THE PUBLICATION OF the censored expenses files by Parliament marked the moment when the Telegraph’s marathon expenses investigation finally seemed to have run its course.
But one of the lessons the reporters had learned was that this had become a story they could no longer control, and over the next eight months the scandals and the resignations would just keep on coming.
By Monday 22 June, the Complete Expenses Files supplement had been published and the time had finally come for the bunker team to get back to their day jobs and leave the airless, cheerless room which had become their home from home.
That morning the team assembled for one last time, to clear up three months worth of mess, to take down the cuttings and pictures from the magnetic wall, and to shred anything at all which might be deemed sensitive.
‘Has it really only been a few weeks?’ asked Chris Hope as he heaved another pile of old newspapers into a recycling bin. ‘I can hardly remember what life was like before we moved in here.’
Everyone in the room was having similar thoughts. After the most intense and successful episode of their careers, the demobbed bunker reporters were all wondering just how long it would take to get their feet back on the ground.
The media industry rarely affords its employees time to wistfully look back on their past achievements, however. Every day brings new challenges and new stories, and editors are always more interested in your next story than your last one.
Nor is there any room for sentiment in a newspaper office. Within a few days the bunker was plain old Training Room 4 again, and at the start of 2010 its glass and steel walls were dismantled altogether so it could be absorbed by the marketing department as part of an office reorganization. Today there is nothing left to suggest it ever existed.
While most of the expenses team merely had to walk a few dozen steps from the bunker back to their normal desks in the newsroom, Robert Winnett had a rather more awkward transition to contemplate as he left the office and walked down Victoria towards the Houses of Parliament.
Thankful that his Commons pass had not been cancelled as a parting shot by the Speaker or one of his officers, Winnett managed to slip largely unnoticed through the panelled corridors leading to the press gallery. Many of the MPs who had proved the worst abusers of the expenses system had apparently gone into hiding and would not be seen until the autumn.
Journalists from rival newspapers were relieved to see Winnett return, as it signified that their nightmare few weeks of having to relentlessly follow up the Telegraph’s expenses stories had finally come to an end.
Rayner, meanwhile, quickly found himself back in the swing of things when Michael Jackson died on 25 June. As he anchored the Telegraph’s coverage of the story from London, Nick Allen, the reporter who had found Sir Peter Viggers’ claim for a duck house, flew to Los Angeles to cover the Jackson story on the ground.
For now, at least, it seemed that the expenses investigation was becoming old news.
But in a quiet room in an anonymous Westminster office block, a new episode in the expenses saga was only just beginning.
In May, at the height of the Telegraph’s revelations, the Commons authorities had drafted in a former civil servant called Sir Thomas Legg to carry out an independent audit of all MPs’ expense claims over the preceding four years.
Sir Thomas had seemed a shrewd choice for the job. A former Royal Marine who had gone on to work in the Ministry of Justice, he had sat on various Parliamentary committees which had overseen parts of the expenses system.
Regarded as part of the establishment, he was seen by many MPs as a safe pair of hands who was unlikely to rock the boat too much. As the scandal unfolded, his involvement also gave members a convenient response when they defended their claims, as they could point to the fact that that they would all be scrutinized by Legg.
However, several Cabinet ministers who had previously come across Legg harboured concerns about the choice of the man appointed to lead the review and expressed their fears to Number 10. Having seen him at close quarters, they regarded him as a man who could not be pushed around, and who was well capable of causing trouble if he decided to. They were concerns which would later prove to be well-founded as Sir Thomas took to his new role with an unexpected vigour.
He began by drafting in a team of fifty-four people, including top accountants from PricewaterhouseCoopers and former government statisticians, and began the arduous task of trawling through each and every claim. Within a matter of days, if not weeks, Sir Thomas had come to the conclusion that hundreds of MPs had not just milked the system, they had broken the rules.
After studying the parliamentary Green Book, Sir Thomas pointed out to his staff that it quite clearly stated that claims were not to be excessive and must be entirely essential. So much for duck houses, plasma TVs and antique rugs, then.
One of his first, and most unpopular, decisions was to rule that dozens of the claims for cleaning and gardening were simply unjustifiable. He decided that any claim for more than £2,000 a year for cleaning and £1,000 for gardening was excessive and should be repaid. The introduction of the proportionate limits was a brave decision which led to many disgruntled MPs accusing him of unfairly moving the goalposts by introducing limits retrospectively.
