BY THE TIME MPs returned to Parliament from their weekend break on Monday, 11 May, the expenses investigation was into its fourth day of publication, and with the exposure of the Tories’ claims it had become clear to members of all political parties that no one was immune from the Telegraph’s disclosures. Panic began to grip MPs, who took to waiting by the phone every day, dreading a call from the Daily Telegraph. Only when mid-afternoon had come and ‘the call’ hadn’t could they relax, knowing that they were safe – for another day at least.
The Labour MP Stephen Pound later described the atmosphere as being ‘like a slasher movie where every morning we come in and see who’s still alive. It really is very desperate and very dark, but what makes it worse is that it’s nobody’s fault but their own.’
Ann Cryer, another Labour MP, later said: ‘It was a very, very grim two or three weeks and there were a lot of very depressed people. People were in such a state. You know, the saying is, if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. Well, I had no idea just how hot that kitchen was going to get.’
A third MP, who wanted to remain anonymous, told the Telegraph: ‘It was the most subdued I have ever seen the Commons other than in the wake of a terrorist attack or disaster. Everyone was shell-shocked, casting furtive glances at each other and wondering if they had anything to hide.’
Lobby journalists from all newspapers found that with each new day, a new group of MPs with whom they had enjoyed good working relationships for years would suddenly refuse to speak to them. The Telegraph’s James Kirkup sent regular text messages to Winnett and Rosa Prince charting the disintegration of his contacts book. ‘Deleting another number from my phone,’ said one typical text.
Some MPs were confrontational. Kirkup was shouted at by one Tory frontbencher who fumed: ‘My son is being bullied at school because of you!’ Others were more reflective. Another Tory frontbencher, whose claims had caused him considerable trouble with his constituents, told Kirkup: ‘This is the way the game is played. And when I looked at [the claims] from my constituents’ point of view, I realize why they’re not happy. It’s my responsibility so I have to deal with it.’
The public had little or no sympathy for the MPs, and Telegraph staff even found themselves being applauded by total strangers simply because of their association with the paper. When one senior Telegraph staffer went into his local newsagents, the friendly shop-owner behind the counter congratulated him on the paper’s success at exposing MPs. The queue of people behind him erupted in spontaneous applause as he turned bright red and hurried from the store, nodding his thanks. Benedict Brogan, the Telegraph political columnist who was rapidly becoming one of the public faces of the investigation after countless TV interviews, found himself for the first time in his life being stopped in the street by people asking: ‘Aren’t you that bloke I saw on the telly last night?’ and shaking his hand in approval.
One of the most immediate barometers of public opinion – the London cab driver – also backed the Telegraph to the hilt. As consulting editor Rhidian Wynn Davies took a taxi home to north London, he was treated to an expletive-ridden tirade by one cabbie, who had taken a particular dislike to Alan Duncan and ‘his effin’ garden’.
‘It’s about bleedin’ time these people were taken down a peg,’ the cabbie said. ‘They lord it over us but they don’t like it when people find out what they’ve been up to, do they?’
The following night, Wynn Davies was coming out of a meeting in Holborn when he raised his hand to call a taxi. He was slightly alarmed when a black cab braked sharply and swerved towards him, apparently desperate for his business. Incredibly, it turned out to be the same cabbie that had picked him up the night before.
‘Hop in, mate,’ said the driver, looking pleased as Punch. ‘You can tell me who the Telegraph’s having a go at in tomorrow’s paper!’
Telegraph staff who were churchgoers even found the expenses story being quoted from the pulpit, as vicars used MPs’ greed as an attention-grabbing way to kick off sermons on morally upstanding behaviour.
The story was beginning to ingrain itself in the national consciousness in a way that few other stories had the power to do. At bus stops, in pubs and in workplaces up and down the country, people were talking about MPs’ expenses.
After four days of relentless criticism, Gordon Brown finally appeared to be recognizing that his and Labour’s response to the growing scandal might have failed fully to address the growing public anger. Cameron’s apology, published in that morning’s Telegraph, was receiving significant airplay and Downing Street realized that the Prime Minister also needed to express remorse. However, Brown – still stung by the criticism of his own claims – could not bring himself to offer a personal apology. Instead, in a late addition to a speech to the Royal College of Nursing conference, he apologized on behalf of all politicians.
‘Just as you have the highest standards in your profession, we must show that we have the highest standards for our profession,’ he said to the hall of nurses. ‘And we must show that, where mistakes have been made and errors have been discovered, where wrongs have to be righted, that that is done immediately. We have also to try hard to show people and think hard about how a profession that, like yours, depends on trust – the most precious asset it has is trust – how that profession too can show that it is genuinely there to serve the public in all its future needs.’
