What were they trying to hide? The most common practice the Telegraph discovered was ‘flipping’, which involved MPs nominating either their London or constituency property as their second home, claiming the costs of doing it up and furnishing it from public funds, and then swapping the designations around so they could do the same for their other residence.121 Sometimes they would go on to sell the freshly refurbished ‘second home’, but tell the taxman it was their primary residence so as to avoid having to pay capital gains tax on the profits. (It goes without saying that the rules entitled them to claim back mortgage interest for second homes while also keeping any and all proceeds from a sale for themselves.) Sometimes they did this more than once – cabinet minister Hazel Blears claimed for three different ‘second homes’ in the space of one year, as well as billing the public for hotel stays in between. Her constituents in Salford and Eccles were so furious that there were protests in the streets. She tried to make amends by going on TV and waving about a cheque made out to HMRC for £13,332 to cover the missing tax, only to prompt more public resentment for the ease with which she could rustle up such a sum.122
But Blears was the tip of the proverbial iceberg. No fewer than 232 MPs were revealed to have flipped their residences since the 2005 election. Among them were Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling, Secretary of State for Transport Geoff Hoon and Conservative frontbenchers Michael Gove and John Bercow, the last of whom became speaker of the Commons in the wake of the expenses scandal. One pair of husband and wife MPs, Tories Julie Kirkbride and Andrew MacKay, went further than flipping, indulging instead in ‘double-dipping’: he said their London house was their second home, while she said her constituency flat was. This allowed them to claim over £100,000 in expenses from taxpayers between them. They were not the only ones keeping things in the family: Labour’s Ian Gibson claimed £80,000 in mortgage interest for a London flat in which he spent a few nights a week while his daughter and her partner lived there full-time; he later sold it to them for around half the market value.123
Parliament’s insistence on removing all address details from the data they proposed to publish would have ensured that no one ever found out about such scandals had the whistle-blower not gone to the press. Another common scam which the Telegraph uncovered was for MPs to tell the parliamentary authorities that one residence was their second home, and then tell the local authorities that the other one was: that way you could get your council tax paid in full on one property and get a discount on the other. This was not against any rules. In another open invitation to cheating, the fees office did not require receipts for any expenses under £250. The newspaper’s investigation team found themselves looking at an awful lot of vague claims that came in at around the £249 mark.124 Some MPs were quite happy to bung in fully itemized receipts for the finest furniture expenses could buy: Michael Gove and his journalist wife, Sarah Vine, kitted out their homes in Notting Hill and Surrey from the high-class store run by their friend Samantha Cameron’s mother: a cabinet costing £493 here, a £432 chair there. Their bed sheets were pure Egyptian cotton from The White Company.125 When the Telegraph approached Gove for his excuses, he was one of the few MPs to respond with a lawyer’s letter threatening ‘appropriate steps to defend his reputation’.126
He was far from the only big spender. Other household necessities billed to taxpayers included repairs to a burst pipe under Oliver Letwin’s tennis court;127 servicing to Alan Duncan’s ride-on lawnmower;128 half the £29,000 of repairs to Sir Gerald Kaufman’s Regent’s Park home he insisted were needed to prevent him ‘living in a slum’;129 fixing the boiler for Michael Ancram’s swimming pool;130 mowing and rolling two paddocks on David Davis’s property;131 trimming the hedges around Sir Michael Spicer’s helipad;132 paying a forester to ‘carry out annual maintenance programme to approx 500 trees within the grounds’ of Anthony Steen’s mansion;133 and, most notoriously, clearing Douglas Hogg’s moat.134 Hogg, a former cabinet minister, protested that he had not specifically claimed for the cost of the dredging at his Lincolnshire manor house; rather, he had submitted a full set of expenses for running his estate to the Commons fees office to demonstrate that they should let him claim the full possible amount without having to supply specific receipts. The list included staffing costs for his full-time gardener, housekeeper, £4,000 spending on ‘machines and fuel’ and £650 for ‘general repairs, stable etc.’135
Astonishingly, all of these were within the rules as they stood – even if the fees office sometimes quibbled over one or two of the amounts, or turned down items like Sir Peter Viggers’ notorious £1,600 ‘floating duck island’.136 But such open-handedness was not enough for some MPs. Tory husband and wife Sir Nicholas and Ann Winterton, who had paid off the mortgage on their London flat, transferred the ownership to a trust controlled by their children, and then between them claimed £120,000 of public money to rent it back. When the parliamentary commissioner for standards ruled that this was unacceptable, the couple moved out rather than meet the bills from their own pockets.137 Fellow Conservative Derek Conway was ordered to repay £17,000 he had paid to his two sons out of his staffing allowance after the authorities discovered that one of them had been given an ‘unnecessarily high salary’ while the other had actually been a full-time student in Newcastle during the period he was supposedly turning up to work in Westminster.138
