Brown bulldozed on with his expenses plan. On the night of the Budget, he invited David Cameron and Nick Clegg to meet him in the Prime Minister’s room behind the Speaker’s chair. Both the Opposition leaders were resentful and suspicious that Brown was presenting his plan as a fait accompli. Their mood was not improved when Brown opened the meeting in a patronising fashion by reminding the two younger leaders that he’d been in Parliament for much longer than either of them. The discussion became bad-tempered. Brown turned on Cameron. ‘It’s your fault,’ he said, accusing the Tory leader of whipping up public anger by constantly raising expenses at Prime Minister’s Questions. Cameron pinked a little and retorted that Brown was to blame for coming up with a scheme designed for partisan advantage. The Tory leader, himself alarmed about exposure of his MPs’ expenses, was also struggling to come up with a credible reform package. Cameron arrived at the meeting with his own hastily composed set of proposals on a sheet of A4 paper. Brown dismissed it without even bothering to look at it and met their criticisms of his own plan by repetitively banging out his points. Clegg eventually groaned: ‘Please stop saying the same thing over and over again.’ The trio could not agree. Voices were raised. Clegg later remarked to a friend: ‘It was three rutting males. Thank God the voters couldn’t see the three of us.’32 After forty minutes getting nowhere, the meeting broke up with the Lib Dem leader declaring that his time would be better spent reading a bedtime story to his children. Brown fared little better in winning the support of his own MPs. On Monday, 27 April, he was forced to back away from his widely derided ‘clocking on’ idea. He had gone from YouTube to U-turn in less than a week.
He had also failed to head off another threat marching on Number 10: the Gurkhas. The year before, the High Court had ruled against the Government for refusing to allow 36,000 of the soldiers to live in Britain. The Nepalese veterans enjoyed widespread sympathy in the media and among the public. Even those most rabidly opposed to immigration wanted to make an exception for these old allies of Britain. They also acquired a charismatic commander for their campaign in the shape of Joanna Lumley, whose father’s life had been saved by a Gurkha. The much loved actress did an absolutely fabulous job of presenting their cause. The Home Secretary sniffed trouble ahead when she met Lumley and was exposed to the actress’s steely charm. But Jacqui Smith was distracted and weakened by the furore over her expenses. She failed to convince her colleagues that they needed to act.33 Ministers wrangled inconclusively about the issue when the domestic affairs sub-committee of the Cabinet met under the chairmanship of Jack Straw before Christmas. Alistair Darling was not prepared to loosen the purse strings for the soldiers. ‘There is no money,’ he routinely told colleagues. John Hutton, the Defence Secretary, did not want to set a precedent, the costs of which would come out of his budget. The MoD took ‘a rigid position’ and the Treasury was ‘extremely stubborn’ on the account of one Cabinet minister who was a neutral observer.34 A properly functioning Number 10 would have spotted and defused the threat from the Gurkha campaign, an emotive cause led by a figurehead adored by the tabloids. Yet Lumley later revealed she had written three letters to Brown and not even received an acknowledgement.35
When the issue did finally register on Brown’s radar, he was ‘exercised about the price tag’ and colleagues heard the Prime Minister dismiss the support for the Gurkhas as ‘sentimental’.36 He lacked the emotional intelligence or the media savvy to grasp the importance of sentiment. The heart matters in politics as well as the mind. The cause was taken up by Nick Clegg, who needed popular issues to give definition to his leadership of the Lib Dems. He tabled a motion for debate on Wednesday, 29 April. On the Monday, Jacqui Smith grew anxious. ‘I think we are going to lose this,’ she worried to Nick Brown. The Chief Whip shook his head: ‘I don’t think so.’37 At Prime Minister’s Questions on the day of the vote, Brown was stumbling and sagging after an exhausting trip to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Clegg had his day in the sun. ‘Can he not see that there is a simple moral principle at stake?’ the Lib Dem challenged Brown. ‘If someone is prepared to die for this country, surely they deserve to live in this country.’38 The Prime Minister replied with a mechanical rehearsal of the Government’s argument that it could cost £1.4 billion to allow all the Gurkhas to live in Britain, a figure dismissed as a scare by the campaigners. Clegg became encouraged as he noted the poor reception that Brown was getting among Labour MPs.
