AS THE SLIGHTLY dishevelled-looking reporters filed into the cheerless, windowless surroundings of Training Room 4 at 8 a.m. the next day, some were already a bit suspicious. National newspaper journalists traditionally start work at 10 a.m., a throwback to the days before 24-hour news channels and the internet, and a much-coveted perk of the job. But as the room filled up, Evans and Bayley chatted normally with the reporters about the stories they had written for that day’s paper, ranging from Beckford’s coverage of the latest twist in the horrific Baby P child abuse story to Swaine’s piece about the furore caused when the winner of a Cornish pasty baking competition had turned out to be from Devon.
Not only did several of the reporters have no idea what they were going to be doing, they were also in the dark about who they would be doing it with, and as each new face entered the room they were met with a light-hearted cheer from their colleagues, like school playground footballers just picked to play on the same side.
Christopher Hope was last in, having had the longest journey to work after his punishingly early start in Norfolk. Evans asked him to close the room’s heavy glass door before sitting on a desk in the centre of the room as his team wheeled their office chairs into an untidy semicircle, notebooks at the ready.
‘Thank you all for coming in so early,’ he said, giving a toothy grin and self-consciously pushing his glasses up on his nose. ‘As I’m sure you’ve all guessed, you’re not here for a training session. You’ll all have read stories in recent weeks about a disk with the details of MPs’ expenses claims on it. Well, we’ve got it.’
‘I bloody knew it was going to be something like this!’ interjected Hope, simultaneously breaking the tension and signalling the instant switch from anticipation to excitement.
‘I’m sorry we had to keep you in the dark,’ continued Evans, ‘but there are only a handful of people outside this room who know about this, and it has to stay that way. As far as everyone else is concerned, we’re involved in a training session. I’m afraid you’ll have to lie to your colleagues, though I’m sure you can all manage that, but as long as we all stick to the same cover story we should be OK.’
Several of the reporters exchanged doubtful glances at the idea that other journalists on the paper would swallow the story that any kind of training session could require so many senior members of the staff at such short notice, but in the absence of any better ideas it would have to do.
Evans explained that the disk had been the source of the Jacqui Smith and Tony McNulty stories, but that no other paper had been given access to the entire database.
‘There are something like a million and a half documents which we’re going to have to look at,’ he went on, ‘and we have to decide by this time next week whether we’re going to run with this, so we’re going to have to work through the weekend and do a lot of late nights. But if we do decide to go with it, the potential is absolutely enormous.’
As he spoke, the reporters were all doing the mental arithmetic. One and a half million documents, ten people. One hundred and fifty thousand documents each. In a week. How on earth was that going to be even vaguely possible?
Anticipating the obvious questions, Evans said: ‘We’ll have to divide it up, find a system we can work to and get through as much of this as we can. There’s bound to be stuff we’ll miss, but don’t worry about that because from the limited amount of stuff Rob’s looked at so far, there are going to be plenty of brilliant stories in there.’
Each reporter was then handed their own copy of the disk containing the full expenses files. All the work was to be handled on standalone laptop computers so that none of the sensitive information was put on to the Telegraph’s main systems until absolutely necessary, to reduce the chance of any leak.
Training Room 4 was not exactly set up for the needs of a reporting team working on a complex investigation. The bland office, 30 feet square, had sets of tables arranged in five clusters in the configuration of a number five on a die. Although each table had its own computer, there were few phones, only one printer and no fax machine. The only other furniture in the room consisted of a small wardrobe, a four-drawer metal filing cabinet and a flipchart. It did, however, have one crucial advantage: with two walls made of frosted glass and two walls lined with white-painted metal, it offered the team total privacy. Tucked away in a corner of the office, it was out of sight of most people in the building: few people even walked past it. In the days to come, Training Room 4 would become known to all who worked in it as ‘the bunker’ – a somewhat obvious and inevitable nickname, but none the less appropriate given the bunker mentality which developed within it.