Labour MP Elliot Morley continued to claim £800 a month to pay off a mortgage on a house in his constituency even after it had been repaid in full. He would later be jailed for false accounting.139 His Labour colleague David Chaytor went to prison for claiming back rent he had never paid on a flat he owned himself and a cottage that belonged to his mother. He had faked tenancy agreements for the benefit of the fees office.140 Yet another Labour backbencher, Margaret Moran, had flipped between no fewer than three different residences, one of which was neither in London nor her Luton constituency but one hundred miles away, near Southampton. She had demanded – and received – £22,000 of taxpayers’ cash to treat dry rot there, but refused to answer any questions about it because she claimed to be ‘entitled to a family life’. She later faced twenty-one charges of forgery and false accounting over £60,000 of fake claims. Having been found unfit to face trial she was given a supervision order requiring her to undergo mental health treatment.141
Former Europe minister Denis MacShane was jailed for submitting ‘deliberately… misleading and deceptive invoices’.142 Two other Labour MPs, Jim Devine and Eric Illsley, and two Conservative peers, Lord Taylor of Warwick and Lord Hanningfield, also went to prison.143 Dozens and dozens of MPs agreed to stand down rather than face the voters at the next election. The entire pay and expenses system was taken out of parliamentarians’ control and handed over to an independent body, which massively tightened the rules about what could be claimed for. Eventually, 392 MPs were ordered to pay back a total of £1.3 million.144
No political scandal in my lifetime has caused the level of righteous public anger this one did. The cross-party, across-the-board scale of the offences was a rare justification for that most tedious of pub-bore arguments: ‘They’re all the same.’ At Private Eye, the magazine I have worked at since 1997, we received piles of correspondence from readers apoplectic with their elected representatives: one voter had taken the trouble of going through a constituency mail-out that had been posted through his letterbox, scrawling ‘THIEF’ on every single photo of his MP, and sending it on to us. For the first time ever, the BBC’s Question Time audience only submitted questions about a single topic; they also booed every single politician on the panel as they were introduced.145 Labour backbencher Diane Abbott complained that the public wanted ‘dead MPs hanging from lamp-posts’;146 excitable Tory Nadine Dorries claimed that at Westminster, ‘Everyone fears a suicide. If someone isn’t seen, offices are called and checked.’147
So ingrained had their entitlement become that it took many politicians a long time to understand why. They showed an astonis
hing tin ear to public opinion in the early days of the scandal. Commons speaker Michael Martin continued to fulminate against the press right up until he became the first occupant of the post to be forced out of office for more than three hundred years. He called in the police to investigate the leak. The Met admirably announced that going after the mole would not be in the public interest, but that an investigation into some MPs’ behaviour definitely would be.148 Prime Minister Gordon Brown came up with the genius idea of replacing all expenses with a daily Commons attendance allowance and unilaterally announced it in a bizarre YouTube video in which his unconvincing grin could not disguise the fact he was essentially proposing to bribe MPs to turn up and do the job they were already paid to do.149 Even as the scale of the scandal became apparent he could not bring himself to issue a proper apology for the system he and his predecessors had presided over for decades: instead he offered a general one ‘on behalf of politicians, on behalf of all parties, for what has happened in the events of the last few days’.150
The only one who seemed to really get it was the leader of the opposition. From the outset, Cameron was straight up about ‘just how bad this is. The public are really angry and we have to start by saying, look, this system that we had, that we used… was wrong, and we’re sorry about it.’151 He was the first to launch disciplinary procedures against his own MPs, the first to bring in rules on their claims that were stricter than Parliament’s own and the first to order repayments. He even wrote out a cheque for the £680 he had himself claimed for repairs which included stripping wisteria from the chimney of his constituency cottage in the Cotswolds.152
One reason he came over so well during the crisis was that he had recruited a very special adviser to help out with any situation that had the potential to embarrass the Conservative Party – one Andy Coulson, former editor of the News of the World. Ring any bells?
