CHAPTER 20

AFTER THE DISCOVERY of Douglas Hogg’s expenses claim for his moat, the investigation team – and, presumably, the public – assumed that the saga could not get any more surreal. But, as the team carried on ploughing through the expenses records of backbench MPs, reporter Nick Allen was about to discover a claim so ludicrous it would make even the moat seem relatively sober.

‘What the bloody hell is a floating duck island?!’ Allen called out across the bunker.

The other reporters jumped up from their chairs and crowded round Allen’s screen. No one knew the answer to his question, but it sounded like this was something which was not to be missed.

Allen had been looking through the expenses claims of Sir Peter Viggers, a wealthy Tory MP who represented the constituency of Gosport in Hampshire. Like so many other Tory grandees, he had claimed thousands of pounds for his gardening bills, including nearly £500 for 28 tonnes of manure and a £213 electrician’s bill which included fixing lights on a ‘fountain’ and ‘hanging lights on Christmas tree’. Like Douglas Hogg, Sir Peter had an arrangement with the fees office which involved submitting a breakdown of the annual costs of running his grand constituency home, which ran to more than £30,000, and asking the fees office to pay him the maximum yearly allowance (which in 2007/8 was £23,083).

In the 2006/7 financial year Sir Peter had submitted a handwritten list of his spending, which came to £33,747.19 and included ‘pond feature, £1,645’. Allen was, naturally, curious to find out exactly what this pond feature was, and discovered that among the receipts which Sir Peter had submitted to back up his claim was an invoice for a ‘floating duck island’. It specified that the item was a ‘Stockholm’ model and that the ‘price includes three anchor blocks, duck house and island’.

‘Let’s see if there’s a picture,’ said Allen, grinning as he typed ‘Stockholm duck island’ into Google. The bunker was filled with gales of laughter as a picture of the duck house popped up on his screen. The subject of Sir Peter’s expenses claim turned out to be a miniature stately home for his feathered friends, complete with windows and a tiled roof and topped with an ornate cupola. Painted yellow, with green window frames, it stood proudly on a wooden pontoon, with a little drawbridge for the ducks to walk up.

‘That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen!’ said Caroline Gammell.

The website of the firm which made the 5-foot-high structure said it was based on an eighteenth-century Swedish construction which was now in the Stockholm Museum of Buildings. Other available duck-house designs included a castle with turrets and a flagpole, and a reproduction of a Gothic banqueting house in Cornwall. Sir Peter’s expenses claim was, quite simply, beyond parody, and for the bunker team it was an absolute gift.

‘See if it’s on Google Earth,’ suggested Rayner; so Allen put the address of Sir Peter’s house into the search engine and found an aerial view. ‘There it is!’ Rayner pointed. Sure enough, there, in a garden pond which resembled a mini-Serpentine, was the unmistakable shape of the Stockholm duck house.

‘Brilliant!’ laughed Hope. ‘You can see it from space!’

The only drawback with the story was that the fees office had written ‘not allowed’ next to the ‘pond feature’ on Sir Peter’s claim, suggesting he had not been paid specifically for the duck island; but, as with Douglas Hogg, the inclusion of the item on his expenses claims demonstrated how out of touch he was with the average taxpayer.

Allen prepared a letter for Sir Peter, a member of Parliament’s Treasury Select Committee, who was in Washington DC preparing for a meeting with representatives of the International Monetary Fund. His brief response defended the claim:

‘The claims I made were in accordance with the rules, and were all approved by the fees office. Since then the situation has changed and we must all take account of that. My expenses are being examined by David Cameron’s scrutiny panel and I await any recommendations they may make.’

David Cameron, when told about the duck house, was incandescent. After a brief conversation with his party leader, Sir Peter announced that he would not be standing at the next election. He later expressed his ‘shame’ at what he said had been a ‘ridiculous’ attempt to claim for the island.

