As another momentous day in the bunker drew to a close, Richard Oliver, the Telegraph’s production chief, who began each evening’s work by announcing in gung-ho tones, ‘Let’s get this show on the road,’ was putting the finishing touches to perhaps the strongest front page the team had yet produced. ‘MP who claimed £16,000 for mortgage that did not exist,’ shouted the headline, accompanied by a vast photograph of Elliot Morley.
William Lewis, who had arrived back in the office from Milan late in the afternoon to oversee the Morley story, looked over Oliver’s shoulder. ‘Cracking stuff,’ the editor said. ‘I should go away more often!’
Part of the bunker’s routine was for Oliver to print off proof copies of each page of the next day’s paper so that the reporters could check the stories before they went to press. At 10 p.m., after Watt had signed off her copy of the front page, she headed for the bar of the Thistle to unwind, and began to dwell on the events of the day. She was well aware that her article would at best destroy Morley’s career and at worst put him in gaol. Watt took out her BlackBerry and emailed her best friend, a serving member of the armed forces who was in Afghanistan at the time. ‘Miss you,’ she said. ‘Have been working on horrible story today and the MP has gone completely to pieces. I think he is in really serious trouble. It is v sad actually.’
Watt’s friend emailed straight back. ‘Remember – no one made him break the rules,’ she wrote. ‘He should know what is right and wrong.’
Watt’s friend was to be married shortly, and the regular communication between the pair over the details of the wedding helped restore some sense of normality to the reporter’s world. The next day, in between discussions about sash colours and marquees, Watt’s friend wrote a couple of serious lines recalling the previous night’s exchange. ‘It may be hard for the families of those that are getting caught now but you may just have created the circumstances that lead to a different type of politician for the next decade.’
By then Morley had been suspended from the Labour Party. He went on the defensive, blaming his phantom mortgage claim on ‘sloppy accounting’ and saying he had not realized he had paid off his mortgage (prompting many observers to comment that he must be the first homeowner in the world to pay off their mortgage without realizing it). In the following weeks, he would announce his decision not to stand as a Labour MP at the next election and repay almost £40,000 for his mortgage overclaims, which had involved far more than the £16,000 uncovered by the Telegraph. In the weeks that followed, Morley’s claims would also come under the investigation of the Metropolitan Police.
The Resignations Begin
Thursday, 14 May
CHAPTER 17
IN WESTMINSTER, SPECULATION about who would be next in the Telegraph’s spotlight was reaching fever pitch and generating a plethora of rumours, some of which were wildly off the mark. Many of the rumours were fed by political blogs – internet gossip sites which follow the machinations of Parliament and politicians on an hourly basis.
One such rumour doing the rounds on Thursday,14 May was that the Telegraph was about to focus on the expenses claims made by husband-and-wife MPs. According to one version of events, Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper, Labour’s ‘golden couple’ who both had high-profile ministerial jobs, had successfully taken out an injunction to prevent the Telegraph revealing any details of their expenses (they hadn’t). Another suggestion was that the Telegraph had uncovered several examples of married MPs ‘double-dipping’ – meaning they had each claimed for a different address on expenses, enabling them to subsidize two houses with taxpayers’ money. In fact, the Telegraph had done some preliminary checks on married MPs, but it had not found any widespread evidence of ‘double-dipping’ and was not intending to run stories on married MPs imminently.
Not that the married MPs were to know that. As the parliamentary rumour mill amplified the story, the couples became increasingly jittery. Among them were Andrew MacKay and Julie Kirkbride, Conservative MPs for Bracknell, in Berkshire, and Bromsgrove, in Worcestershire, respectively. Alone among husband-and-wife MPs, they had indeed been guilty of double-dipping. MacKay had claimed a second-home allowance for the couple’s home in London, while Kirkbride had claimed for a flat in her constituency. In total, the pair had received well over £100,000 in taxpayer-funded expenses, and they were now worrying that their claims were about to feature on the front page of the next day’s Daily Telegraph.
