By 1 a.m. a survival plan was largely in place. The reshuffle had been torn up, Darling and Jack Straw had been told they would keep their jobs, and it seemed the Prime Minister might just cling on. Brown went to bed for a few hours’ sleep while Mandelson remained for a short while to make a couple more calls.
By 6.30 a.m. the Prime Minister was back in the ‘war room’ to finish the reshuffle. The first visitor – before the cleaners had even arrived – was Harriet Harman, Labour’s deputy leader, who was assured her position was secure. However, by the end of the day Mandelson would be installed as ‘First Secretary of State’, in effect Deputy Prime Minister. Then came the Chancellor, who had already told his wife Margaret that he would not accept another government job. Brown could not risk Darling going to the back benches. He too was safe. But Brown’s plans for the rest of the Cabinet would soon have to be shredded on another day of shock resignations.
As the investigation team assembled in the bunker, there was only one topic of discussion: could Brown survive the day?
‘I reckon he’s finished,’ Nick Allen said.
‘What do you think?’ Gammell asked Winnett. ‘Are we going to end up bringing down the government?’
‘If there’s any more resignations I think that’ll be it,’ Winnett replied.
‘It’s history in the making, you know,’ Prince mused. ‘I just can’t believe this is happening.’
Turning to the magnetic wall, by now covered with pictures of MPs who had resigned, Rayner said: ‘We’d better get a picture of the Prime Minister printed off, just in case.’
Within an hour, the mood had changed again. David Miliband had been interviewed as he left his house, and had given his support to the Prime Minister. Perhaps, then, there was no organized coup after all, and Purnell had shot his bolt for nothing.
But then came news of another resignation. John Hutton, the defence secretary, had decided he wanted to leave Parliament at the next election and was to step down from the Cabinet straight away. Although he issued a statement in support of Brown, the minister was known to be sceptical about the PM’s abilities and his exit from government while British troops were heavily engaged in Afghanistan looked bad. As renewed talk of a coup swept Westminster, Brown tried to seize the initiative by carrying out the reshuffle he had sketched out only hours before. It didn’t go according to plan. The steady stream of resignations was about to turn into a flood.
Geoff Hoon, another of the longest-serving Cabinet ministers, was one of the first into No. 10. The transport secretary had told the Prime Minister a year previously that he wanted an ‘international role’. However, there were no vacancies. Hoon told Brown he too would be resigning, but he decided not to cause a stir. His friend Darling was safe and the prospect of becoming the next European Commissioner was still on the table. He resigned to the back benches and offered his support.
Margaret Beckett, the former foreign secretary who had rejoined the government as housing minister just months before, was disgruntled at not being offered a Cabinet position. She also decided to leave government (and later made an unsuccessful bid to become the next Speaker). However, she too did not go on the attack.
Paul Murphy, the Welsh secretary, and Tony McNulty, employment minister, also decided they wanted to return to the back benches.
At one stage, for those watching at home and in offices up and down the country, it seemed as though it was impossible even to pop to the loo without missing another ministerial resignation. By mid-afternoon, the number of ministers who had resigned since Tuesday of that week stood at ten. Crucially, however, none of those who resigned on reshuffle day had openly criticized the Prime Minister or called on him to stand down.
Brown and his team managed to put together a patched-up Cabinet, finding new faces to fill the vacancies left by those who wanted out. The Prime Minister decided it was time to face the media, and summoned reporters to Downing Street for a press conference to begin at 5 p.m.
As the journalists looked through a printed list of the new Cabinet, several noticed a glaring omission. Caroline Flint, the Europe minister often described as ‘Parliament’s most glamorous MP’, was missing from the list. Had she simply been forgotten? Had she resigned? What was going on? Flint had been one of Brown’s most steadfast supporters during the crisis, and had even rushed out to make a statement of support on live television the previous evening, criticizing Purnell’s resignation.
In fact, even as the media were gathering outside No. 10 for the press conference, she was discussing her future with the Prime Minister. She had been expecting a major promotion as a reward for her loyalty. But Brown wanted her to remain as Europe minister, albeit with the offer of a full place in the Cabinet. Flint declined the offer and left, seething.
Minutes later, Brown arrived at the lectern in the briefing room looking shaken. His voice trembled as he vowed to fight on.
‘If I didn’t think I was the right person to lead these challenges I would not be standing here,’ he said to the assembled press. ‘I have faith in doing my duty … I believe in never walking away in difficult times. I will not waver. I will not walk away. I will get on with the job.’
Outside the press conference, however, all hell was breaking loose. Flint had released a resignation letter, and it was the most incendiary yet.
‘You have a two-tier government, your inner circle and then the remainder of Cabinet,’ she wrote in the letter to Brown, which the Prime Minister had not yet seen. ‘Several of the women attending Cabinet – myself included – have been treated by you as little more than female window dressing.’
Within moments, the BlackBerries of the reporters inside the press conference began vibrating.