When the story appeared in the Telegraph the next day, the duck house instantly became the iconic image of the whole expenses story. Pictures of it were shown to disbelieving audiences around the world, and it featured in numerous cartoons – including one by the Telegraph’s Matt, which depicted one duck asking another: ‘Do you think we could fit a plasma TV in there?’ The public didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. BBC Radio Five Live began its news headlines with the sound of ducks quacking, while on Radio Four Evan Davis, one of the presenters of the Today programme, memorably ‘corpsed’ as he tried to read the duck house story during a review of the papers, collapsing into such a fit of giggles that his co-presenter had to take over.

The story even sparked an intense debate among bird enthusiasts as to whether the duck house was fit for purpose. Sir Peter admitted that his ducks had ‘never liked’ their plush retreat, and he declared it a waste of money. Bas Clarke, who kept eight hundred wildfowl on his land in Lincolnshire, said the Stockholm model was ‘not suitable for ducks’, pronouncing the doorway ‘far too big’ for birds, which felt more secure squeezing through small gaps. Not so, retorted Ivor Ingall, the retired army officer who had designed it. He said that in his experience ‘ducks vote with their feet’ and that in his own pond in Farnham, Surrey, no fewer than fourteen ducklings had hatched in his duck house during the spring.

There was, however, one final question about the duck house: where was it? Sir Peter had sold his house in Hampshire in 2008 (after the Google Earth picture had been captured) and the island was no longer in the pond. When the Telegraph paid a visit to the house in an attempt to track down the celebrated structure, there were other reminders of the former owner’s presence – including a well cover monogrammed with his initials in gold letters – but no duck island. Sir Peter eventually said the island was ‘in storage’ and announced that he would donate it to a charity auction.

Sir Peter may have claimed for the most ridiculous object of all, but the prize for the most ridiculous rant from an MP went to another Tory grandee whose claims had been exposed by Nick Allen a few days earlier – Anthony Steen.

The MP for Totnes, in Devon, who is the father of the television presenter Xanthe Steen, had featured in the Telegraph on the day that Chaytor’s phantom mortgage appeared on the front page. Yet another wealthy Conservative who had spent thousands of pounds of the public’s money maintaining a large constituency home, Steen had registered claims for the £1.5 million country estate including bills for a woodland expert to inspect ‘500 trees’ as well as tagging shrubs and assessing whether there was a need for ‘additional guarding’ against rabbits. Over the course of four years he had claimed a total of £87,729. Once again, David Cameron was not impressed, and Steen later announced he would be stepping down at the next election, saying: ‘I’ve had a very good innings, there’s no bitterness, no anger, but as the saying goes, all political careers end in tears.’

Within hours of making that statement, however, the barrister had changed his mind: it turned out he was bitter and angry after all. In an interview with the BBC, he let rip with his true thoughts about the Telegraph’s investigation and the public’s reaction to it.

‘I think I behaved, if I may say so, impeccably,’ he said. ‘I have done nothing criminal, that’s the most awful thing, and do you know what it is about? Jealousy.

‘I have got a very, very large house. Some people say it looks like Balmoral, but it’s a merchant house of the nineteenth century. It’s not particularly attractive, it just does me nicely and it’s got room to actually plant a few trees. As far as I’m concerned as of this day I don’t know what the fuss is about.

‘What right does the public have to interfere with my private life? None. It was this wretched government which introduced the Freedom of Information Act and this government which has insisted on things that have caught me on the wrong foot which, if I had been cleverer, it wouldn’t have done.

‘Do you know what this reminds me of? An episode of Coronation Street. Do you know what Members are doing? They are waiting by their phones between three and four o’clock in the afternoon, because that’s the time the Prime Minister used to ring you if you were going to get a job, and now it’s a question of whether the Daily Telegraph are going to ring you, because that’s the time they ring you. Is it the Prime Minister? No. It’s the Daily Telegraph. They just know this is a kangaroo court going on.’