4
GAMBLERS’ CONCEITS
There are several personality traits that are required to go into politics. A fairly big ego. Being able to think on your feet. A high boredom threshold. Clubbability. Willingness to compromise. A peculiar propensity – unique to politicians, this one, I think – for putting on slogan T-shirts over formalwear and not thinking you look silly. A slight sense of public duty. And in many cases, a massive capacity for self-destruction.
Maybe it’s the nature of such an all-or-nothing profession, where you can go from literally ruling the country to claiming Jobseekers’ Allowance in the blink of a ballot box. Maybe it’s the pressure of being on your best behaviour and so much in the public eye. Maybe it’s a reaction to the responsibility. But again and again, certain politicians prove themselves unable to resist playing with fire. Not just in the usual, bit-on-the-side, hand-in-the-till methods displayed in previous chapters, but in spectacular, baroque, logic-defying ways. They find inventive ways to deliberately magnify manageable risks beyond all proportion, constructing great tottering edifices of deceit where there was no need to build anything at all.
Like villains in bad detective dramas, they just can’t help scattering clues as to their real identity – to the extent where you begin to wonder if they aren’t all secretly desperate to be found out.
* * * * *
‘These investigations… have, at my direction, had the total cooperation of the – not only the White House – but also of all agencies of the Government.… I can say categorically that his investigation indicates that no one in the White House Staff, no one in this Administration, presently employed, was involved in this very bizarre incident.’
Richard Nixon, news conference, San Clemente, California, 29 August 1972
The weirdest thing about Watergate was how unnecessary it all was. President Nixon’s approval ratings were on the up in 1972: they peaked for the year, at 62 per cent, just a fortnight before the burglary of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters. He would go on to win his second election that November by a landslide. Yet the sitting president’s ego was so fragile that he saw plots and potential disaster on all sides. He was determined to strike first, strike hardest and do anything – absolutely anything – to ensure he remained on top. ‘I was paranoiac, or almost a basket case,’ he would admit later, years after his resignation.1
With the help of a ragbag of close advisers whose lack of morality and grip on reality rivalled his own, he came up with a series of ‘black ops’ aimed at his enemies, both real and imagined. Like a group of primary-school bullies who are having a particularly hard time at home, they drew up an ‘Opponents List, Political Enemies Project’ and launched demented campaigns against those on it. Over two hundred names graced it – not just politicians, but also academics, celebrities (people like Barbra Streisand, Andy Warhol and Bill Cosby) and quite a number of journalists whose coverage had displeased the president.2 The tax authorities were encouraged to subject them to extreme inspections. A ‘Special Investigations Unit’ was set up to look into those the president deemed especially threatening. He ordered its staff get their hands on a set of documents which he thought would make his Democratic opponents look bad, even if they had to ‘break in’ to a Washington think tank and ‘blow the safe’ to do so.3 This was not a subtle or sly suggestion: he made it in a White House meeting in the presence of Attorney General John Mitchell, the country’s top law enforcement officer, who raised no objection.