MacKay was in a particularly awkward position, as he was a senior parliamentary adviser to David Cameron, a member of the Tory leader’s inner circle. Cameron had followed up his brutal response to the expenses claims of his Shadow Cabinet earlier in the week by attacking Gordon Brown at Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday and accusing him of having a ‘tin ear’ over the public’s anger. With his boss leading the moral charge against dubious expenses claims, MacKay was dreading a call from the Telegraph.
Part of MacKay’s daily routine was to attend strategy meetings with Cameron and his top team at nine fifteen every morning, and that Thursday would be no different, apart from the fact that Cameron was otherwise engaged that day and William Hague, the shadow foreign secretary, was standing in for him by chairing the meeting.
The Conservatives, in common with the other political parties, were desperate to get ahead of the expenses story and demonstrate that they were in control of the situation, and the strategy meetings had started to resemble emergency planning meetings where responses to different scenarios involving MPs’ expenses could be discussed. The rumour about ‘double-dipping’ featuring in the next day’s Telegraph had reached Conservative high command, so Hague asked MacKay what the phrase meant. Without giving any indication of his inner turmoil, Mackay calmly explained to Hague that some married MPs had apparently been claiming expenses on two different properties at the same time. He made no mention of the fact that he and his wife had done exactly that. But as MacKay returned to his office after the meeting, the burden of the secret he was carrying was beginning to eat away at him. He was facing a simple choice: either come clean and tell Cameron straight away about his expenses claims, or wait until the Telegraph did it for him. Either way, MacKay was rapidly coming to the conclusion that his ambition of becoming a minister in a David Cameron government was over.
Earlier in the week, MacKay had told his local paper in Bracknell that he had nothing to fear from the Telegraph’s expenses investigation. ‘I have checked through all my expenses claims over the past four years and there is nothing that stands out – I am confident there is nothing unreasonable in there at all,’ he said. The conversation about double-dipping had made him think again. Within minutes of coming out of the meeting, he had picked up the phone to Cameron to explain what he and his wife had done. Cameron decided the couple’s claims were ‘unacceptable’. MacKay didn’t need to be told what to do; he immediately tendered his resignation from his position as Cameron’s adviser. In doing so, MacKay became the first MP to resign from any job as a result of the expenses row, even though his claims had not featured in the Daily Telegraph.
Back in the bunker, there was a certain amount of bemusement at the fact that the first casualty of the investigation was someone who had not been in the paper, while other MPs, who had been guilty of equally questionable claims, were still in their posts.
‘Well,’ said Chris Evans. ‘I suppose this means we’re going to have to do the couples tomorrow!’
Although the investigation team had made some preliminary checks on the expenses of married couples, they had not yet been looked at in detail, as there had been so many other stories to get out of the way first.
Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper, whose expenses claims had been the subject of such frenzied speculation among parliamentary gossips, failed to live up to the rumour mill’s hype. Although Cooper had flipped the designation of her second home from her constituency home in Castleford, West Yorkshire, to the couple’s London home after her husband joined her in Parliament in 2005, the couple
had, on the whole, been scrupulous in splitting the bills for their London home 50/50. The Telegraph published a straightforward story about their flipping, which managed to enrage both the bloggers (who claimed the Telegraph had let Balls and Cooper off the hook) and the two MPs (who complained vociferously that they had been treated unduly harshly and had not flipped their homes).
The Telegraph also looked again at the claims of Alan and Ann Keen, Labour MPs for adjacent constituencies in west London, who had been dubbed ‘Mr and Mrs Expenses’ by the press after a whole string of previous stories about their claims. The couple had bought a £500,000 flat within walking distance of Parliament, and claimed back the mortgage interest after nominating it as their second home, even though their ‘main’ home in Brentford was less than 10 miles away, just a 30-minute commute from Westminster. Incredibly, their claims were within the parliamentary rules because their constituencies were both classed as being in outer London, making them eligible to claim for a second home.
