AS BROADCASTERS CLEARED their schedules to report every aspect of the Daily Telegraph’s expenses revelations when the paper hit the streets on Friday morning, Gordon Brown’s closest advisers were bracing themselves for one of the most challenging days of their professional lives.
The Prime Minister had erupted in fury after seeing the Telegraph’s front-page disclosure about his cleaning arrangements, and was said to have stayed up much of the night agonizing over the article and reading every word of the coverage on the Telegraph’s website. His mood got even worse when he tuned in to Radio Four’s Today programme at 6 a.m. to find that one of the BBC’s most respected daily news shows was following the Telegraph’s lead by questioning the validity of his expenses claims. Brown was beside himself over the fact that the BBC was not holding the Telegraph’s story at arm’s length, and spoke to Michael Dugher before dawn to express his outrage that the BBC thought the story about the payments to his brother to be a major news story.
Brown had a copy of the cleaning contract, showing that the money had gone to the cleaner, and he wanted to release it straight away to shut the story down. Dugher arranged for a copy of the contract to be sent electronically to the BBC; it arrived at 6.35 a.m., but it wasn’t enough to stop the BBC and every other news organization giving the expenses story wall-to-wall coverage for the rest of the day.
In Downing Street, the man who had been at the centre of the world only a month earlier, at the G20 summit, had been reduced to fretting about cleaning contracts, plumber’s bills and Ikea kitchens. Instead of trying to solve the global financial crisis, he found his integrity threatened by a crisis over his personal finances.
Brown’s anger was stoked up even further shortly after dawn that Friday, when he learned that a reporter from the London Evening Standard newspaper had entered the private staircase of Andrew Brown’s block of flats and videoed an exchange between himself and the Prime Minister’s brother – which consisted of him shouting questions at Andrew Brown through the front door over the cleaning arrangement. It was an unedifying moment for the Brown family, who have jealously guarded their privacy throughout the Prime Minister’s political career.
So by the time Brown’s key strategists dialled into Downing Street for a conference call, the Prime Minister was positively incandescent over what he saw as an unjustified attack on his personal integrity. His advisers couldn’t help thinking that, even for a man who was famous for his rages, this was possibly the blackest mood they had even known him to sink into. ‘He was absolutely livid,’ one adviser later said.
Michael Ellam, senior Brown aide Sue Nye and James Bowler, Brown’s private secretary, were among those involved in discussions that morning. Item one on the agenda was how Downing Street could hit back at the Telegraph. Brown’s advisers all agreed that the Telegraph had treated the Prime Minister unfairly and they decided to release a copy of the cleaning contract to all media organizations in an attempt to prove that he had done nothing wrong. Dugher, meanwhile, was given the task of extracting an apology from the Telegraph for its coverage. According to those who spoke to the Prime Minister that morning, his focus was on clearing his own name and that of his brother. There was little discussion about the wider political scandal which was starting to run out of control as broadcasters and websites greedily gobbled up every detail of the Telegraph’s expenses stories.
Although Brown had cleared his diary on Thursday afternoon to deal with the crisis, he would not cancel a long-standing engagement on Friday to attend a memorial service in Bradford for the murdered policewoman Sharon Beshenivsky. Onlookers were shocked at his appearance as he boarded the train to Bradford. His eyes were red-rimmed with exhaustion and had dark shadows under them, clear signs of the sleepless night he had chosen to endure. Instead of catching up on some sleep during the journey, however, the Prime Minister sat at a table with a copy of the Daily Telegraph, scribbling copious notes across the pages where he thought the government could hit back, and underlining what he perceived to be mistakes.
Brown’s narrow-minded reaction to the story troubled some of his ministers and many backbench MPs, who felt he was failing to get a grip on the situation and to show leadership. They would be proved right in the coming days, when David Cameron’s swift and ruthless response to the behaviour of his own MPs saw his popularity rise with the public, even though the Tories had behaved just as badly as their Labour counterparts.
Nevertheless, both Downing Street and the parliamentary authorities would exert immense pressure on the Daily Telegraph that Friday in the hope that the newspaper would lose its nerve. Winnett got his first sense of how the day might unfold when he was called into the editor’s office shortly before 9 a.m. William Lewis wanted to discuss the following day’s coverage, and Winnett went through a list of other senior government ministers who had made questionable expenses claims and whose stories, he had agreed with Chris Evans and Matthew Bayley, should appear on day two. Lewis, however, was acutely aware of the need for the Telegraph to avoid accusations of party political bias in its coverage, in order to maintain the maximum credibility for the investigation. Several Labour ministers had been in contact with senior reporters and executives at the Telegraph to suggest it would be unfair to focus solely on Labour.