The investigation also quickly acquired a nickname. The portable hard drives on to which the files had been copied had the trade name Firestorm, a word which came up on screen every time the disks were loaded.
‘It’s Operation Firestorm then,’ Winnett said sardonically to no one in particular as he cranked up his computer. The name stuck, and although it wasn’t repeated outside the room, it subsequently took on a certain resonance, with several politicians and even the Information Commissioner later referring to the expenses scandal as a ‘firestorm’.
Before the disks were loaded, the team decided on a way of carving up the information between them. Winnett and Prince would start looking through the Cabinet’s expenses, Rayner and Hope would do the Shadow Cabinet, and Beckford, Swaine and Hooper were to start looking at the Liberal Democrats and then backbenchers, one starting at A, one starting at M and one working backwards from Z. As each MP’s file was examined, the reporter in question would tick off the name on a master list, adding their own initials, to keep track of who had done which MP.
Watt was given the task of compiling a spreadsheet of every address for which the MPs had claimed the second-home allowance, so that any anomalies, such as several MPs claiming for the same address, would show up. It was a thankless task, but Watt had the benefit of being the only reporter to glance through every MP’s expenses, meaning she was able to comb out the most promising stories and keep a list of which MPs should be prioritized.
Ian Douglas, meanwhile, concentrated on preparing the Cabinet’s expenses documents for publication online, working out a system of blacking out genuinely sensitive personal information, such as bank account numbers, while leaving in much of the other data which Parliament wanted to censor.
The atmosphere crackled with anticipation as the reporters got their first sight of what was on the disks, and within a matter of minutes the room was buzzing as members of the team began making discoveries. Despite knowing that they were looking for potential abuses of the expenses system, they still reacted with disbelief at what the MPs had been spending public money on, from the outlandish to the downright trivial.
‘This guy’s bought a plasma television,’ called out Swaine.
‘Alan Duncan’s claimed hundreds of pounds for having his ride-on lawnmower serviced,’ chuckled Hope.
‘Oliver Letwin’s put in a bill for a pipe to be replaced under his tennis court,’ said Rayner.
Each passing minute was punctuated by expressions of disbelief as reporters found ever more astonishing claims.
‘Oh my God …’
‘You’re not going to believe what this guy’s claimed for …’
‘I’ve got a better one than that …’
Within two hours the team had made its first major breakthrough, and it involved none other than the Prime Minister himself.
Rosa Prince had assumed that the job of going through the Cabinet’s expenses would be boring and fruitless. Surely ministers in such prominent public roles would be scrupulous in ensuring that every claim for even a penny was above board and beyond reproach, she thought.
Not a bit of it. As she scrolled through Gordon Brown’s expenses claims, the rest of the room heard an involuntary gasp as she noticed that the Prime Minister had paid thousands of pounds for cleaning services to a certain Andrew Brown. Prince knew that Brown had a brother called Andrew, who ran the communications department of the French energy firm EDF. Was the PM arranging for public money to be paid to his own brother? For cleaning his flat?
‘Looks like Gordon Brown’s paying a load of money to his brother,’ said Prince, looking across at Winnett.
‘What!?’
The rest of the team crowded around Prince’s computer to see the evidence for themselves. Could it be a coincidence? they asked each other. Brown was one of the five most common surnames in the country, after all. Maybe it was another Andrew Brown who just happened to have a cleaning company. Even if it was his brother, why would the Prime Minister be paying him for cleaning services? It all looked very odd.
Within a matter of minutes the team had established, by checking publicly available online electoral rolls and Companies House records, that the Andrew Brown whose name and address appeared on the receipts was indeed the Prime Minister’s brother. Clearly the Prime Minister had some explaining to do.