Meanwhile, even cursory checks of the complicated Parliamentary forms by the team of accountants – who were used to dealing with far more straightforward expense claims in the private sector – found that many of the claims were simply wrong.
Electricity bills and invoices for repairs had been submitted and paid twice. Some MPs were claiming for both the capital and interest repayments on their mortgages, when the rules clearly stated that only interest could be reclaimed.
Others had so-called conflicted living arrangements in which they were paying money to relatives. The Legg team were shocked to discover that the MPs who had broken the rules as defined by Sir Thomas were in the majority.
Blissfully ignorant of the fresh scandal which was brewing in Sir Thomas’s offices, many MPs were using the summer recess to get away from it all as they tried to put their most wretched spring behind them. Gordon Brown’s wife Sarah forced him to take an extended break in the Lake District and Scotland, while David Cameron took his family to Cornwall, Brittany and Greece.
Alan Duncan, who had made some of the most notorious claims for the garden at his Rutland cottage, had his own unique way of trying to restore his public image by inviting a group of anti-expenses protestors to see him at the Commons.
One of them was Heydon Prowse, the leading light of an anarchic organization called Don’t Panic, who had filmed himself planting a flower bed in the shape of a pound sign in Duncan’s garden in May, as well as digging up a hidden treasure chest supposedly containing taxpayers’ cash – in what became a huge hit on the internet.
For reasons best known to himself, Duncan decided to speak candidly with Prowse as he gave him a guided tour of the Commons, complaining that MPs were now treated like shit and forced to live on rations.
‘I’m afraid the world has gone mad’, the Tory MP concluded.
It was another catastrophic mistake by Duncan; inevitably Mr Prowse had secretly filmed the encounter and the recordings dominated the news for days. Duncan was soon sacked from the Conservative shadow cabinet by a furious David Cameron.
As MPs returned from their summer holidays and headed to the annual conferences, there was a clear need to confine the expenses scandal to the past and prepare for the forthcoming election with a flood of new policies and initiatives. At the Conservative conference in Manchester, MPs were banned from drinking champagne, for obvious reasons. One of the few MPs to defy the ban, and be pictured quaffing from a champagne flute, was the now infamous Alan Duncan.
In the bars and restaurants of the party conferences, MPs and ministers were confidently predicting that Legg would take well into 2010, possibly even after the election, to complete his audit. They were visibly relaxed at the thought of the extra time this afforded them before the scandal could rear its head again.
But they were very wrong. While the party conference season had been in full swing, Sir Thomas’s team had been burning the midnight oil to enable them to present each and every MP with a letter when they returned to Parliament in the second week of October.
Each of the letters would set out his preliminary conclusions detailing how much he believed the individual MP should repay, or asking for more information to justify mortgage or other claims. A relatively small number of MPs were told their claims were acceptable.
On Friday, 9 October, just days before Parliament’s return, Downing Street got word that the Prime Minister was one of those to face a large repayment. Legg was to ask him to repay more than £12,000, one of the largest amounts of any MP. The repayment covered excessive cleaning bills and invoices for repairs which had been submitted twice. It was a major embarrassment for Brown, who had stridently defended his own claims during the first few days of the expenses scandal.
The following Monday, MPs waited for hours to receive their buff coloured A4 envelopes from Legg’s team. The letters were to be delivered by hand to pigeonholes in the Members Lobby at the heart of Parliament, and politicians and their secretaries waited anxiously for them, mingling with tourists who had no idea of the drama surrounding them. Every time a new mail bag arrived there was a ripple of nervous excitement.
By mid-afternoon, a rumour was sweeping round that only those with surnames beginning with the letters A-C would receive their letters that day. Then there was word that all the letters were going out at 7p.m. Their nerves frayed, MPs told their secretaries they couldn’t leave.
‘The girls have been told to collect their envelopes, so they’ve been sitting there, not going to the loo, not drinking tea, not doing anything while they wait for the letters’, one bemused Commons official said.
By the end of the day, more than three hundred MPs had received letters informing them that they were expected to make repayments which totalled more than £1 million. The expenses scandal was once again dominating the news.
Back at the Telegraph’s headquarters in Victoria, reporters had also received interesting information about several MPs and their expenses. Martin Beckford, Jon Swaine and Holly Watt were asked to trawl back through some of the newspaper’s expenses files to check out the tip-offs that were being received.