The Government finally rushed out concessions that afternoon, but the decision had been taken so late that many Labour MPs were not aware of the package and the Tories were now committed to voting with the Lib Dems. To make things worse, some loyal Labour MPs were allowed to go home by the whips in their blasé belief that the Government was not at risk of defeat. Watched from the gallery by Joanna Lumley and bemedalled Nepalese veterans, MPs voted at four o’clock that afternoon. A total of twenty-seven Labour MPs backed the Lib Dem motion and a further seventy-seven abstained. It inflicted the first Commons defeat of his premiership on Brown and the first loss for a government on an early-day motion in thirty years.
Phil Woolas, the Immigration Minister, was the battered frontman for decisions made – or not made – way above his pay grade. He had had enough. On the night of the defeat, he quit the Government. Only the direct intervention of Brown persuaded Woolas to withdraw his resignation and not tell anyone about it.39 The cause of the Gurkhas was a lightning rod for other discontents. ‘Lots of people were pissed off about expenses and wanted to let off steam,’ believed one Cabinet minister.40 In an orgy of recrimination, ministers blamed each other and the whips. At an impromptu news conference outside the Commons, David Cameron and Joanna Lumley appeared with Nick Clegg, who celebrated his coup: ‘This Government has now lost its moral authority.’41 With a kukri knife at his throat, Brown agreed to a meeting with Lumley, who emerged from it to declare that he had surrendered to the Gurkhas.
The day after that parliamentary defeat, there were more angry and chaotic scenes during a Commons debate on expenses. Brown got some of his package through, including a measure forcing all MPs to disclose additional incomes. The ‘clocking on’ proposal, the centrepiece of his original plan, was ditched entirely as the only way to avert a second defeat in forty-eight hours. Tony Wright, the Labour chairman of the public administration committee, sighed: ‘It is a rather large understatement to say that we are in a bit of a mess.’42
For Brown, April proved the cruellest month. The hero of the G20 Summit at the beginning of the month, he was back to zero by the end of it. Both the media and his MPs detected a common theme to these apparently unrelated debacles. The McBride Affair, the unravelling of the Budget, the YouTube fiasco, and the defeat over the Gurkhas all had one thing in common: Gordon Brown. It revived once more all the questions about his character and judgement that had raged a year before. ‘He’s had it. He’s finished,’ cried Bob Marshall-Andrews, the MP for Medway, who had agitated for years for his erstwhile hero Brown to replace Blair. ‘All my colleagues think so too. For the first time in my life I’ve seen them united. They are united in despair.’43
A disaffected member of the Cabinet was emboldened to openly mock the Prime Minister. On the night of Saturday, 2 May, Number 10 was alerted to a cheeky attack on the Prime Minister by Hazel Blears, the diminutive, lively, red-haired Communities Secretary who was usually so relentlessly loyal in her public statements that she was known as ‘Little Miss Sunshine’. She had put her name to a piece in the next morning’s Observer accusing her own Government of a ‘lamentable failure to get our message across’ and putting itself ‘on the wrong side of the British sense of fair play’ over the Gurkhas. The article also included a piercingly accurate critique of Brown’s entire modus operandi. ‘All too often we announce new strategies or five-year plans – often with colossal price tags attached – that are received by the public with incredulity at best and, at worst, with hostility.’ In case anyone failed to understand where the finger was being pointed,
Blears gave a twist to one of Margaret Thatcher’s lines. She mocked Brown with the witty crack: ‘YouTube if you want to.’44 The piece was actually written by Paul Richards, her political adviser. Blears had cheerfully signed off on it and told her aide that she particularly liked the YouTube joke at Brown’s expense.45 That night an incandescent Prime Minister blasted his fury down the phone at her. In the words of a Cabinet colleague: ‘He gave Hazel the full hair-dryer treatment.’46 In the early hours of Sunday morning, she issued a retraction. It was too late. The damage was done.