As Prince continued her search, Brown’s expenses claims threw up other potentially damaging material. The Prime Minister had originally designated as his second home a flat in London where he lived with his wife Sarah. But in September 2006, within a fortnight of discovering that Tony Blair would be stepping down as Prime Minister (and hence that he would be moving into Downing Street as his successor), Brown had switched the designation of his second home to his constituency in Scotland. The implication seemed clear: that Brown had changed his designated second home so that he could carry on claiming thousands of pounds from the taxpayer even after he moved into a grace and favour flat in Downing Street.
There was plenty more besides. Brown had submitted two claims for the same £153 plumber’s bill, and had been paid twice. At the very least, it amounted to a deeply embarrassing oversight for the then Chancellor of the Exchequer. The canny Scot had also had an Ikea kitchen installed at a cost of £9,000, spreading the payments over two financial years, which meant that he stayed within the limit for each year’s total claim. There had also been a dispute with the fees office over a £105 children’s window blind. Officials, on first seeing a receipt which said simply ‘Noah’s animals’, had apparently assumed it was for a toy, and rejected it. Sarah Brown had written to the fees office on paper headed ‘Gordon and Sarah Brown’ saying: ‘The Peter Jones receipt for window blinds for London accommodation needs to be reimbursed.’ The fees office promptly paid up.
The Prime Minister, a self-professed sports fan, had even put in £36 monthly claims for the cost of his Sky TV package. How would the public feel about stumping up for Gordon Brown to watch live football on telly? Would voters be happy when they found out they had bought a £265 vacuum cleaner for the then Chancellor, who was at the time paid £144,520 a year? Or that they had paid for Rentokil to get rid of mice at his Fife home, at a cost of £352? The list went on and on.
No one on the investigation team had expected to find many major stories in the Cabinet’s expenses, but it turned out that almost every member of the Cabinet appeared to have played the system in one way or another.
Prince looked through Chancellor Alistair Darling’s claims and found that he too had switched the designation of his second home between London and his Edinburgh constituency, enabling him to claim £2,500 in stamp duty and legal fees when he bought a flat in London, and more than £4,000 to furnish and carpet it. Winnett discovered that Hazel Blears, the communities secretary, had claimed for three different properties in the space of a year, and during one house move had stayed at a £211 per night hotel whose publicity material stated that ‘Heaven will be a let-down after this.’ Margaret Beckett, the housing and planning minister, tried to claim £600 for hanging baskets and pot plants, while David Miliband, the foreign secretary, had spent so much money on his house and garden in his South Shields constituency that his own gardener had queried whether all the work was really necessary.
By mid-afternoon on that first day it was clear that the Telegraph would have a wealth of stories on the Cabinet alone, never mind the other 620 or so MPs who might have been up to no good.
It had also become obvious that as well as being outraged by the apparent abuses which the team was uncovering, the public would also be fascinated by many of the smaller claims. The Conservative MP Cheryl Gillan, for example, had submitted a supermarket receipt which included £4.47 for two tins of Cesar luxury dog food and a packet of Iams Senior chicken dry meal. Much to the amusement of the bunker team, Phil Woolas, the immigration minister, had claimed back the cost of nappies (£2.99), tampons (£1.19), panty liners (£1.48) and a ladies’ blouse (£15). The expenses claims provided a fascinating window on MPs’ lives, and the reporters found there was an irresistible vicarious pleasure in picturing powerful ministers musing over which brand of chocolate biscuits to buy (Jaffa Cakes proved to be a favourite) or knowing what flavour crisps certain members of the Cabinet preferred.
It quickly became apparent that the MPs’ expenses would also feed the British public’s insatiable appetite for toilet humour. The fact that Gordon Brown had claimed back the cost of having his loo unblocked provoked bellows of laughter in the bunker’s classroom atmosphere (as well as speculation about who was the culprit), while the fact that the heavyweight former Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, had claimed for two loo seats in quick succession would provide a rich vein of Carry On-style gags for cartoonists and headline writers when it was revealed to the world. (After several weeks of deliberation, Prescott would eventually announce that he had not broken any loo seats, but had found that the first one didn’t fit his loo because he had bought an imperial size instead of metric.) However, even Prescott was overshadowed by Tory MP Peter Luff, who managed to claim for three toilet seats in four years.
