THE QUESTIONABLE EXPENSES claims of Shahid Malik, a junior justice minister, were originally pencilled in to be covered by the Telegraph on day two of the investigation, along with those of other ministers including Phil Woolas and Ben Bradshaw. Had the Telegraph stuck to its original plan, Malik’s claims might have been lost in the mix, in the same way that Jack Straw, Alistair Darling and others had been able to rely on ‘safety in numbers’ at that point in the proceedings. In the first few days of the investigation, too, ministers could count on the Prime Minister for his support, as Gordon Brown viewed the entire story as a right-wing conspiracy and was in no mood to satisfy the public’s cries for heads to roll.
But the Telegraph had held back from publishing Malik’s expenses claims, because the more Robert Winnett had looked into them, the more complicated they had become. Like that of Elliot Morley, Shahid Malik’s case would require a considerable amount of further investigation before the Telegraph could be sure it had got to the bottom of the story. It was Malik’s great misfortune that, by the time the Telegraph was ready to publish his claims a week into the investigation, he could no longer use the fig-leaf of other ministers’ spivvy behaviour, and the Prime Minister was no longer minded to turn a blind eye.
The expenses claims of Elliot Morley had been ‘a game changer’ for Gordon Brown: according to one source close to the Prime Minister, ‘it was at that point that he decided there would have to be swift sanctions against anyone who broke the rules’. And Brown wouldn’t have to wait long to show the public that he was, after all, willing to flex his muscles.
Shahid Malik was considered a parliamentary high-flier and had made history by becoming the first Muslim to be appointed a government minister. Despite having been elected as the Labour MP for Dewsbury as recently as 2005, Malik had been brought into the government in 2007 by Gordon Brown as a junior minister for international development. In October 2008 he was promoted to Jack Straw’s Ministry of Justice, where one of his briefs was overseeing the implementation of the deeply unpopular proposed national identity card scheme (which was all but abandoned by Labour in the summer of 2009).
But as Winnett read through Malik’s expenses claims, he sensed that the MP’s rise through the political ranks might be about to come to an end.
All the reporters working on the expenses files had noticed almost straight away that they gave a clear indication of the personality and character of the MP behind the claims. Some were disorganized, polite and apologetic, while others appeared more ruthless and aggressive in their dealings with the staff of the parliamentary fees office. Malik’s claims were firmly in the latter category. Within months of becoming an MP in May 2005, he had begun testing the limits of the expenses system.
The MP was claiming expenses under the ACA for a property in south London that he had owned since 2001. It had only cost him £85,000 – but the taxpayer would soon have spent almost as much as that on the property. Between 2005 and 2008 he had claimed the maximum allowable amount for the house, £66,827 over the three years, and in 2006/7 his total expenses, including office and staffing allowances, had come to £185,421 (not including his salary), making him the most expensive MP of all that year.
In his first year in Parliament, Malik spent hundreds of pounds on new kitchen equipment, a microwave, dishwasher, rug, bathroom sink and other items. He even had claims for an iPod and portable DVD player rejected in December 2005. He then approached the fees office to ask whether he was allowed to buy a new television. They informed him that televisions were among the items for which MPs could claim – so he promptly spent more than £2,500 on a 40-inch flat-screen TV and home cinema system. To his fury, the parliamentary authorities refused to pay the full cost of the purchase after informing him that it was ‘luxurious’ and ‘excessive’. There then followed an extraordinary series of exchanges with the fees office, in which he demanded that they should pay up. In one letter he said, ‘from a natural justice perspective I feel a justifiable exception would be the fairest manner to deal with the current situation’. However, the fees office held firm and ultimately only paid him just over £1,000 towards the total cost. His response was to demand from the fees office a list of the maximum amounts that could be spent on other items on the ‘John Lewis list’. They also declined this request.
Undeterred, Malik continued his spending spree over the next two years with the purchase of more rugs, another microwave, a new bathroom, fireplace, lamps and other items. The taxpayer was also to pay more than £700 for a ‘massage chair’ for the MP. He would later defend the purchase on the basis that he had back pain.
As Winnett scrolled through page after page of Malik’s shopping receipts, he realized that he had found one of the most enthusiastic users of the expenses system. His claims were all the more surprising given that he was a newly elected MP who appeared highly ambitious. Why had he been so reckless?