Number 10’s panic about expenses was magnified because it was known that a leaked disc containing the details of four years of MPs’ claims had been touted around the press for some weeks. The disc found a buyer in the Daily Telegraph. ‘The truth about the Cabinet’s expenses’ was the huge headline over the paper’s first shot on Friday, 8 May.47 This focused on Gordon Brown sharing a bill for cleaning with his younger brother, Andrew, an arrangement for which he had a reasonable explanation. Brown responded with fury and mortification. ‘He reacted like it was a dagger to his heart,’ says a senior civil servant. ‘It crashed the whole day.’48
The Telegraph began to dish out its revelations in daily and devastating instalments. Jack Straw claimed for the full cost of council tax even though he received a 50 per cent discount. He had already repaid the £1,500, happily noticing his mistake shortly after the High Court ruling requiring receipts to be published. The Justice Secretary accompanied the repayment with an oh-silly-me note pleading: ‘Accountancy does not appear to be my strongest suit.’ Straw was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Statisticians. Andy Burnham, the Culture Secretary, was embarrassed by correspondence with the Fees Office in which he pleaded for them to cough up on his claims to spare him the wrath of his wife: ‘I might be in line for a divorce!’ The taxpayer had contributed almost £100,000 in mortgage interest payments to Shaun Woodward, the Northern Ireland Secretary and the husband of a Sainsbury heiress who owned seven properties. Hazel Blears, the minister responsible for housing, certainly seemed to know her way round the property expenses game. She was a little whizz at Commons Monopoly. She sped round the board, claiming on three different properties in a single year. It was revealed that ministers had put in claims for everything from pergolas to pot plants. Both the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, and the Housing Minister, Margaret Beckett, had expensive tastes in topiary.49
The public was astounded and then disgusted. Penny-pinching claims for chocolate bars, packets of biscuits, even carrier bags made MPs look pathetically money-grubbing. From Christmas decorations to Remembrance Day wreaths, there seemed to be nothing that tawdry parliamentarians would not stoop to claim. Luxury items – massage chairs, champagne flutes, silk cushions, whirlpool baths, plasma TV screens – suggested the funding of sybaritic lifestyles on the taxpayer. Outrage jostled with hilarity at some of the revelations. John Reid, the former hard man of the Home Office, claimed for a pouffe and a ‘black glitter’ toilet seat from Homebase.50 John Prescott, scourge of the bankers’ bonuses and self-styled champion of the working man, had mock Tudor beams fitted to the front of his home in Hull at the taxpayers’ expense and twice claimed for repairs to a toilet seat.51 Thus the former Deputy Prime Minister went from two Jags to two shags to two bogs.
MPs had long been resentful that their basic salary of £65,000 a year had been outstripped by many lawyers, GPs, head teachers, council executives and other professionals. Denied improved remuneration by successive Prime Ministers and not daring to make the case to the public that their salaries should be higher, MPs had treated expenses as a clandestine scheme for giving themselves tax-free top-ups. The system was inherently dishonest; the rules were lazily constructed and sloppily policed. Sheer greed then kicked in among the most opportunistic and rapacious of parliamentarians. The most lucrative racket was the practice of ‘flipping’. MPs played the property market at the taxpayers’ expense by making claims for mortgage interest and refurbishment on one house and then changing the designation of their ‘second home’ to start claiming on another. Among the most astonishingly brazen was Margaret Moran, the Labour MP for Luton South, who claimed £22,500 to treat dry rot at her partner’s seafront property in Hampshire a hundred miles away from her constituency.52
The Government’s initial response to the scandal was terribly misjudged. It lashed out at the media as if the disgrace was the exposé rather than the scandal that had been exposed. Peter Mandelson went into attack dog mode, accusing the ‘Tory-supporting’ Telegraph of ‘spraying machine-gun bullets across the Cabinet’. With ill-placed confidence, Mandelson suggested the paper didn’t really ‘have evidence of wrong-doing’.53 While most of the Cabinet skulked away from the cameras, Harriet Harman trotted on to the airwaves. ‘I know this looks bad,’ she bleated before pleading that it was all ‘within the rules’ as if the patently rotten rules were an immutable law of physics rather than an invention of MPs themselves. This generated rage-inflaming headlines. ‘Ministers: We are NOT sorry’.54 Margaret Beckett was nearly lynched when she tried to blame ‘the system’ before a jeering audience on Question Time.55