There was also a pattern emerging of several different scams which many MPs used to play the system. Winnett and Rayner compiled a list of the most popular, so that reporters could jot down examples of each one as they came across them.
‘Loads of them seem to be flipping their second home designation between one place and another so they can do up more than one house,’ observed Hope.
Rayner jotted down the word ‘flipping’ at the top of the list, little knowing at the time that it would soon pass into the national lexicon as a virtual dictionary definition of MPs’ dodgy behaviour.
After a few minutes’ discussion, the list looked like this:
‘Right, I’ll just print off a copy for everyone and then we can keep tally of who’s done which scam,’ said Rayner, as he sat down and typed up the list.
Five minutes later Rayner suddenly went pale. ‘Oh shit.’
‘What’s up?’
‘I’ve just pressed print, and it hasn’t sent it to the printer in here. It might have gone bloody anywhere!’
The team were not impressed. Secrecy was vital to the success of the investigation, and Rayner might have just gone and cocked the whole thing up with a single click of a computer mouse.
‘What’s the number of the printer it’s sent it to?’ said Hope. Rayner passed on the number, and Hope rang the Telegraph’s building services department to find out the location of the printer.
‘They say they don’t know where it is.’
‘Bollocks.’ Feeling physically sick, Rayner grabbed Jon Swaine and headed out into the Telegraph’s vast open-plan office to begin a frantic search of every printer they could find. It was almost certainly futile, but it was better than doing nothing.
After an agonizing two minutes, Rayner’s mobile rang. ‘We’ve tracked it down,’ said Hope.
‘Oh, thank God. Where?’
‘Rosa was logged into that computer so it’s gone to the printer in the parliamentary office. Katriona [the Telegraph’s parliamentary secretary] has got it and we’ve told her to destroy it.’
A red-faced Rayner returned to the bunker feeling he’d let the side down horribly.
‘Er, I’ll get the teas in, shall I?’ he sheepishly suggested.
Beckford, meanwhile, was thanking his lucky stars that Evans had persuaded him not to go to Oxford that day.
‘Thanks for twisting my arm yesterday,’ he told the news chief, out of earshot of the other reporters.
‘That’s OK,’ said Evans. ‘I’ve asked someone else to write up something on that conference, by the way.’ (It made six paragraphs in the next day’s paper, leaving Beckford even more grateful he hadn’t chosen to go to Oxford instead of joining the expenses team.)
By the end of day one, the bunker team had already got enough material to write explosive stories about several members of the Cabinet. But if they thought a week was a tight deadline for turning around the MPs’ expenses files, they were in for a shock when they came in the next morning.
Mark Skipworth, executive editor, strode purposefully into the bunker with an A4 notebook under his arm. He had been discussing the previous day’s discoveries with Lewis, Evans and Bayley, and now announced to the room: ‘I don’t want to alarm you, but it may be we decide to go with the Gordon Brown stuff for tomorrow’s paper.’
‘Tomorrow!’ several voices gasped in unison. Then came a chorus of protests by reporters who felt it was madness to rush into print with a story that was still at such an embryonic stage.
The instinct of every reporter is to get stories into the paper at the first possible opportunity, rather than run the risk of being scooped by another newspaper while the story is being held back. Everyone involved in the expenses story was jumpy about the fact that other newspapers had seen some of the data, knowing that any kind of leak could alert those other papers and give them the chance to run the story first. The ticking bombs which the team had uncovered about Brown and other Cabinet ministers only served to ratchet up the tension, as Wick had told Winnett that Brown was one of those whose expenses had been seen by the Sun. But the investigation team felt there was a huge risk of getting key elements of the story wrong if they didn’t have time to check the facts properly, and that the whole project could run out of control as a result.