Encouraged, more junior members of the special unit went on a spree, breaking into a psychoanalyst’s office where a suspected leaker was a patient to try and steal his medical records, and planning a similar raid on the National Archives. They also ran surveillance on opponents and illegally tapped their phones. Proposals to lure senior Democrats into ‘honeytraps’ and photograph them with prostitutes, sabotage the air conditioning at their party convention and even kidnap anti-Vietnam War demonstrators and hold them in Mexico so they couldn’t embarrass the president were forwarded to Mitchell. He ruled them out – but not on legal grounds; he was simply worried that such escapades might be a bit expensive. When White House counsel John Dean objected that such plans were ‘incredible, unnecessary and very unwise…. We don’t need bugging, muggings and prostitutes and kidnappers’, the president’s chief of staff, H. R. ‘Bob’ Haldeman, simply removed Dean from the list of people who were told about them.4
The intrigues unravelled thanks to a particularly alert security guard at the Watergate complex dialling 911 on 17 June 1972. Watergate consisted of several blocks of luxury apartments, offices and a hotel named for its site where the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal flowed into the Potomac River. (Take a moment to reflect on the depressing thought that if another scandal were to occur there now, the media would undoubtedly dub it ‘Watergategate’.) One of the offices belonged to the DNC, and it was there that police arrived to find five intruders attempting to fit a bug to the phone of the party’s national chairman, Larry O’Brien. It wasn’t even the first time they’d broken in. They’d had to return because the first set of wiretaps they had fitted weren’t working properly.
It didn’t take long to trace the intruders back towards Nixon. One was the security coordinator of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President (CRP, or, as his enemies preferred to dub it, CREEP); another was carrying a notebook containing the phone number of E. Howard Hunt, a former CIA man and thriller writer who might have baulked at putting such an obvious clue in one of his own books. Hunt had been seconded from Nixon’s Special Investigations Unit to the CRP earlier in the year, which gave Nixon the get-out clause he used when questioned about the burglary not long afterwards: ‘no one in this Administration, presently employed, was involved’.5
Thus, with the indictment of all five burglars for wiretapping and theft, and a trial scheduled for after the election, the issue might have been tabled – if not for those pesky tapes. Because Richard Milhous Nixon, the man who honestly believed that ‘When the president does it, that means it is not illegal’, personally provided all the evidence that prosecutors need
ed to bring him down.6
Two years into his presidency, and unknown to all but a handful of his closest staff and the secret servicemen charged with operating them, he had installed a recording system in the Oval Office and the other rooms he used most in the White House. Voice-activated microphones picked up every sound, and reel-to-reel tape recorders in the basement captured them for posterity – in theory, for the purpose of compiling the president’s future memoirs. There were five microphones in Nixon’s desk alone. And despite being fully aware of the system – it was, he said, ‘my best insurance against… others, even people close to me [who] would turn against me’ – he had had plenty of conversations in which he referred to the activities of his black ops team within their hearing.7 Even more extraordinarily, he continued to use the recording system after the arrests, fully incriminating himself in the conspiracy to cover up the truth about the burglary.
‘The FBI is not under control… and… their investigation is now leading into some productive areas,’ Haldeman warned the president six days after the arrests, as the recorders whirred away. ‘And it goes in some directions we don’t want it to go.’ Nixon helpfully clarified: ‘You open that scab there’s a hell of a lot of things and that we just feel that it would be very detrimental to have this thing go any further.’ Between them, in a recording that would subsequently become known as the ‘smoking gun’ tape, they hatched a plot to get the CIA to intervene with their rival agency and, in the president’s words, ‘say that we wish for the country, don’t go any further into this case, period!’8 After the burglars went to jail in 1973 – and the president had been safely re-elected – Nixon continued to shoot off about the need to keep on bribing them to stay silent: ‘you could get a million dollars. And you could get it in cash. I know where it could be gotten.’9
The Lies of the Land Page 10