‘Presumably you’re doing the Tories tomorrow, then?’ was the general tenor of their calls. ‘Do you realize the sort of things they’ve been up to?’
So now Lewis asked: ‘Should we go for some Tories tomorrow?’
Winnett strongly believed the paper should stick to the original plan of focusing on Labour for the first two days. As the party in government, Labour had had the opportunity to change the system and yet they had squandered, and probably even blocked, previous chances of reform. Also, the Telegraph had at least two days of coverage on the Conservatives planned for the following week. That morning’s lead story had clearly stated that the newspaper would be covering politicians from all parties in the coming days and there was no need, Winnett argued, to be bounced into covering the Tories early just because Labour were making a lot of noise.
Lewis agreed, but as Winnett got up to leave the office the editor’s mobile phone rang. It was Gordon Brown calling. Lewis has never disclosed what was said in the conversation, but as Winnett shut the door behind him he could hear the beginning of what was clearly a rather heated discussion.
‘That’s me crossed off the Prime Minister’s Christmas card list, then,’ he said to himself.
At The Stationery Office, workers were still carrying out the process of redaction which had begun the previous summer. Few of them knew that one or more of their number had decided to orchestrate a leak, but after their initial surprise at seeing the Telegraph’s expenses stories, the mood was one of quiet celebration.
At a British Army base overseas, two of the soldiers who had been on the security team in the TSO redaction room almost a year before popped into the base’s internet room to catch up on the news back home. They had no idea about the furore back in Britain until they logged on to the Telegraph’s website.
‘Look at this!’ one of the two men said, beckoning over his comrade.
‘Bugger me,’ replied the second soldier. ‘How the bloody hell have they got hold of that?’
On a professional level, the soldiers were disappointed that the data they had been hired to protect had leaked out. But on a personal level, both men felt a certain wry satisfaction at seeing the MPs held up to public scrutiny.
‘Well, the shit’s really going to hit the fan now,’ said the soldier sitting at the computer screen.
As senior executives at TSO gathered on the Friday morning, they were far from relaxed at what they were reading in the Telegraph. An investigation into the leak of the information was immediately ordered.
In the bunker, the reporters would spend most of that day blissfully unaware of the strain that the newspaper’s management was having to bear – which was just as well, as the reporters could ill afford any distractions as they embarked on another mammoth effort to produce just as many stories for the second day’s coverage.
Each had a spring in their step after coming in to work with evidence of the scale of the story all around them. Not only was the expenses story dominating the television and radio news almost to the exclusion of everything else, but there were clearly more people than usual reading the Telegraph on trains and buses, and other newspapers had scrambled to get the story into their second editions.
Among the audience, too, were the vast majority of the bunker team’s colleagues at the Telegraph, who had known nothing about the story until it started breaking on the television news the night before, and who were thrilled to discover that their newspaper was suddenly the talk of the nation. Jeff Randall, the Telegraph columnist and Sky News presenter, summed up the mood in an email to Winnett. ‘BRILLIANT,’ he wrote. ‘I mean seriously, outstandingly, effin’ brilliant. Love it.’
Praise for the Telegraph’s story was not universal, however. The left-leaning Guardian ran a lengthy article accusing the Telegraph of resorting to ‘chequebook journalism’.
Porter, Brogan and Pierce were almost omnipresent on the airwaves (Porter texted Lewis to say: ‘Story huge. Will have done six broadcasts by 8.30am’) while Harriet Harman remained Labour’s sole representative on early morning television. Instead of defending her colleagues, Harman attacked the expenses system itself and began talking of the need for reform and investigating those who had broken the rules.
‘I know people will be very angry and concerned about this, but I do want to reassure people that we have recognized there’s a problem and we’ve already taken action on this,’ she said on GMTV.
She was then asked whether ministers had been caught ‘fiddling’ their expenses, and answered: ‘I think you’ve got to be quite careful about saying “fiddling”. I don’t think that because Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, shared a cleaner for his flat with his brother, that that is fiddling. I don’t think anyone’s suggesting that Gordon Brown was pocketing that £6,000, nor are they suggesting that his brother was pocketing that £6,000.’ Harman was clearly being dragged into territory she would rather have avoided at all costs.