Peter and Iris Robinson, Democratic Unionist MPs who represented constituencies in Northern Ireland, had claimed a total of £159,208 in allowances between 2004 and 2008 for a Thames-side flat, including £30,525 for food alone. In 2007/8 the couple, who were paid separate wages and expenses for their second jobs as members of the Northern Ireland Assembly, had received between them a total of £571,939 in salaries and expenses in 2007/8 from their jobs in Westminster and Northern Ireland.
The final parliamentary couple were the Tory MPs Sir Nicholas and Lady Ann Winterton, who had claimed more than £80,000 in rent for a small London flat which was owned by a trust controlled by their children. The arrangement had been criticized by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards the previous year, when it had received widespread media coverage.
MacKay’s decision to resign, together with the announcement later that day of Elliot Morley’s suspension from the Labour Party, saw the bunker’s ‘wall of glory’ turned into a rogue’s gallery. Hazel Blears, with her £13,000 cheque, already adorned the magnetic wall, and now she was to be joined by portraits of MacKay and Morley. Over the coming days, more MPs would step down or announce their decisions to retire, and as the number of portraits grew, the wall began to resemble an evidence board from a television cop show. Matthew Bayley was particularly pleased with the result. ‘Excellent. It’s just like The Wire!’ he said as he admired the overall effect. Bayley, in common with half the newsroom, had become addicted to watching boxed DVD sets of the US drama said to be President Obama’s favourite television programme. It featured a Baltimore Police Department ‘detail’ whose detectives pinned up pictures of suspects and copies of documents on a board as they made connections between members of a major drug ring. As Bayley warmed to the theme, the reporters in the bunker became ‘the detail’ and anyone who failed would be threatened with returning to ‘the rotation’ – cop-speak for working rostered shifts.
Back in the real world, real policemen were still considering the complaint from the Speaker about the leaking of the MPs’ expenses. William Lewis still harboured concerns that the authorities would find a way to ‘close down’ the investigation, in his words, either through the police or through the courts. His decision to publish the expenses claims of so many MPs in such a short space of time was driven in part by his belief that the newspaper should get as much material in the public domain as quickly as it could in case of an attempt to shut down the operation.
But the middle of May would provide another of the many watershed moments in the investigation. It was at this point that Lewis received information from a highly placed source that the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, had decided not to launch an investigation into the leak. Furthermore, the source also told Lewis that Sir Paul was considering investigating the MPs themselves. The news came as an enormous relief, and gave the editor renewed confidence as he pressed on with the campaign.
More than 200 miles away, a dramatic indication of the public mood was about to be played out on national television. The BBC was about to broadcast the first Question Time since the Telegraph had started publishing its revelations about MPs’ expenses, and the venue was to be a technical college in Grimsby. Among the guests who had been invited on to the panel was Benedict Brogan, the Daily Telegraph’s recently recruited political commentator. As the Andrew MacKay saga was developing in London, Brogan was on a train to Lincolnshire, having decided to get to Grimsby early so he could sample the mood on the streets.
Grimsby had been the busiest fishing port in the world as recently as the 1950s and remained proudly working-class, employing thousands of people in food-processing factories, in its container port and at the nearby chemical works in Immingham. There could hardly have been a worse place for a group of politicians to have to face a live studio audience to explain, in the middle of a recession, why they and their colleagues had been throwing around taxpayers’ money on fripperies like silk cushions and plasma TVs.
Brogan was first to arrive in the makeshift green room at the college, and sat transfixed as he watched television footage of motorists driving past Elliot Morley’s house in nearby Scunthorpe, beeping their horns and shaking their fists.
