unicornnews: PR man involved in expenses scoop

A PR consultant who was involved in providing the Daily Telegraph with all that information on MPs’ expenses has said that he is “extremely proud” of his involvement in the media scoop of the year, adding that “nobody involved in this did it for money”.

Henry Gewanter, MD of London-based communications agency Positive Profile, has now admitted that he worked with former SAS soldier John Wick in orchestrating the expenses story, his name having been linked with the scoop as early as last month.

Last night he gave an interview to the BBC’s Newsnight about his involvement in the affair, claiming he and everyone else involved in providing the controversial data to the broadsheet did so for moral rather than financial reasons. He told the news programme: “Being on your show tonight, I get fifty quid and cab fare home. That is the extent of the payments I actually will be seeing from this”.

Gewanter refused to say whether the Telegraph had paid for the data – the paper itself has been very coy about their deal – but said that rumours that hundreds of thousands had exchanged hands were not true. More modest estimates of what the paper paid have been in the region of £70,000.

Confirming that there had been talks with various newspapers about the expenses information, he said that negotiations centred not on money but on how each paper would report on the MPs’ claims. He said he and his co-conspirators were adamant coverage of the expenses claims would focus on parliamentary-wide abuses of the system, rather than being used to bring down one or another of the political parties.

Those conditions, he says, made doing a deal over the data more difficult than he expected. He said: “I thought it would be a very simple straightforward job, all I would have to do is approach one decent newspaper and that would be the end of it. But to my great surprise, it turned out to be one of the most difficult, complicated and long-running projects of my entire life. Several newspapers were approached from several different newspaper groups. There was at least one newspaper who wanted to use it to destroy one party”.

As for finding out the identity of the insider at the Houses Of Parliament who actually leaked the expenses data, Gewanter says he can’t help. He claims he never met the whistleblower, having deliberately chosen to not even know the person’s name in case he was arrested and questioned about the source of the expenses files.

The data, of course, led to a string of mini political scandals and resignations in the short term, as well as forcing a radical change to the parliamentary expenses system that could have ramifications for decades to come.

Although parliament had reluctantly agreed to publish information about MPs’ expenses before the Telegraph’s series of scoops began, the fact the official release was so heavily censored when it was made public last week has, for many, further legitimised the actions of Gewanter, Wick and the Telegraph, even if the way they obtained the confidential parliamentary accounts information in the first place was illegal.

Posted Wednesday June 24 2009 by Chris Cooke

Related categories: Political Communications Print Media