For the investigation team, the reaction was a huge relief. Although they had been confident the story was huge, they also realized that after more than a week in the bunker they had become detached from the outside world and hence lacked objectivity. The response to the story amounted to vindication for all those working on it.
Over in Parliament, the reaction was rather different. James Kirkup, the only Telegraph reporter in Westminster while Porter conducted interviews and Winnett and Prince stayed in the bunker, found himself the focus of hostile reaction from MPs. Some simply pretended not to see him. Others looked daggers at him, and one minister made a V-sign. Another minister, however, was rather less condemnatory. ‘It’s bloody brilliant, your paper,’ he bellowed, slapping Kirkup on the back. ‘I never realized half the things we could claim until now. I’m going to order a bloody great telly for my flat!’
Kirkup also had to deal with the frenetic questions from rival reporters, who all wanted to know the same things. How did you get the disk? How much more is there to come? What’s in tomorrow’s paper?
Eventually, Kirkup closed the office door, after pinning on it a note which read:
Telegraph Expenses Story: Answers to frequently asked questions.
1 I’m not telling you.
2 I’m not telling you.
3 I’m not telling you.
4 I’m not telling you.
5 I’m not telling you.
If MPs were suspicious of journalists, however, they were perhaps even more suspicious of each other. In Parliament’s tea rooms, usually the setting for lively gossip-swapping, members could barely bring themselves to speak in the days to come. The Labour MP Brian Iddon described how
A dark cloud descended on the place … we wandered round in a state of shock and horror at what some of our colleagues had been doing. I couldn’t believe it myself. A sort of feeling of distrust came over the place, you couldn’t look people in the eye because you wondered what was coming next, whether they were going to be the subject of another story.
Back at the Telegraph HQ, there was a unique challenge ahead. A typical newspaper exclusive involves one big revelation which can be spread over two or three days. If the story is important enough, it develops a life of its own as other newspapers and journalists find their own angles and chase up their own leads. This was entirely different: having printed what might on any other day be career-ending disclosures about the expenses claims of fourteen of the country’s most senior politicians (a unique achievement in itself), the Telegraph was moving on to a whole new set of MPs, with little time for reflection. Indeed, half the team of reporters had already begun preparing articles for Saturday’s newspaper on the previous day while the coverage of the Cabinet’s expenses was being put together.
Phil Hope, a health minister, had spent more than £40,000 on furniture for a modest two-bedroomed flat in south London. How was this possible? Evans wanted a floor-plan of the flat to work out if that amount of furniture could even fit into the property. Barbara Follett, the tourism minister who is married to the multi-millionaire novelist Ken Follett, had claimed more than £25,000 for ‘private security patrols’ outside the couple’s London townhouse. She had told the parliamentary fees office that she did not feel safe in central London. How could a Labour tourism minister say such a thing while attempting to sell the country to potential visitors from abroad? Phil Woolas, the gaffe-prone immigration minister, had submitted receipts for tampons, women’s tights and even ‘ladies’ shoes’. Martin Beckford, writing the story, was looking forward to hearing his explanation of how such items were within rules which stipulated that only items for an MP’s ‘personal use’ were claimable. Vera Baird, the solicitor general, had even tried to claim for Christmas tree decorations.
‘This is getting totally out of control. Do these people have no shame?’ said Beckford as he prepared the letter for Woolas.
The Telegraph also had to deal quickly with a number of other senior MPs whose expenses claims had been seen by other newspapers: Michael Martin, the Speaker, and the former minister Keith Vaz. Michael Martin had rather grandly hired liveried chauffeurs to transport him around various locations in Glasgow, including a job centre. Vaz had unusual property arrangements. Despite representing a constituency in Leicester, where he had a constituency home, his ‘main’ home was a large detached property on the outskirts of London – and his ‘second’ home was a flat in Westminster. He regularly switched his second-home designation between two properties, enabling him to claim expenses towards both of them. During one financial year he bought twenty-two cushions, most of them silk, at taxpayers’ expense. Once again, letters were prepared and sent to the MPs and ministers in question.
By lunchtime, however, debate was raging within the building about whether the investigation was following the right path. Lewis’s concerns about continuing to restrict the coverage to Labour had not gone away. He felt there was a need to include at least one Conservative MP in the following day’s paper to show readers that this was not a one-party scandal. The bunker team wanted to keep the most high-profile Tories under wraps for a headline-grabbing edition the following Monday; so Greg Barker, the shadow climate change minister, was chosen as a compromise candidate. Barker, who had previously attracted controversy after leaving his wife for a male interior designer, had moved between expensive homes in Chelsea, west London, claiming for extensive renovation work on the properties at taxpayers’ expense before making a handsome profit of more than £320,000 on the deal.
