Moat money, more problems

Very few stories can be summed up in a single phrase. But ask many people in the UK what they remember about a big scandal that’s marking an anniversary this week and they’ll say one thing: duck house.

Never before had I contemplated, let alone costed, a floating home for my feathered friends. But who among us has? Well, Sir Peter Viggers, then-MP for Gosport, for one. And what’s more, he tried to claim the £1,645 costs back from the taxpayer, along with £30,000 for gardening at his second home. He was one of dozens of MPs caught up in the expenses scandal, which was broken by journalists at The Daily Telegraph in May 2009.

Just weeks after the first story hit the presses, Viggers told reporters he was “ashamed and humiliated”. Perhaps, most tragically, even the birds found it all a bit much. “It was never liked by the ducks,” Viggers said about the avian abode, adding that he had since put it in storage.   

You can hear more later from one of the reporters involved in covering this story, which turned out to be one of the UK’s biggest political stories in recent years.

While these huge scoops are the stuff of journalists’ dreams, the good that reporting can do in the world comes in all shapes and sizes. 

At TBIJ we believe journalism shouldn’t be done for the plaudits of our peers or to pick up elaborate glass trophies at swanky awards ceremonies. If our work cannot be used to help improve the lives of people around the world, then why are we doing it? And why are we asking you to care? 

In our organisation, we have people whose job it is to make our journalism spark real change – they’re called community organisers and impact producers (I’m one of them). We think we’re the only newsroom in the UK to have such roles, and one of just a handful of news organisations around the globe. 

This isn’t about being campaigners or protesters. We’re journalists. We let the facts speak for themselves. But what we will do is make sure that our findings and data are made understandable and accessible to people who can use them – be that politicians, regulators and others who hold the power in the systems that govern all our lives.

But we also want the people who are directly affected by the issues we’re investigating to be able to understand and use our journalism. This means we want to reach whoever we’re reporting with: farmworkers, patients, voters, shareholders, consumers.

So, we might hold community events, speak on particular podcasts or radio shows, create comic books in various languages – whatever we discover is the best way to reach the people that can use what we’ve discovered. 

What change can journalists cause? Well, by staying on the story we can hold the powerful and rich to account. The Boston Globe’s investigation of child abuse and the cover-up in the Catholic Church required a court fight to release crucial documents. But that grit led to allegations against 150 priests in the Boston diocese alone. Some were jailed. And their work was taken up by other investigative teams to reveal similar abuse in the church across America and around the world. 

That’s the powerful, but what about the rich? Here in the UK, after years of reporting on Thurrock council’s disastrous investments in solar farms, the businessman at the heart of the secretive deals that bankrupted the council is being sued for fraud. 

Then there’s big business. Nestlé dropped a major Brazilian beef supplier after we worked with an Indigenous film collective, the Guardian and O Joio e O Trigo to expose how it sourced cattle from illegally deforested land. The land in question belongs to the the Mỹky, an Indigenous group that has lived on the border of the Amazon rainforest and the Cerrado savanna in Brazil for centuries. 

And, as I told you about last week, TBIJ brought farmworkers directly to speak to peers in the House of Lords for the first time ever. Our reporting was mentioned in the Commons 14 times in 2023 – showing that our work really does get discussed where it matters. Two MPs are in the process of organising a half-day debate around an upcoming investigation into the suppression of free speech.

But sometimes the most powerful changes can be for a single person. In Kenya, after Nation Media Group published a story about Valerie Wangithi, who had been struggling with endometriosis for more than a decade, a leading medical facility in the country got her treatment, free of charge.

This is just a snapshot of the many, many ways that journalism is sparking change. We started The Spark because we want to celebrate and share the positive role that journalism can have in making the world better. 

After the Telegraph broke the expenses’ scandal, the Speaker stood down, other MPs resigned and four MPs and two Lords went to prison. The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority was set up to hold everyone in Parliament to account, making the rules for the rulemakers much more transparent. Our democracy became stronger – that’s worth celebrating.

“My claim to fame is that I took the original call, I was the one who picked up the phone. So it really was that kind of Woodward and Bernstein moment of a phone rings in the office.

It was a Sunday. We had a smallish team of four of us and we would rotate [Sundays] and it was the worst day of your month, because Sundays are really hard and really busy.

I answered it, and this guy who I now know to be John Wick, said ‘Would you like to receive a copy of every single MP’s expenses?’ And I said ‘Yeah.’

There had been rumours this existed going back a long way. Heather Brooke, a journalist, had put in Freedom of Information requests to get their expenses and there’d been this protracted legal tussle to get them released. The House of Commons was trying to block the release, and then they decided to heavily redact them. You can compare the redacted copies to the clean ones we saw, and they were blocking out everything.

The guys they hired to do that were students and part timers, who were so appalled at what they were being asked to do that they decided to leak them. The guards on the rooms where the redaction happened were former military and eventually John Wick, a former soldier, got wind of it and acted as the middleman between them and us. He’d got into negotiations with a few different papers. So when the call came I knew what we were talking about. 

The next I knew was a small team of us were gathered in Telegraph HQ, and there they were, these computer disks that we cracked open. We worked out of a room we called the Bunker. We were so secret, we didn’t tell anyone what we were up to.

It was another extraordinary moment when we loaded up the files and we absolutely couldn’t believe what we saw. Immediately, it was clear that this was a huge story, and very much in the public interest, and just absolutely astonishing and appalling.

We decided quite quickly we would divvy them up. While we were working, we would shout out things we found. We’d go ‘Oh my God, there's a glittery toilet seat’. That was John Reid [a former Labour cabinet minister]. Or, ‘Oh my God, there’s a moat.’ I remember shouting out ‘there’s a moat.’

The expenses scandal was an absolutely huge story and very fulfilling to work on. It was a defining moment. And in terms of the impact on the public, I think it really had a profound effect. Years later, I went on to write a book about Jeremy Corbyn where I analysed why I thought he had to come to win the Labour leadership. There were lots of factors like the Iraq War and various other things, but I think expenses was a part of that.

It really captured the public’s imagination in a way that few political stories have before or since. It had a direct immediate impact – MPs went to prison! But it also had a long lasting effect on the public, which was quite negative, about their perception of politicians. A lot of them still think it was unfair. But I just think that there's nothing more important than politicians having to live to the highest standards, because they are handing down rules for other people.

The election that followed the 2010 election, someone I knew was elected as an MP. And the first thing she did was to say, ‘Rosa, can you tell me if it’s alright, if I rent this flat here? Is that alright, for my expenses?’ Because the new generation who came in after expenses were really concerned that they both follow the rules and be seen to be following the rules. And that’s a good thing.”

You can read more about how The Telegraph broke the expenses scandal here

That’s it for this week! For anyone new (and there are quite a few of you – welcome!) I’m always on the lookout for brilliant examples of journalism that changed the world. If there’s something you’d like to hear more about, I’m keen to dig into it – just hit reply. Special thanks to those of you who got in touch after last week with your ideas, they were all very much appreciated.

Next week I want to tell you about a fantastic investigation from Nepal – no spoilers, but you’ll want to fasten your seatbelt and stow your luggage for this one.

Until then, I’ll be dreaming of duck houses.