He then added: ‘I want to apologize on behalf of politicians, on behalf of all parties, for what has happened in the events of the last few days.’
Elsewhere, politicians from all parties were beginning to question whether the public’s trust in Parliament could ever be restored. The Liberal Democrat Norman Baker warned that the public’s relationship with MPs might have been ‘irrevocably damaged’.
But one man remained unrepentant. Michael Martin, who had for so long tried to block the release of MPs’ expenses claims, made it clear that in his view there was only one way to resolve the crisis: by shooting the messenger. In an extraordinary stand-off during an emergency debate on expenses in the Commons chamber on that Monday afternoon, Martin – who as Speaker was supposed to be the imperturbable, politically neutral referee of Commons debates – not only tried to make the Telegraph the villain of the piece but also rounded on MPs who dared to suggest that the Telegraph might have been serving the public interest by holding up Members’ expenses claims to scrutiny.
Closely watched by an incredulous bunker team, as well as the wider world, Martin rose to his feet and began steadily to dig his own political grave.
‘Members will be aware of the unauthorized disclosure of material relating to their allowances, which has appeared in the press on Friday and over the weekend,’ he said. ‘This has caused great public concern.’
Was he about to apologize for MPs’ avaricious behaviour? Not a bit of it. He stressed that there was ‘some basis for considering that a criminal offence or offences may have been committed’, adding: ‘I can understand Honourable Members’ concerns about the revealing of details of bank accounts, style of signature and verbal passwords and their concern that an individual who may have sold the data is capable of selling this information further. That is why the police have been informed.’
Martin then sat down and allowed other MPs to comment and ask questions. First on his feet was Julian Lewis, Conservative MP for the New Forest in Hampshire and the shadow defence minister. Lewis had been instrumental in ensuring that MPs’ addresses would not be published when ‘redacted’ versions of their expenses claims were made public later in the year, by the introduction of legislation which exempted Parliament from having to publish MPs’ personal details. Now, however, the Telegraph’s disclosures of how MPs had ‘flipped’ their second-home designations cast doubt over the motives of those voting to keep addresses secret. The MP had written to the Daily Telegraph earlier asking what steps the newspaper was taking to ensure that what he described as ‘stolen’ personal data did not fall into the wrong hands. Arthur Wynn Davies had been concerned from the outset that MPs might try to use an obscure and ancient legal concept, contempt of Parliament, to bog down the Telegraph’s investigation by accusing the newspaper of hindering MPs in going about their duty. To reassure Julian Lewis, consulting editor Rhidian Wynn Davies wrote back to the MP pointing out that the information had not been stolen, and that ‘exceptional steps’ had been taken to ensure sensitive information was not published.
As Lewis rose to his feet in Parliament, Wynn Davies stood with William Lewis and Tony Gallagher in the editor’s office waiting to see whether the MP would accept the assurances given in the letter, or whether he would go on the attack.
Lewis began: ‘May I say something of a more positive nature about this matter? I was pleased to see that, in publishing some of the material, the Daily Telegraph has been careful to black out such information as Members’ home addresses.’ He then read out an extract of the letter from Rhidian Wynn Davies, and that was that. A wave of relief passed through the bunker. Another potential crisis had been averted. But as the reporters began to rib Wynn Davies about his fifteen seconds of fame in the Commons chamber, Michael Martin was just moments away from pressing the self-destruct button.
Kate Hoey, a Labour MP and former sports minister, went against centuries of parliamentary custom by openly criticizing the actions of the Speaker in calling in the police to investigate the leak to the Daily Telegraph.
‘Many of us – I hope from all parts of the House – feel that bringing in the Metropolitan Police, who have a huge job to do in London at the moment in dealing with all sorts of problems, to try to find out who has leaked something when, as has been pointed out, the newspapers have handled the personal details very responsibly by blanking them out, is an awful waste of resources. Will the public not see this, whatever the intention, as a way of hiding …’
Martin had heard enough. ‘Let me answer the Honourable Lady,’ he said, jabbing his finger at her: ‘I listen to her often when I turn on the television at midnight and I hear her public utterances and pearls of wisdom on Sky News – it is easy to talk then. Is it the case that an employee of this House should be able to hand over any private data to any organization of his or her choosing? … I just say to the Honourable Lady that it is easy to say to the press, “This should not happen,” but it is a wee bit more difficult when you have to do more than just give quotes to the Express – or the press, rather – and do nothing else.’
MPs looked stunned as Martin completed his attack on Hoey. The Speaker appeared to be losing control.