Meanwhile Mark Skipworth, who was in charge of the Saturday edition of the paper, wanted to know which backbench MPs had committed the worst abuses. One name stood out from those who had been looked at so far – Margaret Moran, the Labour MP for Luton South.
Moran, who was so obscure that the parliamentary reporters barely even recognized the name, had made a series of extraordinary claims which had been picked up by Holly Watt as she compiled the database of MPs’ second homes. A detailed analysis of these claims showed that she had flipped her second-home designation between three different addresses, in London, Luton and Southampton, spending more than £80,000 of public money in total on repairs, renovations and mortgage interest payments. Most extraordinary of all was the claim she had made for the property in Southampton, more than 100 miles away from her constituency. Within a month of designating the property as her second home, Moran had claimed more than £22,000 in taxpayer-funded expenses to treat dry rot at the house, which turned out to be jointly owned by her partner.
Moran would, therefore, be the first backbench MP to feature in the investigation. Rosa Prince duly phoned her to ask for the appropriate email address to send her a letter about her expenses. Before she could get the words out, Moran started screaming at the top of her voice.
‘Wait! How can you have seen my expenses when I haven’t even seen them?’ she shrieked.
Prince replied: ‘I have some questions which I need to put to you. What’s the best email address to get a confidential letter to you?’
‘No! I have some questions for you! How did you get my expenses?!’
‘If you just give me your email address, the letter will explain it.’
Moran, who hung up before giving her full email address, was clearly gearing up for a fight, as the events of the next few days would prove.
She wasn’t the only one preparing to take on the Telegraph. Shortly before 3 p.m., the Press Association wire service issued a news alert to all newspapers and broadcasters. It said simply: ‘The Commons authorities have asked the police to investigate the leaking of MPs’ expenses details, a spokesman for the House said today.’ The bunker team’s previous jokes about prison cells and handcuffs started to seem rather hollow as the prospect of a criminal investigation moved a step closer. Did this mean the bunker team were about to have their collars felt? Malcolm Jack, the Clerk of the House of Commons, had contacted Scotland Yard to say he believed there were ‘reasonable grounds to believe a criminal offence may have been committed’. The Yard said it was ‘considering the request’.
Head of news Chris Evans was unconvinced. ‘There’s no way the police are going to want to get involved in this,’ he said. He was aware that Sir Paul Stephenson, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, had given the Telegraph an interview to mark his first 100 days in office, to be published the following day, in which he spoke of the need for the Met to concentrate on ‘serious crime’ and avoid being ‘dragged into party political games’.
And there were further developments to come. Just over an hour after the Commons authorities contacted Scotland Yard, Sky News began reporting that ‘police sources’ had said that they were also considering investigating MPs who had made questionable expenses claims. One MP highlighted by the ‘police sources’ for possible investigation was Tony McNulty.
As Evans had predicted, police involvement had suddenly become very political and the stakes were growing higher. Scotland Yard appeared to be warning the Commons that if they were put under pressure to investigate the leak they might also start probing MPs.
Some MPs were deeply unhappy that the response of the Commons to the expenses scandal was to attack the Telegraph, and detected the hand of the Speaker, Michael Martin, behind the decision. Kate Hoey, the former sports minister, telephoned Telegraph political commentator Benedict Brogan to register her support for the newspaper’s exposé. In an unusual move, she agreed to be quoted criticizing the Commons’ decision to call in the police. She said: ‘It is a complete waste of public money. All this is doing is trying to cover up what should have been transparent from the beginning, which is what MPs do with taxpayers’ money. The public will not be impressed.’ Norman Baker, a Liberal Democrat who has campaigned for greater disclosure of MPs’ expenses, said, ‘Calling in the police is a distraction,’ while Shami Chakrabarti, the director of the civil rights organization Liberty, said she hoped there would be ‘no question of coming after a national newspaper for exposing such a matter of public interest’.
One man who was becoming increasingly worried about police involvement was whistleblower John Wick. That morning he had caught a train to work from his home in Worthing to London, reading the Telegraph and The Times on the journey. As he did so, he became increasingly convinced that he would be arrested as he passed through the ticket barriers in London. Although his fears proved unfounded, he was alarmed when he heard during the afternoon that Parliament had contacted the police.
