That left Rayner with just one other candidate for the Speaker’s job to investigate – the Conservative backbencher John Bercow. At forty-six, Bercow was not only the youngest of the Speakership candidates but also the most unlikely. Despite being a Tory, Bercow had virtually no supporters on the Conservative benches, where he was seen as something of a traitor. He had started his political career on the far right, calling for ‘assisted repatriation’ of immigrants in his twenties and professing his admiration for Enoch Powell. After entering Parliament in 1997 he had gradually moved towards the centre of politics and had twice been given frontbench posts, only to fall out with the two party leaders who promoted him, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard.
After returning to the back benches, Bercow had repeatedly criticized party leaders, and following his marriage in 2002 to the Labour-supporting Sally Illman (a woman so much taller than him that they tended to pose for pictures sitting down) he had veered so far towards the left that many of his colleagues thought he was about to ‘cross the floor’ and defect to Labour. One senior Conservative dryly noted: ‘The problem with John Bercow is that he discovered sex and New Labour at the same time.’ He had even accepted a request from Gordon Brown to carry out a review of children’s educational needs, which was seen by Bercow’s critics as little more than a declaration of his intent to swap sides.
The only reason Bercow was being talked about at all as a potential Speaker was that, after two Labour Speakers, there was huge pressure on the government to let another party have a turn and, as a left-leaning Tory disliked by his own party, Bercow represented the least bad option in the eyes of some Labour MPs. It was the worst possible reason for someone to be in with a shot at one of the most important jobs in Westminster, and it made Bercow something of a ‘joke’ candidate in the opinion of many political observers.
Rayner expected Bercow’s expenses to be pretty straightforward, particularly in the light of a letter Bercow had written to the Labour MP Martin Salter (shortly to become his campaign manager) in which he declared his intention to run for the post, saying: ‘I am asking people to vote not for a Conservative but for a Speaker who has what it takes to restore trust in Parliament and politicians.’ Clearly, anyone who believed they could restore the public’s trust in politicians must have been supremely confident that their own expenses claims would not attract any adverse comment.
Not for the first time in his life, Rayner was to be reminded that making assumptions is a dangerous habit in journalism. As he scanned Bercow’s expenses claims, he discovered that the MP had flipped his second-home designation from his constituency house to a £540,000 flat in London, and back again. Land Registry checks showed he had also bought and sold properties both in London and in his constituency in 2003. Had he paid capital gains tax on the sale of either property? Rayner sent an email to the MP to ask.
Seven hours later Bercow replied, but his answer was frustratingly vague. He said that ‘so far as I can remember’ his constituency home was his nominated second home at the time of both sales, and his accountant had told him at the time there was ‘no chargeable gain’ on the profit from the sale. Rayner pressed him for more detail, and Bercow said he would seek ‘written confirmation’ from his accountant the next day.
On Thursday the Telegraph ran a page five story headlined ‘Would-be Speaker is another “flipper”’, but Rayner, and news editor Matthew Bayley, felt Bercow still had questions to answer on the issue of capital gains tax. So the following day Rayner chased up Bercow, sending him an email asking him to obtain the ‘written confirmation’ he had talked about. For nine and a half hours Bercow maintained a stony silence, much to Rayner’s frustration.
‘Anything from Bercow yet?’ Bayley kept asking. Because it was a Friday, articles had to be ready earlier than usual so the presses could start rolling early enough to print the bulky Saturday edition. With plenty of other stories already taking shape, it was looking increasingly likely that the pursuit of Bercow would have to be carried over to the following week.
‘It looks like Bercow’s trying to avoid us,’ Rayner reported back to Bayley. ‘His staff say he’s going to reply but they’ve been saying that for hours.’
Finally, at 7.21 p.m., by which time the next day’s completed paper was ready to be printed, Rayner received an emailed reply from Bercow.
‘Bollocks!’ Rayner hissed. ‘Bercow’s replied. Can we still get it in?’
‘We might be able to squeeze a few pars in,’ replied Bayley. ‘What’s he say?’
Bercow admitted that, during the course of 2003, ‘I did make changes in the designation of my main and second homes as a result of which capital gains tax was not payable.’
In other words, he had avoided paying CGT, perfectly legally, just as Hazel Blears had so controversially done.
Bercow went on to say that he had decided to pay £6,508.40 to HM Revenue & Customs, plus interest, in lieu of the CGT he might have paid if he had been required to do so by the taxman.
Rayner felt that admitting to flipping his homes and avoiding paying capital gains tax in the process would be curtains for Bercow’s already slim chances of making it to the Speaker’s chair, given his previous bluster about his ability to restore public trust. But he was frustrated that the MP’s late response – which he saw as a deliberate ploy to run down the clock – meant that the story would be buried. Production chief Richard Oliver managed to find space on page seven for four paragraphs about Bercow’s admission and his CGT payment, but Rayner was smarting over the fact that, in his eyes, he had been outwitted by the MP, whose story would have been given much greater prominence if he had replied earlier in the day, before the pages had been laid out.