‘Why has Caroline Flint resigned and said you think women are window dressing?’ demanded one reporter.
Brown staggered back a step, as if absorbing a physical blow, before insisting that there were still plenty of women in Cabinet.
‘Besides, I am delighted to announce we have a very strong candidate for Europe minister: Glenys Kinnock,’ he added.
Glenys Kinnock? The reporters in the press conference looked at each other, incredulous. Had they misheard? The wife of former Labour leader Neil Kinnock had spent the previous few years making a tidy living as an MEP, having never sat in Parliament. Had Brown just said he was parachuting her into the government?
‘Are you telling us you cannot find a single candidate to be minister for Europe out of 350 MPs?’ asked one reporter. He certainly was. And there were more surprises to come. Sir Alan Sugar, the star of the television show The Apprentice, was to be given a peerage and a post as ‘enterprise tsar’. The news was greeted with disbelieving stares, followed by laughter.
It had been another disastrous day for the Prime Minister – but he had survived, against all odds, through a combination of sheer stubbornness and the Labour Party’s utter inability to get rid of leaders.
‘If this had been the Tories, Brown would have been gone three times over,’ observed Holly Watt in the bunker. ‘Thatcher was basically booted out on the strength of one critical speech from the back benches, never mind all this!’
Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London and Telegraph columnist, memorably likened Brown’s would-be assassins to the inept criminal masterminds who try – and fail – to kill Inspector Clouseau at the end of the Pink Panther films.
The day’s events proved to be a headline-writer’s dream. ‘Stiletto in the heart of Brown’ was the Telegraph’s splash, reflecting on Caroline Flint’s resignation, alongside pictures of her posing in high heels and scarlet lipstick for a magazine shoot.
Away from Westminster, the results from voting in thirty-four councils across England showed that the public had resoundingly rejected Labour. The Tories gained 233 councillors while Labour lost 273 seats and the Liberal Democrats 4. The Conservatives recorded 38 per cent of the national vote; Labour was beaten into third place with a historic low of 23 per cent of the vote.
Monday, 8 June saw another weekly meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party. The gathering – back in Committee Room 15 – was now being seen as crunch time. After days of plotting, it was the moment when the rebels would have to either show their hand and demonstrate they had the support or else leave Brown to focus on his role as Prime Minister.
Brownites spent much of the day working the phones, cajoling waverers into weighing in behind the Prime Minister. MPs in marginal seats claimed they were being threatened with withdrawal of support for their re-election campaigns if they spoke out. Frank Field, a former minister, accused Brown’s aides of ‘terrorizing’ Labour MPs into line. Jane Kennedy, a farming minister, refused to give an assurance that she would remain loyal to the Prime Minister and left her post, becoming the twelfth minister to leave the government in a week.
This time, Brown did turn up for the meeting. The room was so packed that several Cabinet ministers were struggling even to get through the door. The corridor outside the committee room was filled with journalists and the broadcasters were reporting live from outside the entrance to the Commons.
Brown stood up. ‘I have my strengths and I have my weaknesses,’ he said. ‘There are some things I do well, some not so well. I have learned that you have to keep learning. You solve the problem not by walking away.
‘I’m not making a plea for unity, I’m making an argument for unity.’
Labour MPs were surprised. For the first time that many could remember, Brown had shown humility.
Although a few spoke out against Brown, it became clear that the rebels had not managed to gather enough support for a leadership vote. They may have been ‘bullied into submission’, as the Telegraph put it the next day, but one way or another the Labour Party had failed to depose their leader. Gordon Brown was still Prime Minister.
A Sea of Black Ink
Thursday, 18 June
CHAPTER 24
FROM THE VERY first day the expenses scandal broke, MPs who felt they had nothing to hide had been clamouring for Parliament to bring forward the publication of the expenses documents as a way of pricking the Telegraph’s balloon. They believed that if the public and, more importantly, the media were swamped with information on all 646 MPs the story would blow itself out in a matter of days, rather than being controlled by the Telegraph and drawn out over what became several weeks.
Luckily for the Telegraph, the redacted versions of the expenses documents had still not been signed off by MPs, and so Parliament was left in a state of paralysis while officials tried to hurry the process along in order to bring forward online publication from the original target date of July.
Thursday, 18 June 2009 was eventually announced as the day the public would finally get their chance to see the expenses claims of every MP, and find out for themselves exactly what their local Members had been up to.
Although the Telegraph’s expenses investigation would have been going for almost six weeks by then, it would still be a crucial day both for Parliament and for the newspaper. If the House of Commons published detailed information about each MP’s claims, the story could still rebound on the Daily Telegraph to some degree, as politicians would line up to renew their erroneous accusations that the newspaper had paid for what they claimed was ‘stolen’ information just so that it could ‘jump the gun’ by publishing the leaked files ahead of time. The Telegraph’s insistence that it had acted in the public interest by publishing material which would otherwise have been kept secret would also have been seriously undermined. On the other hand, if the material appeared in a heavily censored form, the newspaper would be vindicated.