David Wilshire, a controversial Conservative MP, was exposed for claiming more than £100,000 to pay a company he owned. He claimed the money under his office expenses at a rate of up to £3,250 a month.
When contacted by Swaine, Wilshire said the money was used to buy printing and other services he needed to function as an MP. He said he did not profit from the funds but it was not clear why he didn’t simply buy the services directly and submit receipts for the work as other MPs do.
Within hours of the allegations being put to him, and following a frantic round of private meetings with senior Tory aides, it was announced that Wilshire would not be contesting the next election.
The case involving David Curry, another Conservative MP and former minister, was even more complicated. Curry had recently been made the new chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on Standards and Privileges, which disciplines MPs found to have broken the rules. His committee had been overwhelmed by complaints about MPs accused of breaking the expenses rules.
However, Rosa Prince learnt that a peculiar episode in Curry’s personal life cast doubt on the validity of his second home expense claims.
Four years before the expenses scandal began, Curry had an affair with a local headmistress and used a cottage in his Yorkshire constituency for his illicit meetings with the woman.
When the affair had been exposed, Curry and his wife temporarily separated. However, the pair were soon reconciled on the alleged agreement that Curry no longer stayed overnight in his Yorkshire property.
The Telegraph was informed that when he visited his constituency and needed to stay overnight, he checked in to the Skipton Travelodge hotel. However, he continued to claim for the cottage, an asset which had undoubtedly risen in value.
Holly Watt travelled to north Yorkshire to see what Curry was up to. Sure enough, she discovered him staying in the Skipton Travelodge on the evening of Thursday, 5 November. Watt arranged for a photographer to wait outside the hotel early the next morning to get a picture of him leaving.
‘We’ve got him’, Watt said when she phoned Winnett. ‘Great,’ he replied. ‘Now go and talk to the neighbours.’
Householders living near Curry’s taxpayer-funded second home told Watt they did not recall him staying there.
‘I probably shouldn’t say this but we never see him’, said one close neighbour in the tiny North Yorkshire hamlet.
When confronted by the Telegraph, Curry insisted the cottage was his constituency home but said that he had been unable to stay there recently as much as he had in the past. He was unable to provide evidence showing when he had stayed there in recent years, much to the annoyance of Tory aides.
By early evening on the day before the story was published, Curry had announced that he was standing down as the head of the Standards Committee and referring himself to the committee for investigation.
The following day, his main home in Essex was besieged by reporters from other newspapers. He headed to Yorkshire, where he was happy to pose for the cameras preparing to stay overnight at his cottage.
His wife, Anne, said: ‘It’s his problem’, when asked about the furore over his claims.
Curry joked: ‘I’m not expecting to end up in the Tower of London’, and said he had stayed at the property hundreds if not thousands of times.
Nor was the expenses scandal restricted to the House of Commons. Lord Hanningfield, a Tory peer, had claimed more than £100,000 for overnight allowances in London when it appeared he had been going home to Essex most of the time.
There were also new problems on the Government benches. Sion Simon, a Labour minister, was found to have been renting a flat from his sister, despite the practice being banned since April 2006.
In total, Simon claimed more than £40,000 in rent for the property in the exclusive Regent’s Park area of central London. When asked about the claims, he apologized and said he had been unaware that the rules had changed. He announced he would repay more than £20,000, covering rental claims for the property since April 2006.
Within two months, he announced he would not be standing at the next general election.
By now dozens of MPs had announced they would not be contesting the next election, but for three MPs losing their job was the least of their worries.
Elliot Morley and David Chaytor were still the subject of police investigations into their expense claims, and Scotland Yard had also begun taking an interest in the claims made by a third MP, Jim Devine.
Devine, the Labour MP for Livingston, was investigated over what appeared to be false invoices which he submitted to back up claims of almost £9,000 for cleaning and stationery during 2008 and 2009.
Lord Hanningfield and two other peers were also investigated by the police.
When they were questioned about their expense claims by detectives, both Morley and Chaytor declined to comment.
They said that the centuries-old convention of Parliamentary privilege meant that their cases were not a matter for the law courts but for Parliament. It was for Parliament to decide whether they had broken any rules, they said. The police chose to disagree.
