MPs' expenses and the virtue of chequebook journalism

Along the way, it has also raised a range of ethical questions, mostly for MPs, though many of them are seeking to blame the messenger by talking pejoratively of chequebook journalism.

Before I deal with that, let me first praise Heather Brooke, the freelance journalist who skilfully based her campaign to force the Commons authorities to reveal how MPs spend taxpayers' money by applying the letter and the spirit of the Freedom of Information Act.

Though the Act is imperfect, Brooke - who spent a large portion of her journalistic life in the United States where there is much greater official transparency - has a sincere belief in public accountability. She also enthuses trainee journalists to follow her path, as I have witnessed because she gives a yearly lecture to my post-grad journalism students at London's City University. It is always received well.

Brooke follows in the tradition of journalists who pursue single-minded missions on behalf of the greater good, earning only a meagre reward for their efforts. But MPs, who should act for the greater good, cannot believe that Brooke doesn't have some kind of vested (financial) interest in exposing their expenses to the public gaze.

One Labour MP said as much a couple of weeks ago when the investigative journalist Nick Davies and I appeared before the Commons Media, Culture and Sport Select Committee. It was a pathetic attempt to sling mud at Brooke and a forewarning of MPs' reactions to the Daily Telegraph's acquisition of their expenses claims.

They have cried foul ever since the Telegraph broke the story, castigating the editor, Will Lewis, for having paid to acquire what they argue is "stolen property."

Here is a typical reaction from Sir Stuart Bell MP: "It is disgraceful that a national newspaper should stoop so low as to buy information which will be in the public domain in July. It undermines the very basis of our democracy and is against all the rules of fair play."

Let me rephrase that. It is disgraceful MPs should stoop so low as to make outrageous expenses claims, including the "flipping" of second homes in order to make unacceptable profits at the taxpayers' expense. It is against all the rules of fair play, and undermines the relationship between MP and voter, the very basis of our democracy.

That is the straightforward public-interest defence for what the Telegraph has done. It has exposed material that may well have been redacted (also known as censored) by the time the claims were presented in a stage- managed manner to the public in the soporific holiday month of July.

As for the payment - which, I ought to point out, is assumed rather than proven - this needs to be placed in context. When papers pay for documentary information it is very different to paying for an interview, where money can encourage overstatement and even falsehood. If they can assure themselves that the documents are genuine, it is self-evident that the information itself cannot be tainted by the payment.

There have been occasions when malicious hoaxers have sold fake material to papers (remember Hitler's Diaries and the Sunday Times in 1983?), but that is clearly not the case this time. Nor is the size of the payment relevant. It is simply a case of what the market will bear and what benefit it provides for the paper in terms of instant sales and longer term promotion. My understanding is that the Telegraph sold an extra 90,000 copies last Friday and slightly fewer the following day. I would guess that it did just as well on Monday and yesterday. It has certainly raised the paper's profile and may well lead to it securing an award in future. That's not a bad return for an outlay of, say, £90,000.

We also need to see the Telegraph's purchase as part of an historical tradition in the commercial press. Payment in one way or another is common, including by serious papers.

By some measure, the most famous British journalistic investigation and campaign was that launched in 1972 by the Sunday Times on behalf of the victims of the thalidomide drug.

It has been garlanded ever since as one of the finest of journalistic exploits, not least because the editor, Harry Evans, took on the government of the day as well as a multinational company, eventually securing victory in a landmark European court case. Yet during that investigation, he authorised two payments - one of £2,500 to a Swedish lawyer and another of £8,000 to a chemical engineer - in order to obtain documents. There was agonising about the ethics at the time, but he was right to do so. As in the Telegraph case, public interest was the justification.

Finally, I must deal with the nonsensical claim about theft. If we were to take this literally, no journalist could ever obtain any document, be it a piece of paper or a photograph (and a CD is merely a modern form of paper). Leaks would dry up. Civil servants, acting in what they take to be the public interest, have often passed on documents to newspapers and, of course, to MPs.

Do the honourable members ever think of such leaks as "stolen property"?