Leaving aside Malik’s extravagant spending on household goods, Winnett had a nagging doubt over another facet of the minister’s expenses. He was claiming that his London house, where he lived with his wife, was his ‘second home’. However, there was no trace in the files of another property. All his bills were sent either to the London address or to his office at the House of Commons. In the hundred pages of claims, the only non-London address was on a bill sent to his parents’ home in Burnley – about 30 miles away from Malik’s Dewsbury constituency. This was so unusual that Winnett decided to hold the Malik article back for further investigation.
To find out whether Malik had a home in Dewsbury, Nigel Bunyan, the Daily Telegraph’s Manchester district reporter, was dispatched to the West Yorkshire town. Bunyan soon discovered that the MP rented a property in part of a converted barn complex on the outskirts of Dewsbury owned by Tahir Zaman, known as ‘Terry’ – a local businessman who might charitably be described as ‘colourful’. Zaman, who spent much of his time in Dubai, owned a number of properties in the Yorkshire town and had previously pleaded guilty to letting out a property that was uninhabitable to a family of five (he claimed they were sitting tenants when he bought the property), a criminal offence for which he was fined £450 and charged £200 costs. In 2004 he had announced plans to invest £15 million in the area, only to be formally declared bankrupt three years later (though the decision was annulled after three months). Zaman lived in the main property on the barn complex. He also rented Malik his constituency office, which was funded by the taxpayer through the parliamentary office expenses system. It was an odd set-up, to say the least.
Bunyan went to Malik’s ‘main home’ in the rented property, where there was no answer and not much to see apart from a rusty wok on the window sill and a dirty plate in the sink. Next door, at Zaman’s house, the businessman was out, but his wife was at home.
‘He [Malik] is a good friend and neighbour,’ Mrs Zaman told Bunyan. ‘He comes here just at the weekends. He was here this weekend just gone. He rang my little boy up because it was his birthday. Usually he comes here alone. He’s always getting involved with local issues and he’s always in the local paper.’ Mrs Zaman also told the reporter that the house was normally occupied in the week by one of Malik’s constituency workers. The situation was getting murkier – this was supposedly the MP’s ‘main’ home.
Bunyan reported his findings to Winnett and Rayner.
‘Sounds pretty dubious,’ said Winnett. ‘Wonder how much rent he’s paying Zaman?’
The most obvious way to find that out was to ask Zaman himself, but first Winnett felt he would like to know more about the landlord. The task of looking into Zaman’s background was given to Caroline Gammell, who had been asked to join the bunker team as its first new member since the stories had first started to appear.
Gammell had joined the Telegraph in August 2007 at around the same time as Winnett and Rayner, having previously been chief reporter at the Press Association, where she had covered the Bali bombings and the Indian Ocean tsunami and had twice been to Afghanistan to report on the war. Her other claim to fame was that, during a previous ‘career’ as a schoolgirl cricketer, she had appeared in the cricketing almanac Wisden as the most economical bowler of either sex at the country’s independent schools.
One of the Telegraph’s most versatile reporters, Gammell had been in Germany chasing leads on another story when the results of the expenses investigation first began appearing in the paper, and had cursed her luck when she saw that she was missing out on a ‘big one’. When Matthew Bayley asked her to get involved a week later she couldn’t get to the bunker fast enough, though the smell of decomposing takeaways when she walked in quickly disabused her of any notion that she was about to get involved in anything glamorous.
Gammell began by speaking to local newspaper reporters in Dewsbury, and found they were entirely familiar with Zaman. It wasn’t long before she had a mobile phone number for him, and not much longer before Winnett, after attaching a digital voice recorder to his phone, was dialling it.
A cheery voice answered, slightly to Winnett’s surprise. ‘Is that Mr Zaman?’ the reporter asked.
‘Speaking,’ he replied.
‘This is Robert Winnett at the Daily Telegraph.’
‘Lovely. Have I won the lottery?’ he joked, before launching into a lengthy account of his conviction as a ‘slum landlord’ several years previously.
Winnett began to ask him about the various properties that he rented to Malik. Zaman described in detail how the office was rented at normal commercial rates and had been independently valued.
Then came the key question from the reporter. ‘It’s a flat he’s [Malik] got, next door, that’s owned by you too?’ Winnett asked.