The economic crisis already besetting the Government was now compounded by a constitutional convulsion and they fed on each other. The recession made voters even less tolerant of squalid money-grubbing at their expense by politicians. The expenses scandal made it even harder for politicians to justify economic pain to the country at a time when unemployment had topped 2 million. Gordon Brown was in part paying the price for failing to make good on the promises of parliamentary and constitutional reform that he made early in his premiership. The first weekend of the expenses crisis, several ministers and officials e-mailed Brown with suggestions of bold reforms that he could announce in order to seize the initiative.56 The Prime Minister didn’t take them up. He still felt burnt by the YouTube fiasco. He was furious that the Telegraph had gone for him personally over expenses. He was fatally distracted that weekend, much of which he spent hunting around to find tax and national insurance records so that he could answer the charges about his cleaning arrangement.57 The Israeli Prime Minister was visiting that weekend. When he was taken up to the Browns’ flat above Downing Street, there were receipts and tax records scattered all over the floor. Sarah was on her hands and knees crawling through the papers and trying to sort them out. On Monday, the Prime Minister’s response to the public uproar was limited to a few words inserted into a speech about an entirely different subject. It blandly offered an apology ‘on behalf of all parties’.58
‘Paying bills for Tory grandees’ was the huge front-page headline in the Daily Telegraph on Tuesday, 12 May, following on from revelations the day before about the expenses of the Shadow Cabinet. Sir Michael Spicer, the chairman of the Tory backbench 1922 committee, claimed for the installation of a chandelier at his Worcestershire manor house. Other Tories billed for horse manure for their roses and the maintenance of swimming pools.59 Sir Peter Viggers, the veteran Conservative MP for Gosport, claimed for an ornamental ‘duck house’ for his pond.60 The ducks had not even liked it. At £1,645, this was by no means the most outrageous claim, but the ‘duck island’ turned into one of the totemic examples of bilking the taxpayer. Another classic was Douglas Hogg, a former Tory Cabinet minister, who claimed for clearing the moat around his thirteenth-century manor house in Lincolnshire.61
The Telegraph now appeared to be swivelling its guns on the Conservatives. Labour foolishly relaxed. That morning, the Cabinet met for a complacent three-hour session during which they spent little time discussing how they might address the fireball of public fury about the expenses scandal. They were instead treated to a Panglossian presentation by the Prime Minister’s pollsters and communication advisers about how they could still come back from the mammoth deficit in the polls to win the next general election.62
By contrast, David Cameron was in a series of emergency meetings exclusively devoted to handling the scandal. The revelations about chandeliers
, swimming pools and horse manure threatened to undo all his attempts to detoxify the image of his party. There was additional pressure on the Tory leader because some of the worst offenders were fellow Old Etonians. ‘It was the moat that did it. That was the turning point,’ says one Tory official. ‘We knew we had to act fast.’63
Cameron called a hastily arranged news conference which would turn this into a defining day of the saga. ‘I want to start by saying sorry,’ he began, using the word his rival in Number 10 always found so difficult to get out of his mouth. The Tory leader expressed contrition in strong, clear language. ‘People are right to be angry that some MPs have taken public money to pay for things that few could afford. You’ve been let down. Politicians have done things that are unethical and wrong. I don’t care if they were within the rules – they were wrong.’64
He promised that all future expense claims by Tory MPs would be published on the internet and banned ‘flipping’. He made a theatrical show of naming and shaming eight members of the Shadow Cabinet whom he had ordered to reimburse the taxpayer. Michael Gove, the Shadow Schools Secretary, would repay £7,000 in claims for furniture; Alan Duncan, the Shadow Leader of the House, would repay more than £5,000 in gardening costs; George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, would repay a £440 bill for a chauffeur company to drive him from Cheshire to London. At the risible end of the scale, Cheryl Gillan, the Shadow Welsh Secretary, would repay £4.47 claimed for dog food. Cameron announced that he was paying back £680 he had claimed for cutting down wisteria at his home in Oxfordshire. ‘No more bathplugs. No more barbecues,’ he chanted. ‘No more patio heaters.’65
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