David Cameron couldn’t believe his ears when he heard the interview on The World At One. As soon as he could track down Steen, he gave him a piece of his mind and threatened to isolate him from the party. He then spoke on the radio himself, saying: ‘I gave him a very clear instruction after that interview – one more squeak like that and he will have the whip taken away from him so fast his feet won’t touch the ground.’

Steen put out a statement in which he apologized ‘unreservedly’ for his comments. ‘I am sorry that in the heat of the moment I said inappropriate things that weren’t as measured as I would have liked.’

Steen’s hot-blooded outburst should have served as a cautionary tale for every other MP, but it didn’t – not, at least, in the case of Sir John Butterfill, who had designated a small flat in his Bournemouth constituency as his ‘main’ home while claiming expenses on a £1.2 million country retreat in Surrey, which he said was his ‘second’ home (except when he came to sell it, of course, when it became his ‘primary residence’ for tax purposes). Sir John, another Tory grandee, had submitted claims which included £17,000 for a staff annexe where his housekeeper and his gardener lived. When he realized his expenses claims were about to be published in the Telegraph he wasted no time in appearing on Newsnight, before the paper had even hit the streets, to denounce the story in what turned into car-crash television. Becoming tongue-tied under interrogation from Kirsty Wark, Sir John made the fatal error of referring to his two old retainers as ‘servants’: ‘The one mistake I made was that in claiming interest on the home, I didn’t separate from that the value of the servants’, er, the staff, wing.’

Studio guest John Strafford, of the Conservative Campaign for Democracy, watched Sir John’s performance open-mouthed, and, when asked for his reaction, memorably said that the MP was ‘toast’. Sir John had already told his Conservative Association months earlier that he intended to stand down at the next election, so in this instance there was no need for Cameron to intervene.

The edition of the Daily Telegraph which featured Sir Peter Viggers’ duck house on the front page also focused on a third MP with an apparent phantom mortgage – the Conservative whip Bill Wiggin. The MP for Leominster in Herefordshire, who had been a contemporary of David Cameron at Eton, had received more than £11,000 in expenses for mortgage interest payments on his ‘second home’ in his Herefordshire constituency, even though it had no mortgage. When Martin Beckford challenged Wiggin over his expenses claims, the MP said that he had simply claimed for the wrong address: he had meant to claim for the mortgage on his London home, but had accidentally filled in his constituency address instead (on no fewer than twenty-three forms).

For the first time since his ‘John Wayne moment’, Cameron decided to contest the Telegraph’s version of events. After speaking to Wiggin, Cameron was convinced that the MP had made an innocent – albeit stupid – mistake, and did not fall into the same category as Elliot Morley or David Chaytor. Andy Coulson, the Tories’ head of communications, made calls to Andrew Porter, to Benedict Brogan and to Robert Winnett, trying to argue that Wiggin should not be given the same prominence as Morley and Chaytor.

William Lewis discussed the story with Winnett and Tony Gallagher. Gallagher felt it would be wrong to treat Wiggin differently from others with similarly questionable claims when his expenses forms clearly showed he had claimed mortgage interest for a property which had no mortgage. It should be up to the public to decide whether Wiggin’s defence of ignorance stood up to scrutiny. Wiggin’s picture would appear on the front page, together with a photograph of a duck to illustrate Sir Peter Viggers’ expenses claims.

Coulson took the news in his stride, as did many of the MPs who stood to lose the most. James Purnell, the work and pensions secretary, was also to feature in the same edition as Wiggin, as Holly Watt had confirmed that both he and Geoff Hoon had avoided paying capital gains tax when they sold properties. Purnell, who had billed the taxpayer for advice from an accountant on whether he needed to pay tax on the profit from the sale, phoned Andrew Porter after he had received a letter from the Telegraph.

‘Is it the splash?’ the MP wanted to know.

‘It’s on the front,’ said Porter, though he said it was not expected to be the splash. Purnell, who rarely complained at what was written about him in the press, initially made little attempt to throw his weight around, and appeared simply to accept that he would have to face the public fallout. However, he would later make strong representations over the article.