On 23 November, the Metropolitan Police passed files on the MPs and the Lords claims to the Crown Prosecution Service, which would begin the lengthy process of deciding whether charges should be brought against any of the six.
In the meantime, the expenses story was about to be given a whole new impetus with the release of a whole new batch of MPs’ expenses. Parliament had promised that it would, in future, publish MPs’ expense claims once every quarter, and on 10 December the first such release would cover the 2008–09 financial year as well as the first three months of the 2009–10 financial year, information which was not contained on the leaked disk.
It meant a reunion for the bunker team (though not in the late lamented bunker) and as the familiar faces arrived in the office shortly after breakfast they greeted each other like footballers returning for the first day of the season.
Only Nick Allen, now permanently based in Los Angeles for the Telegraph, was absent.
‘I seem to remember it was Chris Hope’s turn to get the teas in’, said Rayner as Hope arrived. After a round of bad jokes, the reporters settled down at their computers in the newsroom and began what was likely to be a frantic day’s work. This time the Telegraph had no advantage over other newspapers as these were unseen claims, meaning a race against every other media organization to uncover any outrageous claims.
It would also be the parliamentary authorities first opportunity to deliver on earlier promises that they would no longer censor the claim forms as blatantly as they had in June.
To the disappointment of the team, many of the pages were still covered by large black boxes, and it was still impossible to determine the addresses on which claims were being made.
It looked as though the main story the next day would be about how details were still being censored – and how MPs had virtually stopped claiming once the Telegraph’s disclosures had begun.
As the reporters gathered in the central hub of the newsroom shortly after 11a.m. to discuss with their news editors how the story would be divided up, the mood was distinctly downbeat.
This was nothing like the buzz and excitement of the weeks in the bunker. But then Winnett’s BlackBerry started vibrating urgently.
Grabbing it from his pocket, Winnett read the text message he had just received from a senior Conservative.
‘Quentin Davies’ claims might well be worth a look, have a look at page twelve’, said the enigmatic text. Davies was a Labour minister who defected from the Tories in 2007 after Brown became Prime Minister and was therefore one of the most hated figures within Conservative circles.
The reporters hurried back to their desks and Rosa Prince quickly scrolled down to the page in question.
‘Oh my God!’ she shouted. ‘Its a bell tower. He claimed for a bell tower.’
Watt quickly dug out Davies’ details from the original Telegraph disk to get his address. After typing the name of his large country home into Google, she saw a picture of a stately home in Lincolnshire flash up on her screen.
‘We’ve got another duck island!’ Watt said as the reporters gathered around her computer. On one flank of Davies’ country pile was what looked at first glance like a chimney, but which on closer inspection had an open arch part of the way down, and in the arch, a bell.
Davies, it seemed, had claimed for repairs to the bell tower, an appendage which few traditional Labour supporters have on their homes, and had subsequently withdrawn the claim in May 2009 after the expenses scandal first broke.
All of sudden, the Telegraph had its front-page story for the following day. Over a picture of the bell tower, the headline read: ‘The last hurrah.’
All told, MPs had gone on a £10 million spending spree in the run up to the expenses system being exposed. Other claims disclosed in the new set of expenses included £16,000 spent on a new kitchen by disgraced former Treasury minister Kitty Ussher, and an £88,000 profit made by John Healey, the Housing Minister, on his taxpayer-funded second home.
While work was well underway to punish MPs for some of their past misdemeanours, the system for present and future expense claims had still not been fundamentally reformed. Despite the weeks of allegations, MPs were still free to claim mortgage interest, flip their claims between different properties, employ their wives and children and even go grocery shopping – all at the taxpayers’ expense.
The man who had been given the job of ending the MPs’ gravy train was Sir Christopher Kelly, another former civil servant, who summoned the country’s media to a grand room overlooking the river Thames in the National Liberal Club on 4 November. The choice of location seemed overly grand for an announcement which would condemn MPs for their profligacy.
Sir Christopher’s 144-page report proposed a root-and-branch overhaul of the entire system. He proposed that in future MPs could only rent second homes, not buy and claim mortgage interest at taxpayers’ expense. All claims for food, cleaning, gardening, furniture and electronics would be banned. MPs would be forbidden from employing family members. In short, they would no longer be able to personally profit from the expenses system.
Many MPs were aghast at the scale of the proposed reform. But the party leaders had little choice but to back the plan in full.