‘Bloody Bercow,’ Rayner grumbled to Bayley as they left the office together an hour later. ‘I suppose the only consolation is that everyone’ll have forgotten who he is by this time next month.’
Keeping It in the Family
Friday, 22 May
CHAPTER 21
THREE WEEKS INTO the investigation, the reporters in the bunker were getting increasingly used to receiving letters and emails from readers who wanted to see their local MPs’ expenses featured next in the pages of the Daily Telegraph, many of them making serious allegations about what the correspondent believed their MP had been up to. A lot of these letters amounted to no more than idle gossip and pub talk, but a few contained valuable nuggets of information from genuine insiders which made the reporters look anew at the expenses claims of certain Members who had, on the face of it, done nothing hugely interesting.
An email which arrived in reporter Gordon Rayner’s inbox on Tuesday, 19 May fell squarely into the latter category. Concise and to the point, it began:
I have recently been told that Dr Ian Gibson MP (Lab; Norwich North) is apparently quite frantic with worry that attention will be brought to bear upon his second home expenses claims, in case it is revealed that the London flat he bought in approximately 2000 (or possibly 2002) was seemingly primarily for the use of his daughter, Helen, who has lived there with her artist boyfriend ever since, as far as I am aware.
The emailer, who wished to remain anonymous, then provided other information about Dr Gibson which left Rayner in little doubt that the correspondent had a genuine working knowledge of the MP’s financial affairs.
‘This looks good,’ he told Winnett, whose head bobbed up from his computer screen to make eye contact with the reporter opposite him. ‘Do you know an Ian Gibson?’
‘Yeah, Labour MP?’
‘According to this, he’s used his expenses to buy a flat for his daughter.’
Rayner was already working on a lengthy feature about the downfall of Speaker Martin, so Holly Watt offered to look into Gibson’s property deals. As she delved into his expenses claims, Watt soon discovered that the west London flat on which Gibson had been claiming expenses had indeed been shared between the MP, his daughter and another man. However, in 2008 the flat was apparently sold by Gib
son to his daughter and her boyfriend for £162,000.
‘Seems rather cheap for a nice flat in that part of London,’ said Watt. A quick check of Land Registry records and a couple of phone calls to local estate agents quickly established that similar flats in the same area were selling for around twice that amount at the relevant time. Gibson had claimed almost £80,000 from the taxpayer to help pay the mortgage interest on the flat before selling it on to his daughter for half its market value. It was one of the most clear-cut cases of what the Telegraph team had dubbed ‘keeping it in the family’ – MPs using the parliamentary expenses system to give their children or other relatives a leg-up on the property ladder.
And that wasn’t all. Earlier that week, Gibson had trumpeted the fact that he had voluntarily published his expenses online on his own website; but large swathes of the documents had been blacked out – including anything which would disclose the financial deal involving his daughter. It was an ominous sign of the widespread cover-up to come.
When contacted by the Telegraph, Gibson was among the most open and frank over his arrangements of any of the MPs the paper had approached. He freely admitted that he spent only three nights a week at the address and that it was his daughter’s ‘main home’. He then said that he would discuss standing down with his local Labour Party.
His subsequent treatment by the Labour Party served as a perfect illustration of the seemingly arbitrary way in which MPs were punished for their misdemeanours. Before he had a chance to consider his future, Gibson was referred to Labour’s version of the ‘star chamber’ and told he would not be allowed to stand as a Labour candidate at the next election. In effect, he had been fired by the Labour Party. The party was well within its rights to discipline the MP, but many observers wondered why Gibson’s expenses claims were any worse than those of Hazel Blears, Alistair Darling or other prominent figures who had escaped censure. Many of Gibson’s supporters in Norwich – where he had been a popular MP – believed he had been harshly disciplined because he was a long-standing opponent of the Prime Minister, having been one of only a handful of Labour MPs who had refused to endorse Brown’s campaign to become the party’s leader.
While every other MP who had announced the end of their career had decided they would not stand again at the next general election, Gibson took the honourable decision to stand down straight away. In doing so, he would not only save the taxpayer the cost of employing him for another year, but also waived the right to a large redundancy payment, worth a year’s salary (paid to all outgoing MPs at a general election). Many voters in Norwich applauded Gibson’s principled stand, but it was the worst possible news for Gordon Brown. It meant there would have to be a by-election – the first since the expenses story had broken. When the election eventually came around in July, it was a disaster for Labour. The party lost the seat to the Conservatives and saw its share of the vote slump from more than 40 per cent in 2005 to just 18 per cent. Many local Labour activists refused to campaign on behalf of Chris Ostrowski, the candidate the party had lined up to replace Gibson. And then, in the days before the poll, Ostrowski caught swine flu, sparking jokes about MPs, pigs and troughs. Bizarrely, however, Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats failed to capitalize on the scandal; indeed, their showing in the polls had actually dipped slightly, despite their MPs avoiding the worst of the controversy.