‘If it’s a flat or if it’s not a flat, it’s his personal house. I don’t really want to say,’ Zaman said.
‘You own that as well?’ Winnett asked.
‘Yes.’
‘How much rent does he pay on that?’
‘You’ll have to ask him. I tell you what, he’s not paying me what the independent valuation said he should be paying me.’
‘On the flat?’
‘Because we got the independent valuation again for this house. This property’s worth, if I were to sell it, maybe £400,000. I’m not even getting a yield of 5 per cent.’
‘What’s your yield on it then? We don’t want to accuse you of profiting from this. So if he’s paying you less than the market value rent …’
‘He is definitely paying well under the market value rent,’ Zaman said.
‘So, what? £100 a week?’ asked Winnett.
‘It’s even less,’ came the response.
‘Less than £100 a week?’
‘I think so, yeah. Put it this way. Where he’s living, I’m renting the next-door half the size of his property, they pay me more rent than what he’s paying me.’
Winnett sat back in his chair, amazed at what the businessman had just admitted. A government minister, representing the Justice Department no less, had claimed that his ‘main’ home was a cheap flat provided by a friend who said he was renting it at well below the market rate. Meanwhile, he had gone to town spending taxpayers’ money on the ‘second’ home he owned in London.
Not only did Malik appear to have abused the second-home allowance by claiming for what looked like his marital home in London, but his opaque rental arrangements with Zaman might also be in breach of another rule-book, the Ministerial Code of Conduct, which banned ministers from any financial arrangement which risked putting them under an obligation to someone.
Winnett turned to Chris Evans. ‘The guy’s just admitted Malik pays below market rent for the property in Dewsbury,’ he said.
‘Sounds like a splash. Better get writing,’ Evans replied.
Earlier in the day, Winnett had also sent a series of questions to Malik. The MP had phoned back to say that he was too busy to answer them but would endeavour to do so ‘over the weekend’. The reporter explained that it was important for the minister to find time to answer the queries as the newspaper was planning to publish a story the following day.
Late in the afternoon an email arrived in Winnett’s inbox with the minister’s answers to the questions. It was signed off: ‘cheers Shahid’.
The MP confirmed that Dewsbury was his ‘home’. ‘I spend half a week in Dewsbury and I obviously have to be in Parliament and need somewhere to sleep from Monday night to Wednesday night. Overall I spent the majority of my time in Dewsbury because although I spent half the week in London when Parliament is in session I spent most of recess at my main home in Dewsbury.’
That’s about as clear as mud, Winnett thought.
Malik strongly defended his claims but added that he regarded the present system as ‘flawed’ and in need of ‘major reform’.
It was almost 6 p.m. and Winnett had yet to write a single word. The deadline was less than three hours away. For such a complicated story, it was going to be tight. Moments later, an email arrived from executive editor Mark Skipworth asking to see a copy of the story. Winnett only had three paragraphs on screen.
By seven thirty the story was starting to take shape, and by eight fifteen, with input from Evans, Winnett was ready to press the button. It began:
The controversial expenses claims of Britain’s highest claiming MP – Justice Minister Shahid Malik – can today be disclosed by the Daily Telegraph.
Mr Malik has claimed more than £20,000 a year from the taxpayer for his ‘second’ home – a house in south London. He put pressure on the Fees Office to pay controversial claims for expenses, including a home-cinema system, deemed to be a ‘luxury’ items by officials.
However, it can be disclosed that his nominated ‘main’ home is, in fact, a constituency property he rents for less than £5,200 from a landlord with a questionable past.
A few minutes later, Lewis called Winnett in to his office. He was sitting at a table in the corner with a printout of the story which was covered in black marks.
‘I don’t think it’s quite there,’ he said. ‘I’m not quite sure what we are trying to say. Can we give it another go?’
Winnett could feel his blood pressure rising as he returned to the bunker. There were only thirty minutes to go until deadline. Winnett and Evans called up the story and began again.
‘The controversial way in which Justice Minister Shahid Malik was able to run up the highest expenses claim of any MP can be disclosed today by the Daily Telegraph.’
‘Better, much better,’ Evans said under his breath. Richard Oliver, the production chief, was now pacing around the bunker. ‘We really need the splash guys, we’re going to be late.’
