THREE WEEKS INTO the investigation, the reporters in the bunker were getting increasingly used to receiving letters and emails from readers who wanted to see their local MPs’ expenses featured next in the pages of the Daily Telegraph, many of them making serious allegations about what the correspondent believed their MP had been up to. A lot of these letters amounted to no more than idle gossip and pub talk, but a few contained valuable nuggets of information from genuine insiders which made the reporters look anew at the expenses claims of certain Members who had, on the face of it, done nothing hugely interesting.
An email which arrived in reporter Gordon Rayner’s inbox on Tuesday, 19 May fell squarely into the latter category. Concise and to the point, it began:
I have recently been told that Dr Ian Gibson MP (Lab; Norwich North) is apparently quite frantic with worry that attention will be brought to bear upon his second home expenses claims, in case it is revealed that the London flat he bought in approximately 2000 (or possibly 2002) was seemingly primarily for the use of his daughter, Helen, who has lived there with her artist boyfriend ever since, as far as I am aware.
The emailer, who wished to remain anonymous, then provided other information about Dr Gibson which left Rayner in little doubt that the correspondent had a genuine working knowledge of the MP’s financial affairs.
‘This looks good,’ he told Winnett, whose head bobbed up from his computer screen to make eye contact with the reporter opposite him. ‘Do you know an Ian Gibson?’
‘Yeah, Labour MP?’
‘According to this, he’s used his expenses to buy a flat for his daughter.’
Rayner was already working on a lengthy feature about the downfall of Speaker Martin, so Holly Watt offered to look into Gibson’s property deals. As she delved into his expenses claims, Watt soon discovered that the west London flat on which Gibson had been claiming expenses had indeed been shared between the MP, his daughter and another man. However, in 2008 the flat was apparently sold by Gibson to his daughter and her boyfriend for £162,000.
‘Seems rather cheap for a nice flat in that part of London,’ said Watt. A quick check of Land Registry records and a couple of phone calls to local estate agents quickly established that similar flats in the same area were selling for around twice that amount at the relevant time. Gibson had claimed almost £80,000 from the taxpayer to help pay the mortgage interest on the flat before selling it on to his daughter for half its market value. It was one of the most clear-cut cases of what the Telegraph team had dubbed ‘keeping it in the family’ – MPs using the parliamentary expenses system to give their children or other relatives a leg-up on the property ladder.
And that wasn’t all. Earlier that week, Gibson had trumpeted the fact that he had voluntarily published his expenses online on his own website; but large swathes of the documents had been blacked out – including anything which would disclose the financial deal involving his daughter. It was an ominous sign of the widespread cover-up to come.
When contacted by the Telegraph, Gibson was among the most open and frank over his arrangements of any of the MPs the paper had approached. He freely admitted that he spent only three nights a week at the address and that it was his daughter’s ‘main home’. He then said that he would discuss standing down with his local Labour Party.
His subsequent treatment by the Labour Party served as a perfect illustration of the seemingly arbitrary way in which MPs were punished for their misdemeanours. Before he had a chance to consider his future, Gibson was referred to Labour’s version of the ‘star chamber’ and told he would not be allowed to stand as a Labour candidate at the next election. In effect, he had been fired by the Labour Party. The party was well within its rights to discipline the MP, but many observers wondered why Gibson’s expenses claims were any worse than those of Hazel Blears, Alistair Darling or other prominent figures who had escaped censure. Many of Gibson’s supporters in Norwich – where he had been a popular MP – believed he had been harshly disciplined because he was a long-standing opponent of the Prime Minister, having been one of only a handful of Labour MPs who had refused to endorse Brown’s campaign to become the party’s leader.
While every other MP who had announced the end of their career had decided they would not stand again at the next general election, Gibson took the honourable decision to stand down straight away. In doing so, he would not only save the taxpayer the cost of employing him for another year, but also waived the right to a large redundancy payment, worth a year’s salary (paid to all outgoing MPs at a general election). Many voters in Norwich applauded Gibson’s principled stand, but it was the worst possible news for Gordon Brown. It meant there would have to be a by-election – the first since the expenses story had broken. When the election eventually came around in July, it was a disaster for Labour. The party lost the seat to the Conservatives and saw its share of the vote slump from more than 40 per cent in 2005 to just 18 per cent. Many local Labour activists refused to campaign on behalf of Chris Ostrowski, the candidate the party had lined up to replace Gibson. And then, in the days before the poll, Ostrowski caught swine flu, sparking jokes about MPs, pigs and troughs. Bizarrely, however, Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats failed to capitalize on the scandal; indeed, their showing in the polls had actually dipped slightly, despite their MPs avoiding the worst of the controversy.