Wick decided not to leave anything to chance. Drawing on his SAS training, he called his partner, Tania, and asked her to make her way to Victoria station with a bag of his clothes and other essentials. Wick explained that she was not to acknowledge him in any way when she saw him at the station, in case either of them was being watched, and that he would draw her into a crowd where she should surreptitiously hand over the bag. Tania followed his instructions to the letter and Wick hired a car before driving to Dorset, where he lay low for forty-eight hours. He would later catch a flight from Gatwick Airport to Spain to maintain a safe distance from the unfolding events. (He realized just how big the story had become when he noticed a thriving black market in copies of the Sunday Telegraph at the airport newsagent, where people were paying ‘touts’ more than the cover price for the newspaper after the shops had run out!)
While the debate about police involvement in the story began to rage, in Downing Street attention was still focused on extracting an apology for the Prime Minister from the Daily Telegraph. At 5.34 p.m. John Woodcock, another of the Prime Minister’s main advisers, emailed senior Telegraph executives with a ‘proposed clarification’ for the following day’s newspaper. The email said:
The PM would like you to agree to print the following statement:
CLARIFICATION
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH WISHES TO MAKE IT CLEAR THAT THE £6,000 CLAIMED OVER TWO YEARS BY MR BROWN FOR A CLEANER WAS FOR PAYMENTS MADE TO A PROFESSIONAL CLEANER WHO MAINTAINED HIS FLAT. A FULL CONTRACT SHOWING THIS HAS BEEN SEEN BY THE DAILY TELEGRAPH.
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH WAS WRONG TO STATE THAT MR BROWN ‘USED HIS PARLIAMENTARY ALLOWANCES TO BOOST HIS EXPENSES CLAIMS BY SWITCHING HIS DESIGNATED SECOND HOME SHORTLY BEFORE HE MOVED INTO DOWNING STREET’.
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH IS ALSO WRONG TO HAVE CLAIMED THAT MR BROWN ‘APPEARS TO HAVE PAID FOR LITTLE OF HIS OWN LIVING COSTS SINCE MOVING INTO NUMBER 10’.
Referring to an article which reprised the fact that Mr Brown had bought his private London flat from the collapsed empire of Robert Maxwell, the late newspaper tycoon, it added:
ANY SUGGESTION THAT HIS FLAT WAS PURCHASED OTHER THAN ON THE OPEN MARKET AFTER BEING WIDELY ADVERTISED IS COMPLETELY UNTRUE.
The Daily Telegraph declined to print the clarification but did reflect part of the Prime Minister’s response in another article. The newspaper also made it clear that it intended to press on with the publication of revelations about a whole new set of government ministers in the following day’s edition. Downing Street aides, predictably enough, were furious. Instead of being able to shift the angle of the story in the other newspapers to one which questioned the Telegraph’s motives and the accuracy of its reports, Downing Street found itself having to cope with an avalanche of new allegations, without time to pause for breath. By the following day, no one would be interested in the Prime Minister’s rebuttals of the Telegraph’s stories, because they would be immersed in this brand new series of disclosures about what other MPs had been up to. Brown became convinced he was the victim of a ‘political plot’ and that the story had been leaked by a Conservative supporter who was only interested in damaging the Labour Party. (In the coming weeks, the Prime Minister’s office would conduct private polling which found that Labour ministers were disproportionately ‘hit’ by expenses revelations compared to their Conservative counterparts.)
Rosa Prince got a taste of the reaction inside Downing Street when she phoned No. 10. She was told in no uncertain terms that the Telegraph would not be receiving much assistance ‘for a while’.
‘It’s nothing personal,’ insisted one adviser.
Despite being in the thick of a growing media storm and possible police investigation, those in the bunker had to continue working to get out the following day’s paper.
The Saturday edition of the Telegraph on 9 May was to carry eleven pages of new revelations over MPs’ expenses. At about 6 p.m. on Friday the MPs who were about to be exposed began to respond to the newspaper’s earlier enquiries. Ben Bradshaw, then a junior health minister, accused the Telegraph of homophobia for questioning whether it was appropriate that the taxpayer now covered the full mortgage interest on a property he owned with his civil partner (the couple had previously split the cost when Bradshaw was claiming for another house in Exeter). Follett, Vaz and virtually every other MP and minister contacted that day defended their behaviour on the basis that they had acted within the rules. Blaming the system was becoming the name of the game. Margaret Moran was one of the few MPs simply not to respond.