If Gibson had been stabbed in the back by his Labour bosses, other MPs seemed intent on killing off their careers without the help of anyone else. Chief among them was Nadine Dorries, a relatively obscure Conservative MP who had previously clashed with reporter Martin Beckford after she provided inconsistent answers over the location of her ‘main’ home. On the day Ian Gibson’s expenses claims were published, Dorries, the MP for Mid Bedfordshire, made a spectacularly ill-judged attempt to garner public sympathy just as the public’s anger with MPs was reaching its peak.
Addressing listeners to the Today programme, Dorries said: ‘People are seriously beginning to crack. The last day in Parliament this week was, I would say, completely unbearable. I have never been in an atmosphere or environment like it, when people walk around with terror in their eyes and people are genuinely concerned, asking: “Have you seen so and so? Are they in their office? They’ve not been seen for days.”
‘There’s a really serious concern that this has got to a point now which is almost unbearable for any human being to deal with.’
Her self-pitying comments enraged listeners, who bombarded the BBC with hostile emails. One said: ‘I listened with incredulity to the bleating of Nadine Dorries on how MPs are near to cracking because they have milked the system. I’m near to cracking, working forty hours a week and looking after a disabled husband.’
Dorries’ comments were backed up by a posting on her blog, where she laid the blame for MPs’ despair squarely at the feet of those nasty Telegraph journalists who had dared to tell the public what their money was being spent on. ‘The technique deployed by the Telegraph, picking off a few MPs each day, emailing at 12, giving five hours notice to reply … is amounting to a form of torture and may have serious consequences,’ she wrote.
MPs are human beings like everyone else. They have families too. McCarthyite witch hunts belong to the past, not the present. As do archaic, cowardly, methods of pay. If MPs are guilty, so are those who knew the system was in place, including the Telegraph journalists who have now decided for their own political reasons to expose the system, in a way which profits the Telegraph, for their own reasons.
The blog was read with a mixture of bemusement and shock by senior Conservative Party officials. David Cameron moved to distance himself from his backbench colleague, letting it be known through aides that he regarded Dorries’ comments as ‘barmy’. The Conservative leader then added: ‘Of course MPs are concerned about what is happening but, frankly, MPs ought to be concerned about what their constituents think and ought to be worrying about the people who put us where we are.’ It was a withering rebuke for Dorries.
Bizarrely, the Church of England also appeared determined to ignore public opinion and defend MPs. Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote a piece for The Times in which he criticized the ‘witch-hunt’ of MPs.
‘Many will now be wondering whether the point has not been adequately made,’ the Archbishop wrote. ‘The continuing systematic humiliation of politicians itself threatens to carry a heavy price in terms of our ability to salvage some confidence in our democracy.’
The comments led to a furious – and virtually entirely negative – response from readers of The Times, many of whom had begun reading the Telegraph during the expenses scandal.
Following the announcement by the Metropolitan Police that it would not be investigating the leak of MPs’ expenses to the Daily Telegraph, the newspaper was about to pull off yet another surprise. John Wick had agreed to ‘out’ himself by talking publicly for the first time about his role in the leak and the reasons behind the decision to give the material to a newspaper. It was a high-risk, but calculated, gamble. Although the police had ruled out a criminal investigation, the admission by Wick that he was involved would put him in the public eye and possibly drag him into lengthy parliamentary inquiries. However, with other newspapers still pursuing him and increasingly anxious that his reputation was being sullied, Wick decided to push ahead. He also decided to give a short television interview with Telegraph TV, an internet-based channel designed to complement the newspaper, which could be released to broadcasters. The interview was recorded on Thursday, 21 May, when Wick and his partner Tania visited the Telegraph’s headquarters. They had been given a private guided tour of the open-plan office, their identities known only to a handful of people at the newspaper.
In his article – headlined ‘I am proud to have played my part in exposing this scandal’ – Wick explained the decision to hand the information to the Telegraph:
As a former military man, I have been in some pretty tricky situations … I took le
gal advice. It appeared that there were some very grey areas and it could be that the police would want to investigate if I was identified as the person who orchestrated the release of the information. My military training had, however, prepared me for far worse than a police cell – and the public interest in this information being published was clear and compelling.
He concluded: ‘I have played my part in history. It is now for others to decide on the best way to move forward and punish those who have been exposed.’
During his television interview – conducted by Guy Ruddle, the Telegraph’s head of visuals – Wick was asked what it was like watching as the scandal that he had triggered unfolded. ‘The biggest problem was not knowing how violent the writhing of the snake was going to be,’ he replied. The clip was to be played on television channels throughout the world.
The team who had produced the video brought an edited version of the interview to show Lewis on a laptop in his office. He was delighted by the composure of the whistleblower. ‘Very Telegraph,’ he said approvingly. Wick, meanwhile, was preparing to leave his home again for the second time in a month. He had decided to lie low in a sedate Sussex town for the weekend after being warned that his interview would be likely to spark a renewed spate of media interest. But at the last moment, the carefully laid plan to release the interview almost fell apart.
No Expenses Spared Page 27