If Gibson had been stabbed in the back by his Labour bosses, other MPs seemed intent on killing off their careers without the help of anyone else. Chief among them was Nadine Dorries, a relatively obscure Conservative MP who had previously clashed with reporter Martin Beckford after she provided inconsistent answers over the location of her ‘main’ home. On the day Ian Gibson’s expenses claims were published, Dorries, the MP for Mid Bedfordshire, made a spectacularly ill-judged attempt to garner public sympathy just as the public’s anger with MPs was reaching its peak.
Addressing listeners to the Today programme, Dorries said: ‘People are seriously beginning to crack. The last day in Parliament this week was, I would say, completely unbearable. I have never been in an atmosphere or environment like it, when people walk around with terror in their eyes and people are genuinely concerned, asking: “Have you seen so and so? Are they in their office? They’ve not been seen for days.”
‘There’s a really serious concern that this has got to a point now which is almost unbearable for any human being to deal with.’
Her self-pitying comments enraged listeners, who bombarded the BBC with hostile emails. One said: ‘I listened with incredulity to the bleating of Nadine Dorries on how MPs are near to cracking because they have milked the system. I’m near to cracking, working forty hours a week and looking after a disabled husband.’
Dorries’ comments were backed up by a posting on her blog, where she laid the blame for MPs’ despair squarely at the feet of those nasty Telegraph journalists who had dared to tell the public what their money was being spent on. ‘The technique deployed by the Telegraph, picking off a few MPs each day, emailing at 12, giving five hours notice to reply … is amounting to a form of torture and may have serious consequences,’ she wrote.
MPs are human beings like everyone else. They have families too. McCarthyite witch hunts belong to the past, not the present. As do archaic, cowardly, methods of pay. If MPs are guilty, so are those who knew the system was in place, including the Telegraph journalists who have now decided for their own political reasons to expose the system, in a way which profits the Telegraph, for their own reasons.
The blog was read with a mixture of bemusement and shock by senior Conservative Party officials. David Cameron moved to distance himself from his backbench colleague, letting it be known through aides that he regarded Dorries’ comments as ‘barmy’. The Conservative leader then added: ‘Of course MPs are concerned about what is happening but, frankly, MPs ought to be concerned about what their constituents think and ought to be worrying about the people who put us where we are.’ It was a withering rebuke for Dorries.
Bizarrely, the Church of England also appeared determined to ignore public opinion and defend MPs. Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote a piece for The Times in which he criticized the ‘witch-hunt’ of MPs.
‘Many will now be wondering whether the point has not been adequately made,’ the Archbishop wrote. ‘The continuing systematic humiliation of politicians itself threatens to carry a heavy price in terms of our ability to salvage some confidence in our democracy.’
The comments led to a furious – and virtually entirely negative – response from readers of The Times, many of whom had begun reading the Telegraph during the expenses scandal.
Following the announcement by the Metropolitan Police that it would not be investigating the leak of MPs’ expenses to the Daily Telegraph, the newspaper was about to pull off yet another surprise. John Wick had agreed to ‘out’ himself by talking publicly for the first time about his role in the leak and the reasons behind the decision to give the material to a newspaper. It was a high-risk, but calculated, gamble. Although the police had ruled out a criminal investigation, the admission by Wick that he was involved would put him in the public eye and possibly drag him into lengthy parliamentary inquiries. However, with other newspapers still pursuing him and increasingly anxious that his reputation was being sullied, Wick decided to push ahead. He also decided to give a short television interview with Telegraph TV, an internet-based channel designed to complement the newspaper, which could be released to broadcasters. The interview was recorded on Thursday, 21 May, when Wick and his partner Tania visited the Telegraph’s headquarters. They had been given a private guided tour of the open-plan office, their identities known only to a handful of people at the newspaper.