After a nervous morning, the decision was taken by lunchtime on Friday that the Telegraph would hold its nerve and keep digging through the files. Cue relief all round.
As the team worked through the May bank holiday weekend, the Sunday Times devoted three pages to an investigation into Baroness Uddin’s second-home allowance claims. The Labour peer had allegedly bought a small flat in Maidstone and designated it as her ‘main’ home while claiming £100,000 for overnight stays in London, even though the newspaper claimed her actual main home was in the capital and she never visited the flat in Kent. The story dominated the television and radio news for the next two days, and provided a timely reminder of the public appetite for stories about parliamentary expenses.
‘Bloody hell,’ said Winnett as he scanned the Sunday Times at his desk in the bunker. ‘This is just one politician that hardly anyone’s ever heard of. We’ve got dozens of better-known people implicated. Wait until people find out what we’ve been up to!’
Other newspapers, anticipating the forthcoming ‘official’ release of MPs’ expenses, ran stories about what they would supposedly reveal. One report said several MPs were ‘on suicide watch’ because they knew their expenses claims had been so heinous. Another said at least three MPs were bracing themselves for the release of hotel receipts which would show they had been having adulterous affairs. A Sunday paper reported that one MP had installed a sauna in his home and claimed it on expenses. And one senior member of the Shadow Cabinet, unaware that the Telegraph had obtained the disk, quietly told a Telegraph journalist that the main scandal was going to be MPs who lived together and submitted claims for the same property. This led to the bunker team being asked on a daily basis by Evans and Bayley whether they had winkled out the unnamed MPs at the centre of these salacious stories.
‘Found any of the shaggers yet?’
‘Have we worked out who’s on suicide watch?’
In the event, no evidence was found to suggest any of these stories were true.
By the time the investigation was a few days old, questions were starting to be asked about the absent reporters.
‘How long is this bloody training going to go on for?’ demanded one staff member, whose patience was wearing thin after almost a week of having to cover for colleagues.
In Parliament, lobby correspondents were starting to wonder where Winnett and Prince had suddenly disappeared to. James Kirkup, who knew the truth about the ‘training’ cover story, batted away an increasing number of questions.
‘Is Rosa around?
‘No, day off. Rob too.’
Then:
‘Rosa back yet?’
‘No. Still off.’
‘Still? Lazy so and so.’
‘Yeah. Tell me about it.’
And:
‘Haven’t seen Rob for ages. Where is he?’
‘Up at Victoria. Some training course. Blogging, I think.’
‘God, you lot are mad for the internet, aren’t you?’
At the outset of the investigation, fewer than ten Daily Telegraph staff outside the bunker team knew the truth about what was going on. One features executive emailed Rayner to ask if he could write a piece for the Saturday review section on ‘Gordon Brown’s worst week’, following a plot by some Labour MPs to defect to the Lib Dems and mounting speculation of a leadership challenge.
‘I think Brown’s week is about to get an awful lot worse,’ he said to the other reporters, as he emailed the executive to say he would be unavailable.
Another executive, wandering past the bunker on bank holiday Monday, was shocked to see the room full of activity.
‘God, they really shouldn’t make you come in for training on a bank holiday,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Surely it can’t be that important?’
‘Not much we can do about it,’ shrugged Watt, as others feigned disgruntlement.
Even a trip to the canteen for a cuppa became a hazardous task as members of the bunker team were confronted by increasingly suspicious colleagues.
‘So you’re doing this training then, are you? What’s really going on in there?’
‘Oh, wouldn’t want to bore you with the details. Can hardly stay awake.’
Meanwhile, Training Room 4 was becoming more of a cesspit than a bunker. The strict secrecy surrounding the investigation meant that cleaners were not allowed anywhere near the place, and as the days wore on the blue speckled carpet tiles started to disappear beneath the takeaway pizza boxes, paper coffee cups, chewing-gum wrappers and plastic bottles which had spilled out of the unemptied bins.