At 8.55 p.m. the story was finally ready to leave Winnett’s computer screen. Senior production journalist Keith Hoggins called it up on his own screen, where he was immediately surrounded by Winnett, Evans, Tony Gallagher and Gordon Rayner, all of whom felt there were still tweaks to be made. The unflappable Hoggins was the coolest head in the room as he made last-minute corrections with four different people’s fingers pointed at words or sentences they wanted him to change.
Half an hour later the story had been laid out on the front page, checked by the lawyer, proofread and sent to the printers. The headline read: ‘The justice minister, his home and the convicted landlord’. On one side of the page was a picture of Malik, on the other was a bearded, smiling Zaman.
Winnett had another sleepless night with the stress of the last few hours still weighing heavily on his mind. He was unsure how the Malik story was going to be received. It was the most complicated investigation into any minister the team had yet published – the sort of thing which might have taken weeks when he had worked on the Sunday Times – and he kept going over and over the facts in his head, with that ‘did I lock the front door?’ feeling in his stomach.
The following morning, Winnett switched on Sky News as he gulped down a cup of tea. He was about to leave for the office when he heard the presenter announce they were going ‘live’ to Dewsbury to speak to Malik in his home. ‘Oh God,’ Winnett thought. ‘Here we go.’
What followed was surely one of the most extraordinary interviews given by a politician in recent decades. It was certainly compulsive viewing.
Malik was sitting at a table in what appeared to be his kitchen, drinking tea from an England mug. As Winnett had suspected he might do, Malik’s opening gambit was to accuse the Telegraph of racism.
‘It makes good copy to put a picture of me and someone who looks like Osama bin Laden on the front page,’ Malik said. ‘I don’t believe my claims were out of the core. This is not dodgy stuff, this is right in the centre. This isn’t helicopters, it’s not tennis courts, it’s not swimming pools, it’s not horse manure. It’s very much at the core of the rules.
‘The Green Book is our Bible. MPs talked about it, we asked what the limits were. They were not able to give us the advice that we needed.
‘I can’t do my job if my main home is not Dewsbury. I’m proud of the fact that I’m the first MP for Dewsbury since the war to live in Dewsbury.’
The interviewer then asked: ‘How much time do you spend here?’
‘I’ve absolutely nothing to hide. I’ve nothing to be ashamed of. The majority of my time is here in Dewsbury. Monday night, Tuesday night, Wednesday night in London. On Thursday I’m in my constituency. Friday, Saturday and Sunday. In the recess I spend the majority of my time here.
‘Whether I spend £10,000 or £5,000 or £1 doesn’t really matter. You can’t choose which your main home is. For me my main home is here. I’m confident that what I’ve done is absolutely right.’
‘Does anyone else live here?’
‘Who lives here has nothing to do with anyone. There is nothing from the public purse that is linked to my Dewsbury home. We are being demonized. It’s got to stop.
‘If you prick me, I bleed. If I prick you, you bleed. People like you and others will feel in the future, “Maybe we went a bit too far, maybe we’ve tarnished the good guys.”
‘I think the Telegraph in the long term will have done a service to democracy, but I don’t know whether we’ll have any democracy worth saving after this bloodfest.’
He was then asked whether his job as a minister was safe – a question he dismissed as ‘silly’.
‘Of course my job as a minister will be intact. There is no question of me not continuing in my role. I hope I won’t be proved wrong.’
The interview was turning into a rant from Malik. He had also said: ‘I think this is a bit of a non-story, to be honest. I’m going one million per cent by the book. It’s a non-story in the sense that I could have been one of five hundred MPs. I don’t know why the Telegraph focused on me.
‘Of course I feel that my reputation is tarnished, but my integrity is intact. I’m not in it to make money, I’m here to make a difference.’
Then came the most bizarre exchange. The Sky interviewer asked: ‘Can I ask why an £800 massage chair is so important to you?’
Malik replied: ‘You see, I’d have more respect for you if you were honest about the figures. You know full well it is £730.’
Back in Downing Street, the Prime Minister’s watching advisers were agog. They had read the Telegraph’s story when it landed on the website at 10 p.m. the previous evening. ‘The alarm bells had started ringing immediately,’ one of those present later said.