In his article – headlined ‘I am proud to have played my part in exposing this scandal’ – Wick explained the decision to hand the information to the Telegraph:
As a former military man, I have been in some pretty tricky situations … I took legal advice. It appeared that there were some very grey areas and it could be that the police would want to investigate if I was identified as the person who orchestrated the release of the information. My military training had, however, prepared me for far worse than a police cell – and the public interest in this information being published was clear and compelling.
He concluded: ‘I have played my part in history. It is now for others to decide on the best way to move forward and punish those who have been exposed.’
During his television interview – conducted by Guy Ruddle, the Telegraph’s head of visuals – Wick was asked what it was like watching as the scandal that he had triggered unfolded. ‘The biggest problem was not knowing how violent the writhing of the snake was going to be,’ he replied. The clip was to be played on television channels throughout the world.
The team who had produced the video brought an edited version of the interview to show Lewis on a laptop in his office. He was delighted by the composure of the whistleblower. ‘Very Telegraph,’ he said approvingly. Wick, meanwhile, was preparing to leave his home again for the second time in a month. He had decided to lie low in a sedate Sussex town for the weekend after being warned that his interview would be likely to spark a renewed spate of media interest. But at the last moment, the carefully laid plan to release the interview almost fell apart.
It had been decided that Telegraph PR Fiona Macdonald would release the tape to all the broadcasters at 9 p.m. – on the strict understanding that they would not use it before 10 p.m. It was the Friday evening before the Whitsun bank holiday weekend and the broadcasters were running low on staff – particularly after such a taxing week covering Parliament. Reeta Chakrabarti, the BBC’s main political correspondent that night, was on her way to Bracknell to cover the meeting between Andrew MacKay and his constituents. (MacKay was to be given an extremely tough time. After emerging from the meeting he attempted to say that he had been warmly received, only to be contradicted and confronted by others who had been present. The following day, he announced he would be standing down from Parliament at the next election.) However, as Chakrabarti was travelling to Bracknell she received the call from Macdonald. ‘We are going to have some video footage for you tonight,’ the Telegraph’s PR woman said. ‘It is of the whistleblower behind the expenses scandal.’ There was a long silence at the other end of the phone, as the BBC correspondent realized that her carefully planned evening was about to be blown apart.
The call played havoc with the BBC’s plans for the ten o’clock evening bulletin. The editor of BBC News phoned and Chakrabarti was on the line to Macdonald almost constantly over the course of the next hour. The Telegraph was intending to place the interview footage on a secure part of the newspaper’s website which broadcasters could log into – but a few minutes after the scheduled release time of 9 p.m. both the BBC and Sky News said they were unable to access the footage on the site. Sensing imminent disaster with the deadline for the ten o’clock news rapidly approaching, Macdonald ordered a taxi and was preparing to deliver a computer memory stick containing the interview to the broadcasters’ Westminster studios – only to receive another call from the broadcasters to say they had finally managed to access the material, with just minutes to spare.
The interview with Wick led that evening’s news programmes, but the whistleblower himself missed his moment of fame – owing to technical problems of his own at the B&B he had chosen for the night.
In the Thistle Hotel’s Harvard Bar, meanwhile, Robert Winnett had been joined by Arthur Wynn Davies for a drink after work. Wynn Davies, fiercely proud of his Welsh roots, was delighted to discover that the hotel guests in the bar included a coach party from north Wales. Unable to resist the opportunity of speaking in Welsh to them, the lawyer hurried over to introduce himself, while Winnett chatted to some of the other reporters who had joined them.
Ten minutes later, Winnett was bemused to see Wynn Davies frantically beckoning him across. He was talking to a sheep farmer from Wales who wanted to talk to one of the reporters who had been directly involved in the expenses scandal. To Winnett’s intense embarrassment, Wynn Davies theatrically announced – both in Welsh and in English – that Winnett was the reporter behind the expenses scoop, prompting the coach party to stand up and applaud.
‘It has been brilliant, absolutely brilliant,’ the garrulous sheep farmer said to Winnett. ‘I’ve never bought the Telegraph before but now it sells out at the local newsagent. We can’t get enough of it – what these MPs have been up to is a bloody scandal.’
‘Great, thanks,’ Winnett replied nervously. ‘You don’t think we should start to wind everything down yet then?’
‘Absolutely not!’ the farmer spluttered in surprise. ‘It’s our money and I want to know how every last penny is being spent. Keep going, and good luck to you,’ the farmer added, giving Winnett a rather hefty slap on the back which propelled him back towards the bar.