‘It’s starting to smell like my old student digs in here,’ observed Jon Swaine as the smell of leftover Chinese food, delivered to the office as the team worked into the night, lingered heavily one morning.
The team also had to protect the information on the disks as if their lives depended on it; if so much as a single document containing MPs’ personal details was seen by someone outside the building, not only would the Telegraph’s investigation become common knowledge, but Parliament would be able to turn the tables by accusing the Telegraph of compromising security. Instead of reporting the story, the Telegraph would become the story.
So a strict set of protocols were observed from the very beginning. Winnett put the master disk on its own in one safe (the location of which was not known even to the other reporters), where it remained untouched, while the working copies were kept in a second safe, where he returned them every night. In the bunker itself, any material which was printed out for reference had to be destroyed at the end of each evening in an old, dustbin-sized shredder which made the whole floor vibrate every time it thrummed into action. One reason for destroying the documents was the fear of a burglary, but it would also be vital to the credibility of the investigation, once it became public, to be able to demonstrate to the outside world that all genuinely sensitive personal data, such as addresses and bank details, were being handled under maximum security conditions. To ensure no electronic leaks of information, the team also imposed a ban on making any references to the investigation in emails. Even so, the fear that the outside world would discover what the Telegraph was up to hung in the air every minute of the day.
By now the team had settled into something of a routine, starting at 8 a.m. and working through until 10 p.m., with meals eaten at a desk while staring at the seemingly endless stream of expenses documents. Eyebags and spots became increasingly de rigueur; sunlight and fresh air were distant memories, and the third-hottest May on record was something the team could only read about in the papers. During one conversation about the amount of time MPs seemed to spend pursuing their hobbies, Beckford dryly noted: ‘My only hobby at the moment is sleeping.’ More than anyone else, Beckford had every right to feel exhausted. He had become a father for the first time on 2 April, less than a month before the investigation began, and would have been sleep-deprived even without the punishing hours demanded by Operation Firestorm.
One of the few moments of relaxation came on the evening of Wednesday, 6 May, when the team downed tools to watch the Chelsea v. Barcelona Champions’ League semi-final on a computer screen in the bunker. Winnett, a lifelong Chelsea fan, wished he hadn’t bothered, as a last-minute Barcelona equalizer knocked Chelsea out of the competition on away goals. ‘Hope it’s not an omen,’ he mumbled, looking crestfallen.
As John Wick’s ten-day deadline approached, Chris Evans decided the investigation needed all the resources he could throw at it, and the bunker team gained a new member in the shape of Nick Allen, one of the Telegraph’s most thorough and dependable news reporters. Allen, who had joined the Telegraph two years earlier from the US news agency Bloomberg, had previously been chief reporter at the Press Association, the UK’s national news agency, where he had covered military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as natural disasters and high-profile Old Bailey trials. He was at his desk in the Telegraph’s newsroom being briefed by a member of the news desk to write a story about swine flu when Evans approached. ‘This man has to go to the training room immediately,’ Evans interjected, in what seemed to Allen a strangely urgent way. Allen, who had just come back from a holiday, had heard about other reporters disappearing from the face of the earth after being selected to work on a ‘special project’ and feared he was in for a mind-numbing experience learning about new computer software.
‘Been sent to the training room?’ asked deputy news editor Neville Dean as Allen passed him.
‘Yes. Don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing,’ replied Allen.
‘Oh, it’s very, very good,’ whispered Dean, the only member of the eight-strong news desk other than Bayley who knew about the expenses project.
As Allen entered the bunker, he was greeted by silence and nervous glances.
‘What’s going on, then?’ he asked.
Hope was first to speak. Turning to Evans, he asked: ‘Can we tell him?’ Evans nodded, and Hope, who, like his colleagues, had been burdened by the urge to tell someone about the expenses story, blurted out in relief: ‘We’ve got the disk! The disk with the MPs’ expenses. We’ve got it!’