In the Cabinet Office at 7 a.m. Sir Gus O’Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary and the most powerful civil servant in the land, was starting to immerse himself in the Malik case.
Sir Gus was a clear-headed and highly respected Whitehall veteran. He had been around John Major’s unravelling government as the Prime Minister’s press secretary, so he knew what a crisis looked like. By 8 a.m. he had spoken to the Prime Minister and given his initial thoughts on Malik’s position. They were not positive. O’Donnell was concerned about the implications of Malik’s rental agreement on the Ministerial Code of Conduct. The code stipulates that ministers must disclose to the senior official in their department any financial arrangement which could put them under an obligation to someone. No such arrangement had been registered by Malik.
By mid-morning, Jack Straw had also spoken to Malik, as had the permanent secretary at the Ministry of Justice. Again, the prognosis was not good.
Just before 11 a.m. on Friday, 15 May, Downing Street announced that Malik was to be investigated by the independent adviser on the ministerial code. Barely two hours after he had dismissed the Telegraph’s investigation as ‘a non-story’, Malik announced he would be stepping down from his ministerial post while the investigation was carried out. Once again, the bunker team had apparently been vindicated, at least for the time being.
Such was the unstoppable momentum which the expenses investigation had gathered, however, that there was no time for anyone to rest on their laurels. The following day was Saturday, the Telegraph’s biggest-selling edition in any week, and a new batch of MPs were already being investigated by the team.
After the immense pressure of the Malik investigation, the veteran Labour MP Sir Gerald Kaufman was to provide some welcome comic relief. Kaufman’s claims had first been examined the previous week by Gordon Rayner, who had been looking forward to writing about them for days.
Rayner had barely been able to contain his glee on the day he first looked through Kaufman’s expense receipts.
‘Have a guess how much Gerald Kaufman claimed for a television,’ he asked the reporters in the bunker.
‘Two grand?’
‘No.’
‘Two and a half?’
‘No. Eight thousand, eight hundred and sixty-five pounds.’ Cue gasps of disbelief.
Sir Gerald had bought a 40-inch Bang & Olufsen LCD television for £8,865 and tried to claim for it in 2006. The fees office told him it fell into the category of ‘luxurious furnishings’ and paid him only £750. And there was much, much more. The Manchester Gorton MP, a former environment minister, had also charged the taxpayer £1,851 for what he described as a ‘second-hand rug’ on his claim form. It turned out he had bought it from an antiques centre in New York. His other claims included £220 for a pair of crystal grapefruit bowls and £225 for a rollerball pen. In one exchange with the fees office, regarding £28,834 of work on the kitchen and bathroom at his London flat, he had said the work needed to be done because he was ‘living in a slum’, even though his second home, off Regent’s Park, was in one of the most expensive areas of the capital. He had also claimed £1,262 for a gas bill that was £1,055 in credit.
When Rayner contacted Sir Gerald, he admitted that the claim for the TV was ‘a bit daft’, insisted his flat had needed work because it was ‘neglected’ and said he would pay back the money for the rug if he was asked to.
Like so many other MPs, however, Sir Gerald found that the story continued to run in his local newspaper, and more than a fortnight later he agreed to give an interview to the Manchester Evening News in which he came up with perhaps the most bizarre attempt at an excuse in the entire history of excuses.
‘I live very modestly. I don’t have much in the way of luxuries,’ he began, before addressing the subject of why he tried to claim £8,865 for a TV.
‘I’d self-diagnosed myself with obsessive compulsive disorder and I’d bought a new television set. Then I decided to have a bigger one. I thought to myself, “Well, you can claim for a TV, so why not claim for it?”
‘Because I’ve got this self-diagnosed OCD, I do things according to rules that I’ve created.’
On the subject of the grapefruit bowls, he said: ‘As part of my OCD, I have the same breakfast when I’m at home both in London and Manchester every day. Half a grapefruit, a bowl of muesli with semi-skimmed milk and a cup of coffee with a Rich Tea biscuit. That’s breakfast. A cleaner broke one of the dishes, so I went and got a replacement.’
Readers of the Manchester Evening News were incredulous. One correspondent wrote: ‘Sir Gerald blames “self-diagnosed obsessive compulsive disorder (O.C.D.)” for his behaviour. I have worked in the NHS for nearly 20 years and my opinion is that he suffers from self-diagnosed G.R.E.E.D.!’