Brown said: ‘People want to know that the system in future will be different. It will be open. It will be transparent. It will be fair. It will not be managed by MPs themselves but by an independent body that will take responsibility for it.
‘That is why it is right to refer the Kelly report for action and implementation, not by ourselves, but by the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority. That is the recommendation of the Kelly report and that is what we should do.’
Cameron also said it was important that the Kelly recommendations were accepted in full.
‘By accepting this report, today should mark an important day, a day when we say that from now and into the future, MPs should not vote on our pay, our expenses, our pensions, our terms of service, our resettlement, or our expenses packages.
‘Isn’t that an essential part of restoring faith in Parliament, in politics and in this House of Commons, that all of us care about?’
Nick Clegg added: ‘After a shameful year for this Parliament I agree that Sir Christopher Kelly’s report finally gives us the opportunity to start restoring people’s trust in the work of MPs here, and that is why it must be implemented in full without any further delay.’
Sir Christopher ended with a warning. He said: ‘There is a risk that, as the impact of the revulsion caused by the Daily Telegraph’s revelations fades with time, some may be thinking of distancing themselves from their earlier expressed determination to implement our report in full. If so, that would, in my view, be an error. The damage that has been done by what has been revealed about past malpractice and about the culture that goes with it has been very considerable.
‘I don’t believe the trust in those who govern us will be restored unless those in authority show leadership and determination in putting the abuses of the past behind them, however uncomfortable that may be.’
As 2010 began, the expenses saga still hung over Parliament, with the twin threats from the Legg report and the police investigation still to be played out.
To the dismay of those MPs who had hoped the Legg report would be delayed until after the election, Sir Thomas announced that he would publish his findings in the first week of February.
Across 240 pages, the former mandarin detailed how he had ordered 390 MPs to repay just over £1.3 million. The biggest single repayment ordered was almost £65,000.
For the first time, the public was given a completely independent verdict on how MPs had behaved. The fact that well over half of MPs were deemed to have broken the rules was a fresh shock to an electorate which had, no doubt, been hoping that the scale of the MPs’ greed had been exaggerated by the media.
If anything, Sir Thomas’s verdict was even more damning than anything which had gone before.
‘The saga of MPs’ expenses and freedom of information has been traumatic and painful’, Sir Thomas said. ‘Public confidence has been damaged, and the scars will no doubt take time to heal.
‘But there is a positive side. In responding, our national institutions, including a free press, an independent judiciary and – in the end – the executive government, political parties and above all the House of Commons itself, are showing that, when things do go wrong, we have together the will and the means to put matters right, heal and reform the systems and the culture, and move forward.’
Sir Thomas, however, proved to be simply the warm-up act for a far bigger bombshell which would be dropped the following day.
On 5 February Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions, made a live televized announcement to disclose the Crown Prosecution Services decision in the cases of the three MPs and three Lords whose cases had been referred on by the police.
The decision had been an impeccably guarded secret; no newspapers or media organizations had received leaked information about whether anyone would be charged, so the Telegraph newsroom stood in silence to hear what he had to say.
Starmer’s words drew gasps from the watching reporters; all three MPs were to be charged with multiple criminal offences. Lord Hanningfield would also face prosecution.
He said: ‘In four cases, we have concluded that there is sufficient evidence to bring criminal charges and that it is in the public interest to charge the individuals concerned. Accordingly, summonses in these cases have been obtained from the City of Westminster Magistrates Court and will now be served on the individuals in question.’
All four were to be charged with false accounting under section seventeen of the Theft Act 1968, which carries a maximum sentence of seven years’ imprisonment.
Elliot Morley was accused of making mortgage claims of £30,000 ‘in excess of that to which he was entitled’ and, for part of the period, when ‘there was no longer a mortgage on that property’.
Chaytor was accused of ‘dishonestly claiming’ £1,950 for IT services and also claiming sums of £12,925 and £5,425 relating to rent on properties which he and his mother allegedly owned.
Devine was accused of ‘dishonestly claiming’ money for cleaning services and for stationery, using false invoices, and Lord Hanningfield was accused of dishonestly claiming ‘for expenses to which he knew he was not entitled’.
All four said they would deny the allegations when they made their first court appearance on 11 March.
No date has yet been set for the men’s trials, but a year after the Telegraph’s expenses investigation first began, the most dramatic twist in the tale may be yet to come.