‘Ah, the Antichrist,’ said a voice behind him. It was Sir Menzies Campbell, the 68-year-old former Liberal Democrat leader, who had arrived with the shadow work and pensions secretary Theresa May. Although the urbane Sir Menzies was as friendly as ever towards Brogan, he had clearly been bruised by the disclosures about his expenses revealed in the previous day’s Telegraph. The evening’s other panellists, the Labour minister Margaret Beckett, whose claims had featured on day one of the Telegraph’s expenses files, and Steve Easterbrook, chief executive of McDonald’s UK, followed shortly afterwards.
The awkward small talk in the green room was interrupted by a producer, who told the guests: ‘Just to let you know, all of the questions submitted by the audience tonight were about expenses. There weren’t any questions about anything else, which has never happened before, so the whole programme will be about expenses.’ It was clearly going to be a long night for the MPs.
The show’s presenter and chairman, David Dimbleby, was first into the tightly packed auditorium, a few minutes before filming was due to begin. In keeping with his usual practice, he introduced each of the panellists to the audience in turn, inviting them to walk on to the stage and take their seat so that the panel would be seated and ready to go when the cameras started filming.
‘Please welcome our first guest, the minister of state for housing and planning, Margaret Beckett.’
‘Boo!!!’ shouted the audience, with an unmistakable air of menace.
Theresa May received the same treatment; then it was the turn of Sir Menzies (commonly known as Ming), one of the most respected MPs in Parliament. ‘Boo!!!’ came the response from the audience, whose anger only seemed to be increasing.
Sir Menzies looked crestfallen as he made his way across the stage, and Brogan, still off-stage, turned to a producer and raised his eyebrows. The producer was starting to look worried.
‘They’ve booed Ming!’ she gasped. ‘They never boo Ming!’
Finally it was Brogan’s turn to be introduced – and this time there were cheers and applause from the audience. Brogan felt a blush rising from his collar.
If the MPs on the panel, or any of those watching on television at home, had any remaining doubts about the level of public fury over the expenses scandal, they were finally put to bed by the unbroken hostility of the audience throughout the hour-long show. As Beckett, Campbell and May tried to placate the audience, they were repeatedly heckled and barracked with shouts of ‘Resign!’ and ‘You think you’re above the law!’ and ‘You think you’re better than us!’ Brogan was so alarmed by what he was seeing that he began to worry that the audience, by now taking on the air of a lynch mob, might rush the stage, and producers later told him they had considered calling in security guards for the first time in the show’s history.
For the BBC the show was a ratings triumph, attracting a peak of four million viewers – the highest audience for seven years (aside from a general election special in 2005).
For the watching MPs, it represented a watershed moment: they could no longer credibly argue that the expenses story was anything other than a full-scale disaster for the political class. It was becoming clear that Andrew MacKay and Elliot Morley would be the first of many casualties. Within hours, one of those casualties would be a government minister.
The Justice Minister, his House and ‘Osama bin Laden’
Friday, 15 May
CHAPTER 18
THE QUESTIONABLE EXPENSES claims of Shahid Malik, a junior justice minister, were originally pencilled in to be covered by the Telegraph on day two of the investigation, along with those of other ministers including Phil Woolas and Ben Bradshaw. Had the Telegraph stuck to its original plan, Malik’s claims might have been lost in the mix, in the same way that Jack Straw, Alistair Darling and others had been able to rely on ‘safety in numbers’ at that point in the proceedings. In the first few days of the investigation, too, ministers could count on the Prime Minister for his support, as Gordon Brown viewed the entire story as a right-wing conspiracy and was in no mood to satisfy the public’s cries for heads to roll.
But the Telegraph had held back from publishing Malik’s expenses claims, because the more Robert Winnett had looked into them, the more complicated they had become. Like that of Elliot Morley, Shahid Malik’s case would require a considerable amount of further investigation before the Telegraph could be sure it had got to the bottom of the story. It was Malik’s great misfortune that, by the time the Telegraph was ready to publish his claims a week into the investigation, he could no longer use the fig-leaf of other ministers’ spivvy behaviour, and the Prime Minister was no longer minded to turn a blind eye.
No Expenses Spared Page 22