One of the most bizarre responses came from Phil Woolas. The Labour MP for Oldham East and Saddleworth is not known for his tact, and had exasperated colleagues in the past with his bluntness and outspoken comments. He had once said that the population of the country could be capped, only to be quickly rebuked by the home secretary. Earlier that week he had been outmanoeuvred by Joanna Lumley when the Gurkha campaigner, having had a meeting with the immigration minister, said in front of television cameras that the minister had, in effect, agreed to all her demands. Woolas, standing beside her at the time, had looked more and more queasy as he watched the actress forcing him into a corner. Now, on the evening of Friday, 8 May, Woolas went to war with the Telegraph over whether the taxpayer had paid for tampons he had purchased.
In a series of phone calls to Martin Beckford, he insisted that the reporter had got it wrong. ‘There are family items for which I did not claim,’ he said. ‘The amount of expenses claimed and received was less than the receipt submitted.’
He then began to telephone bemused journalists from other newspapers to inform them he was about to be ‘incorrectly outed’ as an MP who had bought women’s clothing and tampons. The Telegraph had got it wrong, he told them.
Beckford held his ground. He double-checked every receipt and compared them to Woolas’s claim forms. Beckford was able to prove that Woolas had claimed the full amount for the receipts which included tampons, meaning they had been paid for by the taxpayer.
The irony was that the rules allowed MPs to claim up to £400 per month for groceries without producing receipts. Woolas had voluntarily provided the receipts – a decision which was now causing him acute embarrassment.
They showed that in one weekly shop he spent £1.48 on panty liners, £1.19 on tampons, £2.99 on nappies and £15 on a ladies’ blouse. Another trip included claims for £5.96 on disposable bibs, £23 on women’s shoes, £1.99 for a child’s comic, £1.60 and £1.55 on more comics, £2.88 on baby wipes and £5 on a ladies’ jumper.
Inexplicably, one bill from Tesco showed he had received a 10 per cent staff discount.
Head of news Chris Evans was satisfied that despite the minister’s vociferous denials, Beckford had got it right. The headline for the article on page nine was written. It read: ‘Minister claimed for women’s clothing and panty liners’.
Woolas was incensed. After the paper was published, he embarked on a series of television interviews outside his house in which he said the Telegraph’s claims were ‘absolutely disgusting’. He said: ‘It is untrue that I claimed these things. It misunderstands the system. The receipts are there, but I never asked for or got money for these items. To suggest otherwise is disgusting.’
However, he later appeared to concede, when confronted with evidence, that the Telegraph had indeed been correct and that he may have made a mistake. ‘I am being hung out to dry for being honest,’ he said.
By 9 p.m. that Friday, one of the most extraordinary days in the Telegraph’s history was coming to a close. The next day’s front-page headline read: ‘The ministers and the money’. Bradshaw, Hope, Follett and Woolas were all pictured.
For the second night in succession, the investigation team decamped to the Harvard Bar in the Thistle Hotel next door to the office to unwind and see how their stories were being reported on the television news. Unfortunate hotel guests trying to enjoy a quiet drink had the misfortune of finding themselves surrounded by more than twenty journalists who commandeered the large flat-screen television in the corner of the bar and turned up the volume before flicking between channels to check the coverage on BBC and ITV.
As Robinson on BBC1 and Bradby on ITV both once more led the news with the Telegraph’s latest revelations, the journalists sounded more like pub regulars watching a football match as they cheered and jeered every twist and turn of the coverage. Within minutes of the broadcast ending, Winnett received a text message from one of the country’s most senior police officers, congratulating him on the scoop.
‘No chance we’ll be investigated now,’ Winnett thought as he smiled to himself, making his way over to a corner of the bar where William Lewis, Mark Skipworth and Rhidian Wynn Davies were sharing a bottle of white wine. All three were concerned about the possibility that if the Telegraph kept up its relentless pursuit of MPs for too long, the public might decide they had had enough of the story and accuse the paper of overkill. Judging when this tipping point would come – and ending the investigation before the public had reached saturation point – would be vital to the long-term impact of the campaign.
While his reporters revelled in being involved in the greatest scoop of their careers, Lewis’s mind had already raced ahead to the end-game. ‘What’s the plan, then?’ he asked the others.
The challenge for the editor, having pressed the button on the investigation, would be judging when to bring it to a conclusion – ‘exiting stage left, with the applause still ringing in our ears’. In theory, the sheer volume of expenses data at the team’s disposal meant the investigation could roll on for months while remaining unequivocally in the public interest. But how long would the revelations remain interesting to the public? A week? Ten days? A fortnight?
‘We need an exit strategy,’ announced Lewis.