I set up an internal scrutiny panel, a so-called Star Chamber, including my aide Oliver Dowden, known as ‘Olive’, who I also called ‘the undertaker’, since he so frequently brought me the bad news. The panel, assisted by a team that was combing through all the information, would examine the expenses claims of every Tory MP, and would decide who had to pay money back. Anyone who refused to comply would lose the whip. This was faster and firmer than the Parliament-wide independent inquiry that Brown would set up, and showed that we had understood the severity of the situation and had gripped it early.
The whole thing became a daily ordeal. The Telegraph would call up in the morning, give us details about whose expenses they were going to expose the next day, and allow us until 5 p.m. to respond. Ultimately the call – both the judgement call and the phone call to the MP – had to be made by me.
The calls included some of the strangest conversations. ‘Your entire family were working for you?’ ‘Why do you need a ride-on lawnmower?’ ‘What does your swimming pool have to do with your parliamentary duties?’
As before and since, I always tried to give people a chance to explain their situation, rather than being driven by arbitrary deadlines. But it was hard. Some colleagues didn’t help themselves by taking to the airwaves. Anthony Steen became one of the most famous examples. Having claimed over £80,000 for the upkeep of his country house, including rabbit fencing and tree surgery, he insisted to BBC radio that he had behaved impeccably: ‘I’ve done nothing criminal, that’s the most awful thing, and do you know what it’s about? Jealousy. I’ve got a very, very large house. Some people say it looks like Balmoral …’
He had to go.
I had to deal with Peter Viggers, who had claimed, among £30,000 of gardening expenses, for a £1,600 ‘floating duck island’. With Michael Ancram, whose swimming-pool boiler was serviced at taxpayers’ expense. With Douglas Carswell, who put a ‘love seat’ on expenses. With John Gummer, whose moles were removed from his lawn using public funds. It just seemed to go on and on, and to get weirder and weirder.
Then there was Douglas Hogg, who was, according to reports, reimbursed by the taxpayer for having his moat – yes, moat – cleaned. To be fair to him, he had never actually claimed for this directly. He had given all his receipts to the Fees Office and, satisfied that they added up to far more than the ACA, they had just given him the full amount. I could see his point. He was doing what he had been told to do. It was all within the rules. But, as Andy put it, the point was that he had a bloody moat.
There were some heart-rending examples at the other end of the spectrum. One MP who was asked to pay back thousands of pounds was desperate not to do so, both because it would look as if he was admitting guilt when there was no impropriety, and because as a young MP with a large family he genuinely couldn’t afford to.
The sheer, granular detail being unearthed made the scandal run and run. Receipt by receipt, the Telegraph gave an insight into MPs’ lives – and revealed a class that seemed completely out of touch with normal people. Never mind that most MPs had claimed only for rent or mortgage interest payments or the odd piece of IKEA furniture, and had been urged by the authorities to claim even more. The colourful examples stood out, showing a world of ride-on mowers, moats and mole-free lawns.
Of course, I had a colourful example of my own – violet-coloured, to be specific.
I had only ever claimed for the mortgage interest on my constituency home. It was a simple approach, specifically permitted by the rules, and seemed to me to be clearly within the spirit of what was intended. But one year I had an extra bill, which I handed to the Fees Office. Ordinarily this would have been logged as ‘maintenance’, and would have attracted absolutely no attention. Except, like a good West Oxfordshire tradesman, my builder had detailed the work he had done: ‘Cleared Vine and Wisteria off of the chimney to free fan.’ As with so many other claims, it was the detail that did for me. People still ask me how my wisteria is doing today.
Every party was embroiled. Which meant we could only fix the broken system if we worked together.
In fact, before the scandal broke I went to see Gordon Brown in his Commons office with Nick Clegg to see what the three main party leaders could do. He gave us a take-it-or-leave-it proposal: a per-day allowance for MPs – not all bad, but far from right.
Had we been with Tony Blair, the three of us could have thrashed out something workable. With Brown, it was pointless. He was sullen and stubborn, and couldn’t hide his contempt. Clegg and I both concluded that it was impossible – he was impossible.
What were the long-term implications of the expenses scandal?
We lost a lot of good MPs, as people who weren’t even guilty of any wrongdoing, such as Paul Goodman, left Parliament.
The British Parliament is one of the least corrupt in the world, but it would be forever tainted. I believe deeply that people go into it to make a difference and to serve, not to see what they can get out of it. Yet ever since 2009, my postbag has been full of letters about how venal our MPs are.
It left many Tory MPs feeling aggrieved with me. They felt that the system I had set up to clean house made them look as though they had done something wrong, when they felt they hadn’t. At one point Andy walked into my office and said there was a serious chance of rebellion. I said I didn’t care. ‘This is the right thing to do – if it’s going to take me down, then so be it.’
So while it stored up bad feeling between me and some in the party, I don’t regret the position I took. Politics ended up with a model that was more transparent and that cost far less, and our party drove that.
In the normal course of things the searchlight might land on politicians once or twice a year, but its harshest glare is saved for momentous events like the financial crash and the expenses scandal. Under that intense scrutiny, I thought we had demonstrated that we were the party with the answers not just to a broken society, but to a broken economy and broken politics too.
But we were also suffering from our own broken – a broken promise.
In 2004, Tony Blair had pledged to hold a referendum on a proposed European Constitution, but it was rejected at plebiscites in France and the Netherlands.
The European powers went back to the drawing board and came back with the Lisbon Treaty, which retained many of the elements of the constitution – creating an EU Council president, foreign minister and diplomatic service, eliminating national vetoes in many areas, and paving the way for more vetoes to be eliminated.
We argued straight away that if the government had said it was going to have a vote on the constitution, it must have one on this treaty – especially since it was more significant and far-reaching than its immediate predecessors, Nice and Amsterdam. I was clear about the lessons from Maastricht: it was right to give people their say on such important changes.
I thought – I still think – that Labour’s failure to hold the referendum it had promised in 2004 was outrageous. It had managed to avoid all questioning on the European constitution during the 2005 election campaign by saying it would be subject to a separate vote. And then it didn’t hold one. So in the Sun in 2007, as the treaty was still being negotiated, I gave a ‘cast-iron guarantee’ that a Conservative government would hold a referendum on any EU treaty that emerged from the negotiations.
In 2007 it seemed entirely likely that we would be able to fulfil this if we entered government, since we all thought that the Parliament wouldn’t run its full course to 2010. But as Brown delayed, member states had the time to ratify and implement the treaty – including the UK, which did so in July 2008.
By 2009, our last hope was the Czech Republic. I wrote to the president, Václav Klaus, pleading with him to wait until after a UK general election before he ratified the treaty. But he replied that he could not hold out that long – another eight months – without creating a constitutional crisis. The Czech Constitutional Court ruled against the one remaining challenge to the treaty,