Earlier the same evening, Porter had encountered a rather less sanguine figure in the form of Alastair Campbell, the former spin doctor widely regarded as the second most powerful man in Britain during the time he worked for Tony Blair. Porter had been invited to a Downing Street drinks party for Alison Blackshaw, a civil servant who had for years been an events organizer in No. 10.

‘So, are you lot happy now?’ Campbell asked Porter sarcastically.

‘Are you happy that these MPs have been at it for years?’ Porter replied. Campbell admitted he wasn’t, and changed the subject before making his way down the famous staircase in No. 10. Porter thought to himself that if Alastair Campbell didn’t have the stomach to defend the MPs’ behaviour then the Telegraph was clearly doing something right.

On the other side of the room, Benedict Brogan was being buttonholed by Michael Dugher, the press aide who had been given the job of defending the Prime Minister’s own expenses claims. Dugher was reasonably good-humoured, but still smarting at the way the Telegraph had started its coverage, saying the newspaper had ‘stitched [Labour] up’ and given the Tories ‘a three-day head start’. It was an accusation that Labour politicians would trot out repeatedly over the coming weeks and months.

In the meantime, Parliament needed to turn its collective attention to the small matter of finding a new Speaker to replace Michael Martin. MPs who wanted the job had already started to throw their hats into the ring, so Matthew Bayley asked Gordon Rayner to prepare stories on the expenses claims of all of the potential candidates.

Three of the bookies’ early favourites, Sir Menzies Campbell, Sir Alan Haselhurst and David Davis, had already appeared in the paper: Sir Menzies for the £10,000 spent on redecorating his flat, Sir Alan for £12,000 of gardening bills, and Davis for his £5,700 portico and thousands of pounds’ worth of gardening and furniture bills. The Labour backbencher Frank Field, who had been a minister in Tony Blair’s first government and was now considering running for Speaker, had appeared as one of the ‘saints’ because he was one of the 200 lowest-claiming MPs despite having a constituency 220 miles from Westminster. The only MP who had already openly declared an intention to stand for the post, the veteran Lib Dem Sir Alan Beith, was found to have claimed £117,000 in second-home allowances over the course of seven years while his wife, Baroness Maddock, claimed £60,000 in House of Lords expenses for overnight stays at the same address. The couple responded by saying each of them had claimed only half of what they were entitled to, which they believed was ‘within the letter and the spirit of the rules’. Another early front-runner, Sir George Young, the Old Etonian Conservative MP known as the ‘bicycling baronet’, had relatively straightforward expenses claims; although he had claimed the maximum second-home allowance for each of the previous two years, almost all of it had gone on mortgage interest.

That left Rayner with just one other candidate for the Speaker’s job to investigate – the Conservative backbencher John Bercow. At forty-six, Bercow was not only the youngest of the Speakership candidates but also the most unlikely. Despite being a Tory, Bercow had virtually no supporters on the Conservative benches, where he was seen as something of a traitor. He had started his political career on the far right, calling for ‘assisted repatriation’ of immigrants in his twenties and professing his admiration for Enoch Powell. After entering Parliament in 1997 he had gradually moved towards the centre of politics and had twice been given frontbench posts, only to fall out with the two party leaders who promoted him, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard.

After returning to the back benches, Bercow had repeatedly criticized party leaders, and following his marriage in 2002 to the Labour-supporting Sally Illman (a woman so much taller than him that they tended to pose for pictures sitting down) he had veered so far towards the left that many of his colleagues thought he was about to ‘cross the floor’ and defect to Labour. One senior Conservative dryly noted: ‘The problem with John Bercow is that he discovered sex and New Labour at the same time.’ He had even accepted a request from Gordon Brown to carry out a review of children’s educational needs, which was seen by Bercow’s critics as little more than a declaration of his intent to swap sides.