The day would also prove a crucial test of whether the Commons had listened to the public anger over MPs’ expenses by publishing more information than it had originally planned to release.
In the run-up to Parliament’s publication day, the Telegraph’s coverage of the expenses story – which at its peak was taking up thirteen pages per day – had been wound right down, with the bunker team contributing no stories at all to the newspaper on some days. But behind the scenes the reporters, designers and sub-editors had been busier than ever, working flat out to produce a supplement on the expenses scandal under the guiding hand of group consultant editor Derek Bishton. The Complete Expenses Files was to be a 68-page magazine which would detail the claims made by every MP.
William Lewis stressed that he wanted the magazine to be a treasure trove of fascinating details, modelled on the design of the Sunday Times Rich List. But whereas the annual Rich List took almost a year to compile, The Complete Expenses Files had to be put together in little over a fortnight. Lewis had initially set a publication date of 27 June – comfortably before the original parliamentary publication date – but when Parliament brought forward its own publication date to 18 June, Lewis responded by changing the magazine’s publication date to 20 June, when it would be distributed free with the newspaper.
With a week less to prepare the supplement than had originally been expected, the bunker team worked later and later into the nights as they wrote new material on each MP and compiled new figures breaking down what they had spent on furniture, gardening, mortgages and other items. The magazine had to be finished by 12 June to make sure of its printing slot, and the bunker team worked until 3.30 a.m. that night to finish the job, before breaking out a warm bottle of white wine and some plastic cups from the water cooler for a weary celebration.
The Complete Expenses Files, published the following week, amounted to a Domesday Book of MPs’ profligacy, and it proved to be a massive hit with a public who were still clamouring for information. The reporters’ efforts would be rewarded with a sales increase of 150,000 – one of the biggest one-day rises in the Telegraph’s history, making that day’s paper by far the biggest-selling issue of the whole investigation. By lunchtime, newsagents across the country had completely sold out of copies.
Sales were helped by Andrew Pierce’s characteristically cheeky plugs for the supplement during a round of television interviews, in which he waved a copy of the magazine in front of millions of viewers. One TV producer tried to stop Pierce taking the magazine on set, so the indomitable reporter hid a copy down the back of his trousers before producing it with a flourish on camera.
Although the media coverage of MPs’ expenses had diminished following Gordon Brown’s reshuffle, the Westminster rumour mill was being cranked up to full power again with whispers that the Telegraph had held back a ‘big story’ for publication on the eve of the parliamentary disclosure.
‘Please, just give us a hint of what you’ve got – have you kept back the affairs?’ Winnett was asked by one caller from the upper echelons of the Conservative Party.
‘Erm, not quite, but I think you’ll enjoy what we have got,’ came the hesitant reply.
In fact, the truth was that once again the rumour mongers were wide of the mark. The Telegraph had nothing spectacular up its sleeve at all. But, not for the first time, luck was about to shine on the newspaper and the prophecy would, in the end, be fulfilled.
Having put the magazine to bed, the bunker team had started going back through the expenses files to tie up any loose ends and chase any leads they hadn’t previously had time to follow up. The team had hoped to come up with two or three front-page stories to run in the build-up to the official publication. By Tuesday evening, however, there was little sign of the major breakthrough required for Thursday’s paper.
; ‘Found anything good yet?’ Chris Evans kept asking.
‘We’re working on it,’ Winnett would reply.
Then, as Winnett was travelling home on Tuesday night, he received a text from Martin Beckford. ‘Think I may have found something interesting, give me a call if you can.’
Winnett immediately did so, and Beckford, who had been going through the office expenses of junior ministers, explained that he had found a bill for accountancy advice for Kitty Ussher, the junior Treasury minister who had featured in the paper in the early days of the investigation after she tried to claim for having ‘swirly’ Artex removed from her ceiling.
Winnett was distinctly underwhelmed by Beckford’s news. After all, the Telegraph had already devoted considerable coverage to the fact that several senior ministers, including the Chancellor, Alistair Darling, had claimed for advice from accountants. This sounded like more of the same – an OK story but not one which was likely to make the front page.
‘Sounds all right,’ said Winnett, trying not to communicate his disappointment to a reporter who had worked as hard as anyone over the previous weeks.
‘Hang on, I haven’t finished yet,’ Beckford continued. The letter setting out the advice Ussher had received from her accountant was in the file. Beckford said: ‘I’m not sure whether it means what I think it means. But this is what the letter says:
‘“I am enclosing a declaration to vary your previous main residence election for a period of one month to [Burnley home] and then back to [London home].
‘“The effect of varying the election is that [Burnley home] will receive the final three years’ main residence exemption and the gain will be completely exempt from capital gains tax provided [Burnley home] is sold before April 2007.”’
No Expenses Spared Page 31