Beating the old boys’ club

WHEN the Speaker of the House of Commons resigned this week following the expenses scandal, Heather Brooke couldn’t help smiling.

For five years, the US-born investigative reporter had been fighting to discover what extras the “old boys’ club” of Parliament claimed from the taxpayers’ purse.

But back in 2004, her demands for a breakdown of expenses under the 2000 Freedom of Information Act were met with what she describes as “baffled silence”.

“So many public servants in Britain don’t tell you anything,” she says, reflecting on her initial inquiries. “Their first inclination is, ‘how can I obstruct you and be as much of a pain in the ass as possible?’”

A year before The Daily Telegraph’s revelations of moats and rat poison, Mrs Brooke was in the High Court, opposite Speaker Michael Martin’s legal representative, fighting to uncover the truth.

“I seem to have a great zeal for taking on old pompous men – I don’t know why,’’ flamehaired Mrs Brooke, 38, admits, with a laugh.

‘‘They really annoy me. I just seem to have this magnet for them. They’re everything I loathe, so I do find myself drawn to these situations of quite intense patriarchal bureaucracy.’’ Despite being ordered by the judge to disclose his members’ second-home expenses, Mr Martin delayed publication time and time again, determined to keep the system under wraps. MPs even tried to make themselves exempt from freedom of information requests – twice.

But finally came the leak, which laid the whole scandal bare to an appalled public.

“I was going to a conference the next day and saw on the web at midnight that it was coming out. I’m kind of resigned to it,” says Mrs Brooke about the expose she never got to write.

“It’s not just my story. I feel like I got the ball rolling on it, but I didn’t create the huge juggernaut it’s become.

“I’ve never been precious about my knowledge, because I can’t do this all on my own. I want people to make Freedom of Information requests and start hassling public bodies for more information, because I feel there’s a lot more information out there.’’ Since the scandal broke, column inches have been full every day with salacious details of how MPs spend taxpayers’ money.

No party has been spared embarrassment – or punishment.

Conservative MP Douglas Hogg, whose £2,200 moat-cleaning claim was one of the more explosive, has stepped down, while several MPs have been suspended from their parties pending investigations, and Mr Martin became the first Speaker to have to step down from his post in 300 years.

Mrs Brooke believes that the public will no longer put up with an “archaic, feudal attitude toward its right to know”.

“We can see arguments about privacy and security were just a smokescreen. They were protecting their own interests,” she says.

“Of course not all MPs were cheating, but the problem with the secretive system is that it only rewards those who cheat.”

Mrs Brooke’s journey to become the scourge of the Commons has been a long one. She gave up journalism in her 20s, before deciding she wanted to become a self-styled “woman of the people, battling for the common person’s rights”. Her Liverpudlian parents emigrated to the US in the Sixties and she was born there, gaining dual citizenship.

She first came to England for school, but returned to the US at 15 and trained as a journalist, cutting her teeth as a newspaper crime reporter. But the internal politics of the newsroom eventually got to her – and when her mother died when she was only 26, she decided to change direction.

“I felt like all the reasons I had gone into journalism had been abandoned by the newspaper I worked for,” she says. “I was really disillusioned, as everybody is in their late 20s. I think you have this idea that the world is going to be so amazing, and then you discover that it’s not.

“I also had no family in America, because my mum was the only one who lived there, so when she died, I thought, ‘I’ll come back to Britain and just start anew’.”

In 1997, Mrs Brooke returned to the UK and took a masters degree in English literature, before joining the BBC as a publicist, copywriter and then sub-editor on children’s magazines.

“I remember my claim to fame at the time was an article about human and animal ears.”

She secretly wanted to write a book, and when she heard an item on Radio 4 introducing the Freedom Of Information Act, she was inspired to start work on Your Right To Know, a citizen’s guide to using it.

“I just kicked around this idea of getting people to be a bit more proactive about their society, so that’s what I did,’’ Mrs Brooke says.

“And when I was writing it, that’s when I phoned up the House of Commons and asked about MPs’ expenses.”

She insists the ensuing five-year struggle didn’t impact too much on her life.

“It’s never been a full-time thing. I would do my requests and it would be at some stage of action and I’d kind of forget about it.

“It was just bubbling away in the background most of the time and it would occasionally boil over, usually because of something the Speaker had done,” she adds, with a laugh.

MRS Brooke says her husband of eight years, Vaci, is proud of her achievement, but took some time to get used to her campaign.

‘‘I think he finds it really strange.

He’s half-Czech, but he was born and raised in England and went to quite a traditional public school, so he finds what I do quite shocking,”

she says.

“And he’s almost embarrassed when I have these run-ins with people, he’s very English, like ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe you’re doing that’.”

Looking ahead to the future, Mrs Brooke wants to see the UK adopt President Barack Obama’s approach to freedom of information.

“What needs to happen is instantly all the expenses to be disclosed, instantly there needs to be some sort of central memorandum that goes out about how the House of Commons is going to respond to future Freedom of Information requests,” she says.

“On Obama’s first day in office, he sent out this message and just totally changed the culture – he passed an executive order making it a fact in law.”

More MPs need to stand up and be counted in Parliament and stop being afraid of the Speaker and the Whips’ Office, she says.

“That battle should have been fought by the upright politicians. Only two MPs were supportive about my campaign: Norman Baker and Douglas Carswell.

“Why don’t more MPs lobby for change and reform? Why do we have all these MPs if they’re so cowardly that they never speak their mind?”

Mrs Brooke also hopes there will be more sweeping changes throughout UK politics.

“I’m very much in favour of primaries, where you have a wider range of people selecting the candidates,” she says. “Too many people in British politics aren’t in that position because of merit, they’re there from patronage. They don’t represent the constituents.”

With the scandal rumbling on, Mrs Brooke has been rightfully basking in her triumph – her phone has not stopped ringing.

If she met Mr Martin in the street, she says she’d probably thank him. ‘‘I would say, ‘Hey, thanks for making my career, I could never have done it without you’.”