Allen looked slightly stunned. Then his face broke into a huge smile. ‘Fantastic!’
Evans explained the need for watertight security, giving Allen a particularly thorny problem. His girlfriend was a reporter on another national newspaper, and he didn’t want to present her with divided loyalties by telling her about the expenses investigation. He decided straight away he would have to lie to her, leading to a series of uncomfortable phone calls.
‘Why are you at the office so late, what are you doing?’
‘Um, internet training, like I told you.’
‘At this time? You’re lying. Why are you lying? Are you in the pub?’
‘Er, got to go now, training’s starting again. Bye.’
One of Allen’s first tasks was to plough through the expenses claims of the Tory grandee David Heathcoat-Amory, who had submitted handwritten invoices from his gardener which included regular deliveries of horse manure. After more than two hours of combing through the bills, Allen came up with a grand total: the taxpayer had bought 550 sacks of horse manure at a total cost of £388.80.
‘So he’s literally dumped a load of shit on the taxpayer,’ Allen noted. It seemed like the perfect description for the way the MPs had behaved.
Even with the extra muscle which Allen provided, it was clear that the team would only be able to look at a fraction of the MPs’ expenses files by the time the ten-day deadline expired, because it was taking up to half a day to look through each MP’s claims. This meant that if the Telegraph did go ahead with publication, the reporters would have to divide into two teams, with one team writing stories for publication and the other team carrying on with the task of looking through more MPs.
Problems were also becoming apparent in another area – the planned online publication by the Telegraph of the original expenses documents. The intention had been to put all of the Cabinet’s expenses receipts online on the day the first stories were published in the newspaper, to enable the public to see for themselves what ministers had done. To make this work, however, Ian Douglas and Duncan Hooper were having to go through individual pages drawing black boxes over bank account details and other private information, a process which was taking an inordinately long time. Also, the reporters were uneasy about the idea of putting the information online where rival newspapers could see it, fearing that if anything had been missed, other papers would be able to scoop the Telegraph. There was also the danger of a bank account number or home address slipping through the net, and Arthur Wynn Davies felt the risk was too high: if the Telegraph accidentally published the sort of information which could have been used by identity fraudsters, the fallout would be hugely damaging to the paper’s integrity, as well as leading to costly legal action.
In the end, the Telegraph decided to publish only some of the documents online as the investigation progressed, with the intention of ultimately publishing extensive details on every MP. The website was also to be used to release key memos and other information which helped reinforce the impact of the scoops in the newspaper, and to break some stories online during the day.
Winnett began compiling a list of the stories which had been uncovered for each of the MPs the team had looked at, ranking the Members into high, medium and low priority. Watt, meanwhile, was keeping detailed notes on MPs whose claims appeared suspicious in some way but would require further investigation, while Rayner kept a file marked ‘A to Z’ in which the more bizarre items claimed on expenses could be listed alphabetically.
Throughout the week, the reporters shouted out their favourite expenses claims for the A to Z, each trying to outdo the others by finding ever more ludicrous claims.
‘I for Ikea carrier bag,’ said Swaine, after noticing one MP had claimed 5p for such an item.
‘G for Ginger Crinkle biscuits,’ Hope chortled, as he looked through the Labour MP Austin Mitchell’s file.
With Zanussi ovens, quiche dishes and yucca plants among the items claimed by MPs, even the most awkward letters were covered – except X.
‘Don’t suppose anyone’s claimed for a xylophone?’ Rayner asked.
‘No, but we could do X-rated moves for Jacqui Smith’s porn claim,’ replied Beckford. The list was complete.
The bunker team was by now convinced that they were working on one of the biggest stories they would ever be involved with. But it was still by no means certain that any of the material would see the light of day. Although Winnett had given the news executives regular updates on how the investigation was progressing, nothing had been set in stone, and the editor wanted to keep his options open for as long as possible.
William Lewis was about to make the biggest decision of his life.