It was the scoop of the century. It hit British politics hard – it took no prisoners. And this Tuesday at Westminster University, we were lucky enough to get an exclusive look into how the expenses scandal really went down….
Gordon Rayner, chief reporter and Robert Winnett, deputy political editor at The Daily Telegraph
Gordon Rayner, chief reporter at The Daily Telegraph, and Robert Winnett, deputy political editor of the same newspaper, took to the stage to tell all.
Who dun it?
The expenses scandal wasn’t just served up on a plate to The Daily Telegraph – a quick kiss and tell.
It was a work of cutting edge journalism and one of which the media can be proud. But it wasn’t easy. Rayner and Winnett tell of the mounds of “raw data” they were faced with.
Having so much information to process was “daunting” and “time consuming” with many weeks of methodical combing – a massive task on a scale rarely seen today’s newsrooms.
Working through the nights, making discoveries, rooting out corruption – it sounded incredible.
To make it even more exciting, this was all happening in a secret bunker deep inside the Telegraph – a private room open only to about 8 or 9 insiders – a hot-bed of investigative journalism locked away from the rest of the world.
And it wasn’t just the outside world that was dangerous…Rayner and Winnett tipped us that a newspaper is widely known to be the worst place to keep a secret.
Journalists are a cynical bunch at the best of times – and these political hacks are just about as hard as they come. But Rayner, Winnett and the rest of the Telegraph team were in for a shocker. As the stories emerged they couldn’t believe it – they “thought they’d seen it all”…the buzz was immense.
And the surprises just kept on coming with duck islands and moats appearing well into the investigation. The best thing about it, they said, was the range of revelations – from the funny to the criminal. Anything could happen.
“The first few weeks were pretty hairy”. They had warnings wherever they went – MPs swore and shouted. Even David Cameron was “very cross”.
But how did they come upon this story?
This was definitely one of ‘Fleet Street’s’ best kept secrets – The Daily Telegraph refused to speak of how they had come upon the story and, in the name of all good journalism, they have protected their source to this day.
And the source was no money-hungry rat. Rather, Telegraph journalists were approached by a middle man who did all of the negotiating for nothing. The source was horrified by what he was seeing and wanted to speak out. Only later was he encouraged to ask for compensation in order to protect against job loss.
And it was tense getting the story – it wasn’t always a sure deal. The Sun was prepared to pay £16,000 for 20 names, but it all fell through. Meanwhile The Times recoiled from the legal complications.
But Rayner and Winnett had the support of their relatively young, ambitious editor, not to mention the help of an older lawyer who threw all his energy into the project.
Suspicious to the last, the team were unsure if they were sitting on fake material. MPs were notified about the impending coverage and all waited with baited breath for a reaction. According to Rayner and Winnett, the key moment came when Jack Straw, the first to reply, confirmed the information to be true.
The rest – as we know too well – is history…