The only reason Bercow was being talked about at all as a potential Speaker was that, after two Labour Speakers, there was huge pressure on the government to let another party have a turn and, as a left-leaning Tory disliked by his own party, Bercow represented the least bad option in the eyes of some Labour MPs. It was the worst possible reason for someone to be in with a shot at one of the most important jobs in Westminster, and it made Bercow something of a ‘joke’ candidate in the opinion of many political observers.

Rayner expected Bercow’s expenses to be pretty straightforward, particularly in the light of a letter Bercow had written to the Labour MP Martin Salter (shortly to become his campaign manager) in which he declared his intention to run for the post, saying: ‘I am asking people to vote not for a Conservative but for a Speaker who has what it takes to restore trust in Parliament and politicians.’ Clearly, anyone who believed they could restore the public’s trust in politicians must have been supremely confident that their own expenses claims would not attract any adverse comment.

Not for the first time in his life, Rayner was to be reminded that making assumptions is a dangerous habit in journalism. As he scanned Bercow’s expenses claims, he discovered that the MP had flipped his second-home designation from his constituency house to a £540,000 flat in London, and back again. Land Registry checks showed he had also bought and sold properties both in London and in his constituency in 2003. Had he paid capital gains tax on the sale of either property? Rayner sent an email to the MP to ask.

Seven hours later Bercow replied, but his answer was frustratingly vague. He said that ‘so far as I can remember’ his constituency home was his nominated second home at the time of both sales, and his accountant had told him at the time there was ‘no chargeable gain’ on the profit from the sale. Rayner pressed him for more detail, and Bercow said he would seek ‘written confirmation’ from his accountant the next day.

On Thursday the Telegraph ran a page five story headlined ‘Would-be Speaker is another “flipper”’, but Rayner, and news editor Matthew Bayley, felt Bercow still had questions to answer on the issue of capital gains tax. So the following day Rayner chased up Bercow, sending him an email asking him to obtain the ‘written confirmation’ he had talked about. For nine and a half hours Bercow maintained a stony silence, much to Rayner’s frustration.

‘Anything from Bercow yet?’ Bayley kept asking. Because it was a Friday, articles had to be ready earlier than usual so the presses could start rolling early enough to print the bulky Saturday edition. With plenty of other stories already taking shape, it was looking increasingly likely that the pursuit of Bercow would have to be carried over to the following week.

‘It looks like Bercow’s trying to avoid us,’ Rayner reported back to Bayley. ‘His staff say he’s going to reply but they’ve been saying that for hours.’

Finally, at 7.21 p.m., by which time the next day’s completed paper was ready to be printed, Rayner received an emailed reply from Bercow.

‘Bollocks!’ Rayner hissed. ‘Bercow’s replied. Can we still get it in?’

‘We might be able to squeeze a few pars in,’ replied Bayley. ‘What’s he say?’

Bercow admitted that, during the course of 2003, ‘I did make changes in the designation of my main and second homes as a result of which capital gains tax was not payable.’

In other words, he had avoided paying CGT, perfectly legally, just as Hazel Blears had so controversially done.

Bercow went on to say that he had decided to pay £6,508.40 to HM Revenue & Customs, plus interest, in lieu of the CGT he might have paid if he had been required to do so by the taxman.

Rayner felt that admitting to flipping his homes and avoiding paying capital gains tax in the process would be curtains for Bercow’s already slim chances of making it to the Speaker’s chair, given his previous bluster about his ability to restore public trust. But he was frustrated that the MP’s late response – which he saw as a deliberate ploy to run down the clock – meant that the story would be buried. Production chief Richard Oliver managed to find space on page seven for four paragraphs about Bercow’s admission and his CGT payment, but Rayner was smarting over the fact that, in his eyes, he had been outwitted by the MP, whose story would have been given much greater prominence if he had replied earlier in the day, before the pages had been laid out.

‘Bloody Bercow,’ Rayner grumbled to Bayley as they left the office together an hour later. ‘I suppose the only consolation is that everyone’ll have forgotten who he is by this time next month.’