the 24-hour news channels and become ‘breaking news’ until the first edition of the paper appeared late that night. The strategy ended up driving broadcasters potty, with television reporters desperately trying to second-guess what the Telegraph had in store (and often getting it completely wrong); so instead the Telegraph started publishing on its website a story which would appear on the inside pages of the next day’s paper, giving the broadcasters something specific to get their teeth into while they waited to find out what the main story would be in the next day’s edition.
For the unfortunate MPs who featured in the ‘tasters’, it meant an uncomfortable few hours to endure while they temporarily became the story. Other MPs decided that they didn’t want to wait for the call from the Telegraph, and voluntarily decided to pay back thousands of pounds before the reporters had even had a chance to open their files. Ronnie Campbell, the Labour MP for Blyth Valley, announced he was paying back £6,000 for furniture he had bought to kit out his second home (Jon Swaine was swiftly tasked with looking at his expenses claims to turn around a story for the next day’s paper).
So far, the Daily Telegraph had exposed greed, excess, hypocrisy and cupidity. What it exposed next would border on the downright criminal.
The Phantom Mortgage
Wednesday, 13 May
CHAPTER 16
IN A NONDESCRIPT office block overlooking the Mersey, the staff of the Land Registry’s Birkenhead division were among the first people outside the Telegraph’s bunker room to get a hint that something was brewing in the days before the first stories were published.
The civil servants working in this government agency provide one of the most valuable services of all to journalists carrying out investigations into an individual’s finances, as they hold public records on the ownership and mortgage details of millions of properties dating back several decades. For a small fee, any member of the public can get hold of information on who owns a particular property and, if it changed hands in recent years, how much they paid for it. Copies of mortgage documents held for the property can also be accessed, and, since a recent change in the law, the details of previous owners and their mortgage arrangements are also publicly available. It amounts to an absolute gold mine for reporters; and for the expenses team, it was invaluable.
In the days after the Telegraph obtained the expenses disk, one of the most regular callers to the Land Registry’s customer information service had been Holly Watt. Watt had been given the task of compiling a list of the past and present addresses of all 646 MPs, which would provide a unique database against which their second-home claims could be compared. Once the information had been keyed into a spreadsheet, any MPs who might be claiming for the same address – as it had been rumoured some were – would quickly be found out. But having the addresses was only the start. What if an MP was claiming for an entirely fictitious address? What if they were claiming for a property they didn’t actually own? What if they were claiming more for their mortgage interest than they actually paid? The only way to find out was to delve into the Land Registry’s records to establish whether the MPs’ claims tallied with the public records held in Birkenhead.
Watt ran up a bill for thousands of pounds on her credit card (and later claimed it back on expenses, naturally) as she carried out hundreds of searches. The work was tedious and time-consuming, but it gave her a unique overview of all the MPs’ claims; and out of all these claims she had spotted several relating to mortgage interest payments which, on the face of it at least, didn’t seem quite right.
Working on a laptop computer, Watt had set up a spreadsheet which listed MPs’ names, the addresses of properties on which they had claimed, whether each was rented or mortgaged, and notes of other points about their claims. By the middle of the second week in the bunker, she had reached the letter ‘I’ in her list of MPs when she had a potential breakthrough. As she typed in the address of the second home of Ian Cawsey, an obscure Labour MP (the Firestorm disk listed MPs according to the first letter of their first name), a box popped up on her screen with the rest of the address. This ‘auto-complete’ function meant she had already typed in the address for another MP.
‘Bingo!’ Watt shouted across the office.
Scrolling back up through the spreadsheet, Watt found that Cawsey’s London address was shared with Elliot Morley, another Labour MP and a former agriculture minister. Morley was paying the mortgage on the house and claiming back the interest on his parliamentary expenses – but Cawsey was paying rent to him and claiming the rent back on his parliamentary expenses. In other words, the taxpayer was being billed twice for the same property. Morley had also spent several years claiming expenses for a property in his Humberside constituency before ‘flipping’ his second-home designation to London in November 2007; he even appeared to have attempted to claim for a £14,000 wet-room (an upmarket type of bathroom) to be installed in the London property in 2008.
Clearly, Watt thought, this was going to require furt
her investigation.
A quick search of the men’s names on Google revealed that they were long-standing allies and friends. Cawsey used to work as a researcher for Morley before he became an MP, and represented the neighbouring constituency to his former employer’s. The pair lived in the same small Humberside village and their children played with one another. Now, it appeared, they were also claiming expenses for the same London property.
It was time to phone the Land Registry. Watt felt strangely tense as she picked up the receiver, sensing that it might be one of the most important calls of her career.
‘Morning, it’s Holly Watt here again,’ she breezily said as a familiar female voice answered the phone in Birkenhead. ‘Sorry, couple more checks to do.’
Watt gave the civil servant the address of Morley’s London house.
‘That’s owned by an Elliot and Patricia Morley. There’s a charge [mortgage] on it with Nationwide,’ the official said.
‘Great, thanks,’ replied Watt. ‘Sorry, just one more – a house in Winterton, near Scunthorpe – the address is—’
‘Yes, got that as well,’ the Land Registry official said. ‘Also owned by an Elliot and Patricia Morley. No mortgage on that one since March 2006.’
No Expenses Spared Page 20