While Rayner was chuckling to himself over Sir Gerald’s expenses claims, Jon Swaine was about to make a breakthrough on a story which appeared to involve another ‘phantom mortgage’.
Swaine, originally from Chelmsford in Essex, had joined the Telegraph as a graduate trainee in 2007, and from his very first day it had been clear he was going places. Spending six months on a local newspaper and six months with the Press Association as part of his training on the Telegraph scheme, he was a frighteningly quick learner who could not only rapidly turn around well-written, accurate stories but was also fully fluent in emerging web-based reporting techniques including blogging and Twitter. As one of the paper’s newer recruits, he often had to work early shifts, starting at 6 a.m., to make sure the Telegraph’s website was bang up to date in time for the morning rush hour; so he was the only member of the team for whom the 8 a.m. starts in the bunker represented a lie-in.
For Swaine, still only twenty-four, the expenses story represented a chance to prove that he was not only bright but also capable of pulling his weight in a major investigation, and he repaid the faith of Bayley and Evans by quietly getting on with the job in hand, producing a string of excellent stories as the investigation progressed.
‘The Swaine’, as the other bunker reporters called him, had become highly suspicious when he had checked the expenses claims of David Chaytor, a little-known backbench Labour MP representing Bury North. Chaytor appeared to be the most frequent flipper in Parliament. His files showed that he had changed his designated second home six times in five years. One of his flips was to a property where his son was registered as the occupant, where he paid off thousands of pounds’ worth of bills. Swaine prepared a letter for Chaytor asking him to explain why he had made claims for this property along with a number of other questionable expenses. While waiting for the MP’s response, he started to delve more deeply into the various properties for which Chaytor had claimed.
Using Land Registry records, Swaine established that a London flat on which the MP had claimed £13,000 in mortgage interest in 2005 and 2006 was not currently mortgaged. But had it been mortgaged at the time he made the claims? As Watt had done with Elliot Morley, Swaine asked the Land Registry office in Birkenhead to check the history of the mortgage, and was told that Chaytor had paid off his Yorkshire Building Society loan in January 2004, the year before he started claiming expenses for the mortgage.
‘Are you absolutely sure?’ Swaine asked the official.
‘I’ve no doubt about it, Jon – we received an application to end the mortgage on the seventh of January, 2004, and there don’t appear to have been any others since,’ she said. Swaine asked her to fax over the document.
It didn’t arrive.
Panic began to mount. Swaine called to check she had sent it – she had. He asked her to send the document again – she did. Still it didn’t arrive. With the deadline looming, Swaine began to fear that the official had accidentally sent it to the news desk of another newspaper, or made up the whole thing as a ‘Friday joke’ after getting fed up with doing so many checks for the bunker team during the week.
Eventually Swaine found another fax machine in the main newsroom, gave the Land Registry the number, and then stood guard beside it, waiting. After what seemed like hours, the document eventually came through. It showed that Chaytor was indeed another ‘phantom mortgage’ claimer – the second in a week.
The rush was now on for Swaine to put a series of follow-up questions to Chaytor. He wrote a second, more serious, letter to the MP, asking whether he might have broken the law. The wording was identical to that of the letter that had been sent to Morley. He then called Chaytor’s constituency secretary, to whom he had spoken when sending the first letter. ‘I’ve got another letter for Mr Chaytor, this time with some very serious allegations,’ he said. She explained that the MP was on a ‘fact-finding’ trip to America with a parliamentary committee to study education policy. An hour later, the secretary replied:
Thank you for your two emails, which I confirm have reached David Chaytor’s inbox. However, as he is away on a Select Committee visit abroad, and has had technical problems all week in accessing his inbox, I do not know whether he has yet received them personally. I am trying to contact him to let him know you have written and would like a response.
After another two and a half agonizing hours, Swaine still hadn’t received a reply. He telephoned the secretary again, called Chaytor’s mobile phone and even called Mrs Chaytor (who worked in the MP’s Westminster office). Chaytor had switched off his phone and his wife was sounding incredibly stressed.
Just before 5 p.m. Swaine asked the secretary for her mobile number, in case she had to leave the office. ‘I don’t think that’s going to be happening tonight,’ she said. Swaine was encouraged.
