Ruth Addicott goes in search of the biggest scoops and speaks to the reporters who broke the stories


Hold the front page! W


hen Gordon Rayner was ushered into a back room at The Telegraph for an 8am “training session”, he didn’t realise he would be working on the biggest political scandal to hit parliament for a generation.


In 2009, The Telegraph was offered a disc containing details of expenses claims of all 646 MPs over four years. It had 10 days to analyse the data and start publishing or the deal would lapse. The clock was ticking and Rayner, The Telegraph’s political


editor, who was chief reporter at the time, was part of a seven-strong team who had the task of combing through it. The disc contained more than a million pages of documents, including receipts, letters and hand-written notes on torn-off sheets of paper, all of which had to be read, analysed, checked against public records and cross referenced. There were concerns the authorities would seek a high court injunction and some staff could even be arrested. “It was a huge undertaking,” says Rayner. “We had to be careful that every single story was legally watertight. We had a brilliant lawyer – Arthur Wynn Davies. Without him, we wouldn’t have been able to do it.” Team members were each given a laptop and copy of the disc and worked in secret from a windowless backroom which became known as “the bunker”. As claims for everything from a 5p carrier bag and a glittery


toilet seat to Douglas Hogg’s epic £2,200 bill for cleaning his moat emerged, they realised they were sitting on dynamite. Nearer the deadline, they were joined by reporter Nick Allen. “Whenever anyone found anything amazing, we’d shout


out and he just said, ‘what the fuck is a duck house?’ ” recalls Rayner.


“The appetite was huge. We kept getting letters and calls


saying, ‘you’ve got to keep going’, ‘I want you to do my MP’. It became clear after a couple of weeks that we were going to have to do the whole lot.” The story dominated the news, taking up 13 pages in The


Telegraph per day at its peak. The challenge was keeping up – reporting the fallout as well as fresh revelations every day. “Normally you break a story and squeeze every line out of


it, but we had to let the stories take care of themselves which goes against your instincts,” says Rayner. The pressure was also taking its toll on the Bunker. The


strict secrecy meant cleaners were not allowed in, the bins were overflowing and there was a lingering smell of Chinese food.


14 | theJournalist


off “Get the story, then make a decision,” says Rayner. “We all get phone calls from fantasists but, if you ignore a call that sounds too good to be true, you might be turning down the best story of your life.” • Keep it under


wraps “I always think you do people a favour if you don’t tell them because, if it does leak and people don’t know, they can’t be blamed,” says Rayner. • Intuition While


“We were working until two or three in the morning and coming back in at 7-8am – it was exhausting,” says Rayner, who had a 50-mile commute and was running on adrenalin. “It felt like we were right in the middle of events. It was the biggest story any of us had worked on.” The Expenses Files led the front page of The


Telegraph for 35 consecutive days and led to a record number of resignations, sackings, apologies and, for some, imprisonment. The story increased sales by more than a million and generated 30 million website hits, proving, as Rayner notes, that “good old-fashioned scoops still sell newspapers”. In 2003, over at the Mirror, 26-year-old Ryan Parry was in his third year of The Mirror’s graduate


Tips for working on a big story • Never ignore a tip


claims for bags of manure and a Bang & Olufsen TV were clear, reporters uncovered bigger stories from MPs’ expenses, such as “flipping” homes and mortgages that didn’t exist, by reading between the lines. “I think we picked up on that because they were claiming for round numbers,” says Rayner. “We were constantly on the lookout for something that looked a bit out of place.” • Resources Both


Rayner and Mirror man Parry had the experience,


resources and legal backing of a national newspaper behind them. Although the core team working on MPs’ expenses was small, Rayner believes it was the right size. “We were able to keep it tight,” he says. • Be imaginative “It’s


easy to sit there and wait for your news editor to come over with ideas, if you really want to make a mark, you have to come up with your own stuff and go for it,” says Parry. “That’s the great thing about journalism – you can be a veteran of 30 years or have just started in the business, if you get a good story it doesn’t matter.”


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