Word: telegrapher
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...order. And that is now Labour's task. The party has endured a long, slow decline, but its current crisis was triggered by one of the greatest press exposés of the modern age. It started when a former soldier and Conservative supporter called John Wicks contacted the Telegraph Media Group with a disc containing details of MPs' expenses claims. Quite how Wicks came by the disc remains a mystery, but its contents...
...some politicians routinely worked the system to minimize their personal tax burden at public cost - much of this falling within rules agreed by MPs over years to enhance their remuneration without having to publicly award themselves fatter pay packets. Over 27 days of revelations in the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, politicians of all hues have been implicated and their reputations trashed...
When William Lewis, Telegraph editor-in-chief, first looked at the material Wicks brought him, he felt "physically sick," he says. "I knew at that moment we had no option but to publish because the readers needed to know what I had just been shown." Initial coverage focused on Labour. "In the early days we took a lot of heat from senior people in the Labour government about why we were starting with them," says Lewis...
Conspiracy theories were bound to flourish given Wicks' political affiliations and the Telegraph's own establishment credentials. Once nicknamed "The Torygraph," one of the daily's most famous editors served as a Conservative Cabinet minister; among its current star columnists is its former reporter, the Conservative Mayor of London, Boris Johnson. Lewis vehemently denies any suggestion of bias. The decision to start with government was purely editorial, he says, and MPs from the Conservative and Liberal Democratic parties were subsequently scrutinized with the same vigor. "Had this expenses story landed in a different environment, it wouldn't have had this...
Scanning the front pages of the Telegraph and rival newspapers he sells from his central London shop, Pankaj Mehta highlights another reason the expenses scandal hit Labour hardest. Reports of Conservative grandees submitting bills for the upkeep of mansions have reinforced the party's unfortunate image of entitlement and wealth, but the vision of Labour MPs subsidizing their lifestyles is more damaging still. New Labour defined itself as a party that encouraged wealth creation, that in the words of Peter Mandelson, Business Secretary and Brown's de facto deputy, was "intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich." But it still...