At 5 p.m. precisely, Chaytor made contact with Swaine for the first time. ‘As you know I am abroad on a Select Committee visit at the moment, and have been all week,’ he said in an email. ‘Because of this I have been unable to go through the documents properly. Because of this I am taking legal advice and therefore am unable to give a statement at this time. I will respond as soon as possible.’
After consulting Arthur Wynn Davies, Swaine replied:
As is widely accepted, our investigation concerns matters of enormous public interest. Given that each Member of Parliament is accountable for expenses claimed from public funds you are plainly under a duty to respond to legitimate questions raised with you as a matter of public interest and concern. This matter is urgent.
While we note what you say about being currently abroad, we cannot see any reason for your not being able to answer the relatively straightforward questions put to you in my earlier email.
Just eight minutes later, the MP sent back a long and detailed response.
Swaine crouched forward as he eagerly read Chaytor’s email. As he got halfway down the screen, he collapsed back into his chair and breathed out heavily. Holding his outstretched arm towards the computer, he turned to Winnett.
‘He’s admitted it,’ said a mightily relieved Swaine.
The reporters gathered round his screen, giving Swaine morale-boosting slaps on the shoulder as they read Chaytor’s response.
‘In respect of mortgage interest payments, there has been an unforgivable error in my accounting procedures for which I apologise unreservedly,’ he had written.
Arthur Wynn Davies came into the bunker. ‘He’s coughed to it,’ Winnett told him.
‘Bloody hell – he must have had it ready all along,’ said Wynn Davies.
Winnett passed the news on to the editor.
‘He’s the first one to actually just admit it and apologize, right?’ said Lewis.
‘Yep,’ replied Winnett.
Winnett and Swaine started work on a story which would be headlined: ‘The MP and the phantom £13,000 mortgage’. It was the first time the phrase ‘phantom mortgage’ would appear in print.
As the finishing touches were put to the story, Chaytor was heading for an airport in Washington DC to catch a flight back to Britain to face the Labour Party. Television crews would be waiting for him at his various properties the following day. Like Morley, he would be suspended from the Parliamentary Labour Party and would decide to pay back the money and announce he would not be standing at the next election. And, like Morley, his claims would become the subject of a police investigation.
Apart from stories about Chaytor and Kaufman, that Saturday’s Daily Telegraph also contained stories about the expenses claims of another eight MPs – a measure of just how much was going on in the bunker on any one day. The paper also contained a new feature of the expenses investigation: the ‘saints’. Readers had made it clear that as well as finding out which MPs had been up to no good, they wanted to know which members had been scrupulously honest. By the time the investigation had finished, the Telegraph had published the names and details of fifty ‘saints’ who had done all they could to minimize their burden on the public purse. They included Vince Cable, the Lib Dem Treasury spokesman, who was one of seven Lib Dem MPs representing outer London constituencies who had chosen not to claim the ACA despite being eligible to claim it. The Conservative MP Ann Widdecombe claimed just £858 of her second-home allowance in 2007/8 (for occasional hotel stays), having decided against buying a second home in London and opting instead to commute from her constituency home 42 miles away in Maidstone. Labour’s ‘saints’ included the likes of Martin Salter, the Reading West MP, who claimed nothing at all under the second-home allowance, choosing to commute the 50 miles from his Berkshire constituency rather than buying a flat in London at taxpayers’ expense.
The saints also included some of Parliament’s wealthiest MPs: Geoffrey Robinson, the millionaire former paymaster general and Labour MP for Coventry North West, claimed nothing at all on his ACA, despite owning more than one property. True, he was wealthy enough not to need help from the taxpayer; but that hadn’t prevented other wealthy MPs, such as Michael Ancram, from claiming thousands from the public purse.
The bunker team had written to about twenty MPs on that Friday alone, and the reporters were starting to feel the pace. Before they could go home for the evening, however, they were summoned into the editor’s office for one last duty of the week: sharing a trolley-load of champagne bought by the proprietors and handed round by chief executive Murdoch MacLennan.
MacLennan was generous in his praise for the efforts of the team, describing the expenses investigation as one of the biggest scoops in Fleet Street history. But with the investigation only a week old, there were plenty more twists and turns to come.