The Lib Dem MP Norman Baker suggested it would be best simply to publish MPs’ expenses as quickly as possible, which earned him a blast of the Speaker’s cold sarcasm, as Martin suggested some MPs were ‘keen to say to the press whatever the press wants to hear’.
‘What the hell is he doing?’ Winnett asked no one in particular as the reporters watched in silent fascination.
‘The bloke’s a disgrace,’ answered Beckford.
Hoey later suggested the Speaker had ‘lost it’, and in the following days murmurings in Parliament about Martin’s behaviour would swell into ever louder cries for his resignation. For the first time, a senior political figure appeared to be on the ropes as a result of the Telegraph’s expenses investigation; but while Martin’s performance amounted to great sport for the reporters watching in the bunker, none of them thought at that stage that he was in serious danger of losing his job. Speakers, after all, were elected for life, and no Speaker had been ousted from office for hundreds of years.
The fact that Martin had become so rattled did, however, take the Telegraph’s expenses investigation to a new level. Rather than simply embarrassing senior MPs, it had given the first real indication that the expenses story was starting to influence events, and there was a growing sense that this was only the beginning.
The reporters had felt from the outset that some of the most damaging revelations would probably lead to the resignation of one or more backbench MPs; indeed, there had been a certain amount of surprise that arch-flipper Margaret Moran had not already thrown in the towel. Some had even thought that at least one minister would have to resign, and that the only reason this had not yet happened was that damage caused to individual ministers had been diluted by the publication of so many individuals’ details at once. No one involved in the investigation had made any predictions beyond guessing who might have to resign. But the events of Monday, 11 May, amounted to a tangible shift in the expenses scandal. For the first time, it was starting to become apparent that the greatest impact of the investigation might be not on individual MPs, but on Parliament itself.
Martin’s outburst also had the unintended side-effect of marshalling media opinion squarely behind the Telegraph, with even the newspaper’s habitual critics lining up to praise the investigation and pour scorn on the Speaker. Simon Jenkins, writing in the Guardian, the newspaper traditionally at the opposite end of the political spectrum, defended the Telegraph against Speaker Martin’s attack, saying: ‘I cannot see what the Telegraph has done wrong … publication was the only way to reveal a systematic fraud on the public accounts, whose perpetrators had already shown they were determined to use the courts to suppress it.’ Stephen Glover, one of the Telegraph’s harshest critics over the years, used his column in the Independent to say: ‘The expenses story will be written about by historians in a hundred years. It will become part of journalistic lore … the day-by-day presentation of often complicated facts was a challenge which the paper brilliantly met. It could scarcely have been better done … the Daily Telegraph has pulled off a journalistic triumph of courage and skill.’
The bunker team, of course, decided such plaudits should be put on display to provide a fillip to morale in late-night moments of lethargy. Matthew Bayley got hold of a large packet of magnets and put the white-painted metal wall of the bunker to good use, transforming it into a ‘wall of glory’ which quickly became a giant scrapbook for the investigation team. It included letters of congratulation (the author Jilly Cooper wrote to the editor on lavender-coloured paper to tell him: ‘I really think you’ve saved the country’), letters of thanks (‘Keep up the good work!’) and the best cartoons, jokes and quizzes that the investigation had spawned, such as Private Eye’s neat summary of the way the expenses system worked:
Those expense claim rules in full:
1 All claims made by MPs are within the rules.
2 All rules are made by MPs.
3 Er …
4 That’s it.
Rory Bremner, the country’s leading satirist and impressionist, later suggested the story was beyond parody. ‘People are getting their satire off the front page of the Daily Telegraph at the moment,’ he said.
The only non-expenses-related material to appear on the wall was sports reports on Newcastle United’s fortunes (or lack of them) put up by Newcastle fan Gordon Rayner, at a time when he was under the delusion that Alan Shearer’s arrival at the club might save it from relegation from the Premiership. Rayner, a tall, wiry Geordie, liked to try to persuade colleagues (unsuccessfully) that he bore a passing resemblance to Shearer, though in truth all he shared with his footballing idol was his birthplace and a receding hairline.
Another Geordie who was regularly invoked in the bunker was Marcus Bentley, the man whose rather exaggerated north-east accent has described events in Channel Four’s Big Brother house for almost a decade. With so many of them cooped up in such a small space for so many hours a day, the reporters were starting to feel like participants in a slightly twisted social experiment, and took to mimicking Bentley’s accent each morning as they registered ‘day seven hundred in the Big Brother house’. Although the public had been aware of the expenses story for just four days, the reporters had been on the case for a fortnight, and it was starting to become difficult to remember what life had been like ‘pre-expenses’.
But some of the most shocking revelations were still to come.